interaction presentation meaning

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Interactive presentation: What it is & how to use it

An interactive presentation includes components that the spectators can examine and entitles them to feel belonging through participation. Prevent your dialogues from being predictable; with an interactive presentation, there is always something overlooked waiting to be noticed.

Workplaces, schools, and organizations have turned to remote working and learning models in response to the ongoing global crisis. We’ve been challenged to communicate through screens without proper preparation, leaving plenty of room for miscommunication. 

Clear and effective communication strategies are vital for the proper development of society from learning centers to the workplace, and presentations are often the perfect tool to acquire the wanted effect on our audience.

The success of a presentation depends on the ability to organize and present it well; having a clear idea of your presentation options and how to get the most out of each of them will be the decisive factor.

What is an interactive presentation?

An interactive presentation is a more dynamic way of presenting than the traditional way, by connecting with an audience through sounds and visual tools that amplify the chances for the topic to impact the participants and gain audience engagement significantly.

These presentations allow communication between an audience and their expositor in a dynamic way, enabling interaction through real-time mutual communication. Dynamics of this type are helpful to connect with clients, students, co-workers, or even remote family members.

The importance of audience engagement

The obvious goal whenever preparing a presentation is to successfully engage our audience by delivering the topic in a clear and significant way, as it’s known that the attention span of a standard audience lasts approximately 7 minutes. If the subject is particularly intriguing, it might take up to 10 minutes.

The lack of interaction with the public is the main reason why audience engagement is not acquired in a traditional presentation setting. If the participants don’t identify themselves as relevant to the topic or the experience, the chances are they won’t pay enough attention.

Interactive presentation Tips for audience engagement

We witness an interactive presentation when the presenter can interact with the audience in a back and forth conversation. Whenever you’re the one in front of a stated audience, you can for sure use some of these ideas and tips we’ve gathered for you.

• Create interactive custom content. Build a trivia game with topics of interest to your audience and start with a competitive game to activate the mind.
• Use visuals in your favor. Audiovisual resources aim to facilitate the communication of the message and the retention of the information presented. We must select them appropriately depending on the audience and the theme.
• Ask direct questions to the audience. When the audience members feel they’re part of the presentation and know there is an opportunity to participate directly, they tend to pay more attention and retain data.
• Set moments for discussion sessions. Moderate the conversation in crucial moments of the presentation to avoid blank spaces between bullet points.
• Use interactive games wisely. There are several ways to implement interactive games within a presentation to keep the audience engaged, such as trivia games and fun quizzes.
• Share study cases. A personal story that exemplifies the topic can be engaging when used correctly.

In addition to keeping your audience engaged during a presentation by following these tips, it’s crucial to have the right tools.

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Blog Marketing 15 Interactive Presentation Ideas to Elevate Engagement

15 Interactive Presentation Ideas to Elevate Engagement

Written by: Krystle Wong Aug 04, 2023

As attention spans continue to shrink, the challenge of engaging audiences in a short timeframe has never been more significant. Let’s face it — grabbing and keeping your audience’s attention can be quite the challenge, especially when time is ticking away. But fear not, I’ve got the perfect solution: interactive presentations!

Believe it or not, creating an interactive presentation is easier than you might think. In this guide, I’ll show you how to effortlessly turn ordinary slides into captivating experiences with 15 interactive presentation ideas that will leave your audience begging for more. From quirky polls and fun games to storytelling adventures and multimedia magic, these ideas will take your presentation game to the next level.

Venngage is a game-changer when it comes to empowering interactive presentations. With just a few clicks, users can customize their favorite presentation templates , add multimedia content and create immersive experiences that leave a lasting impact. Whether you’re a seasoned presenter or a newcomer, get started with Venngage to elevate your presentation game to new heights of engagement and creativity.

Click to jump ahead:

What is an interactive presentation?

15 ways to make a presentation interactive, 7 best interactive presentation software, what are some common mistakes to avoid when creating interactive presentations, interactive presentation faqs, how to create an interactive presentation with venngage.

