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As a meeting planner, your job is to ensure the conference runs smoothly and the client is satisfied. While hotel blocks, snack breaks and networking sessions matter, there's another essential piece: making sure the presentations don’t put the audience to sleep.
This is especially important when technical professionals (scientists, engineers or researchers) are on the agenda. These subject-matter experts often struggle to engage audiences. Their presentations can become dense, jargon-heavy lectures that leave attendees disengaged. But even if you're not a speaker coach, there’s plenty you can do to help improve the quality and clarity of these talks.
Remove the unknowns
Many technical presenters are not natural public speakers. For academics, especially, presenting at conferences is more about adding to their CV than nurturing a passion for being on stage. Graduate students, postdocs or early-career professionals might be speaking only because it helps with tenure or future job opportunities. Knowing this, one of the best ways you can support them is by reducing their anxiety.
With that in mind, provide detailed information about the presentation environment well in advance:
- Will they be on a stage or at floor level?
- How many attendees are expected?
- What’s the room layout and seating arrangement?
- What kind of microphone will they use (lav or handheld)?
- Will there be a lectern?
- Is there a confidence monitor or countdown timer available?
These details may seem minor, but for infrequent speakers, they make a big difference in preparation and confidence.
Provide Helpful Templates
You don’t need to be a communications expert to give technical presenters tools that help. Providing a few key templates can elevate their presentations significantly:
1. Audience Analysis Worksheet
This worksheet helps speakers think intentionally about who’s in the room. Are attendees mostly experts, newcomers or a mix? What level of technical understanding can they assume?
Encourage speakers to clarify:
- The audience’s baseline knowledge;
- The presentation’s main learning objectives;
- Which technical jargon might need explaining; and
- Analogies or common words to make complex ideas more accessible (generative AI can be helpful with this).
By identifying jargon and simplifying language, speakers can connect better with all audience members, not just the other experts in the room.
2. Speech Structure Worksheet
Technical presenters often struggle with structure. A simple worksheet can guide them to:
- Define a clear call to action (what do you want the audience to think or do after the presentation?).
- Identify main points that lead logically to that action.
- Craft an engaging introduction (e.g. a story followed by a question, a question followed by a story, etc.).
- Use transition sentences that give the talk a flow that participants can follow.
This process also helps eliminate unnecessary content that doesn’t serve the presentation’s purpose.
3. Timing Worksheet
Technical talks often run long. A timing worksheet helps presenters track how long their presentation takes each time they practice. The goal: to get comfortable and finish on time, every time. The worksheet is simple enough: a column for speech title, a column for target time and a column for practice time. If, after working through the speech a few times, the practice time is consistently less than the target time, the speaker is ready for the stage!
4. Presentation Feedback Form
Encourage speakers to test their talk in front of a few honest colleagues or peers. A simple form should include the questions “Was this presentation understandable?,” “Was the presentation relevant?” and “Was the presentation actionable?,” with space beneath each question to offer answers to the questions. By asking whether the presentation is understandable, a technical presenter will see how big a gap there is between what the audience understands and what the presenter wants them to understand. Asking about actionability lets presenters know if the audience will know what to do or think after the presentation. By asking about relevance, it’ll indicate whether it is clear why the audience needs to know the content of the presentation.
In so many instances, technical presentations can be hard to sit through. By offering these resources, you’re helping presenters think more deeply about giving their presentations, which will ultimately lead to better sessions and will enhance the conference experience for attendees. That’s the kind of above-and-beyond value that clients remember.
Neil Thompson is the founder of Teach the Geek, working with technical professionals so they can present more effectively, particularly in front of nontechnical audiences.