An interactive presentation is a dynamic and engaging communication format that involves active participation and collaboration between the presenter and the audience. Unlike traditional presentations where information is delivered in a one-way manner, interactive presentations invite the audience to interact, respond and contribute throughout the session.

Think of it as a two-way street where you and your audience have a friendly chat. It’s like playing a fun game where you ask questions, get live feedback and encourage people to share their thoughts. 

To make a good presentation , you can utilize various tools and techniques such as clickable buttons, polls, quizzes, discussions and multimedia elements to transform your slides into an interactive presentation. Whether you’re presenting in-person or giving a virtual presentation — when people are actively participating, they’re more likely to remember the stuff you’re talking about.

Interactive presentations leave a lasting impression on the audience. By encouraging active participation and feedback, interactive presentations facilitate better understanding and knowledge retention. Here are 15 innovative 5-minute interactive presentation ideas to captivate your audience from start to finish:

1. Ice-breaker questions

Start your presentation with intriguing and thought-provoking questions or a fun icebreaker game. These questions should be designed to pique the audience’s curiosity and encourage them to think about the topic you’ll be covering. By doing so, you create an immediate connection with your audience and set the stage for a more engaged and attentive audience.

For example, if you’re giving a business presentation about management and leadership training, you could ask audience questions such as “What’s the best business advice you’ve ever received, and how has it impacted your career?”

2. Live polling

Incorporate live polls during your presentation using audience response systems or polling apps . This allows you to collect real-time feedback, opinions and insights from active participants. Live polling encourages active participation and involvement, making your presentation feel like a collaborative and interactive experience.

3. Q&A sessions

Encourage the audience to ask questions throughout your presentation, especially for pitch deck presentations . Address these questions in real-time, which fosters a more interactive and dynamic atmosphere. This approach shows that you value the audience’s input and promotes a two-way communication flow.

4. Clickable buttons

Add clickable buttons to your slides, allowing the audience to navigate to specific sections or external resources at their own pace. For example, you could include links to your social media accounts or extra reading materials in your education presentation to give further information about the topic and get your students engaged.

By providing this autonomy, you empower the audience to explore areas of particular interest, creating a more personalized and engaging experience through your interactive slideshow.

5. Storytelling

Incorporate anecdotes or personal stories related to your topic. Storytelling is a powerful way to emotionally connect with your audience, making your presentation more relatable and memorable. A little storytelling along with a set of creative slides draws the audience in and keeps them engaged as they follow the narrative.

6. Interactive charts and graphs

Use interactive charts and graphs that respond to user input to make your presentation interactive. For instance, allow the audience to click on data points to view more detailed information or to change the displayed data series. Creating charts with interactive visuals help the audience interact with the data, fostering better understanding and engagement.

7. Animated infographics

Add animations to your infographics, making them visually dynamic and progressive. Animated infographics reveal information gradually, keeping the audience curious and attentive. This transforms complex data into an easily digestible and engaging format.

Venngage’s extensive library of infographic templates is a powerful tool to visualize data and elevate the interactivity of your presentations. Personalizing the visuals ensures a cohesive and professional look throughout your interactive presentation. The templates are highly customizable, allowing you to adjust colors, fonts, and styles to match your presentation’s theme and branding. 

8. Gamification

Introduce an interactive quiz, puzzles, or challenges related to your presentation content. Gamification adds an element of fun and competition, motivating the audience to participate actively and boosting their learning experience. Here are some gaming presentation templates you could use. 

9. Virtual reality (VR) or augmented reality (AR)

If applicable, leverage VR or AR technologies to provide immersive experiences. These interactive presentation tools transport the audience into a virtual or augmented environment, making your presentation more captivating and memorable.

10. Collaborative whiteboarding

Get your audience involved in your presentation by utilizing digital whiteboards or collaborative tools to brainstorm ideas collectively. This fosters teamwork and creativity, enabling the audience to actively contribute and feel a sense of involvement in the presentation.

11. Hyperlinked text

Keep the information in your slides minimal with a simple presentation and incorporate hyperlinks to direct viewers to relevant websites or blogs , resources, or additional information. This encourages self-exploration and gives the audience the opportunity to delve deeper into topics of interest.

12. Role-playing

Engage the audience in role-playing scenarios to explore different perspectives. Role-playing promotes active learning and helps the audience relate the content to real-life situations, enhancing their understanding and retention.

13. Embedded videos

Include video clips in your slides to provide visual explanations, demonstrations, or interviews. Videos add a dynamic element to your presentation, enriching the content and keeping the audience engaged.

14. Audience-generated content

Encourage the audience to contribute ideas, stories or examples related to your professional presentation . Audience-generated content fosters a sense of ownership and involvement, making the presentation more interactive and personalized.

15. Slide transitions

Use slide transitions to create smooth animations between slides. Well-planned transitions maintain the audience’s interest and keep the presentation slides flowing seamlessly.

Interactive elements aside, enhance your presentation with these guides on how to summarize information for a captivating presentation and how to make a persuasive presentation to captivate your audience. 

If you’re looking to create engaging and interactive presentation slides that captivate your audience, these presentation software options are sure to elevate your game:

Prezi is renowned for its dynamic and non-linear presentation style, enabling users to craft visually stunning and interactive presentations. With an array of templates and animation effects, Prezi enhances audience engagement, making your presentations more captivating and memorable.

2. Mentimeter

Mentimeter serves as an audience response system, empowering real-time interaction during presentations. Users can create interactive polls, quizzes, word clouds and more, allowing the audience to respond using their smartphones or other devices. This fosters active participation and provides valuable feedback instantly.

3. Google Slides

Google Slides is a free cloud-based presentation software that not only offers collaboration features but also enables real-time interactions. It includes add-ons and third-party integrations to further enhance interactivity, making it an excellent choice for collaborative and engaging presentations.

4. Microsoft PowerPoint

PowerPoint, a classic presentation software, has evolved to incorporate more interactive features like live captions, real-time collaboration and interactive elements such as quizzes and forms. With its familiar interface and versatile functionalities, PowerPoint remains a reliable choice for interactive presentations.

5. Prezentor

Prezentor caters to sales-oriented presentations focusing on interactive storytelling and data-driven content. It offers analytics to track audience engagement and behavior during presentations, allowing you to fine-tune your approach and keep your audience hooked.

6. Opinion Stage

Opinion Stage is a visual and interactive data collection tool designed to engage and excite audiences whether sitting in a lecture hall, participating in a live Zoom, or watching an on-demand webinar. The Opinion Stage tools are simple and intuitive, making it easy to create attention-grabbing quizzes, surveys, and polls in minutes. A great way to spice up any presentation, encourage audience participation, and collect authentic feedback.

7 . Venngage

Venngage stands out as a versatile design tool that facilitates the creation of interactive infographics, data visualizations and presentations with ease. Offering various interactive elements and animations, Venngage empowers you to craft visually appealing and engaging presentations effortlessly.

With these interactive presentation software options at your disposal, you can unleash your creativity and deliver presentations that leave a lasting impact on your audience. So, go ahead and make your presentations interactive, captivating and memorable!

For more presentation software options, check out this blog on the 12 best presentation software for 2023.

Creating interactive presentations can be a game-changer for engaging your audience and enhancing your presentation skills, but steering clear of common pitfalls is essential. Here are some key mistakes to avoid when crafting your interactive presentations:

1. Overloading with interactivity

While interactivity is fantastic, bombarding your audience with too many interactive elements can backfire. Strive for a balanced approach that enhances engagement without overwhelming your listeners.

2. Ignoring audience relevance

Failing to tailor interactive elements to your audience’s interests and preferences can lead to disconnection. Make sure your interactions resonate with your specific audience for a more meaningful experience.

3. Not testing interactive elements

Skipping thorough testing of interactive features before showtime can spell disaster. Avoid technical glitches by diligently testing all interactive components in advance.

4. Poor timing and pace

Timing is everything, especially with interactive activities. Ensure seamless integration by planning your key points and the timing of your interactive elements carefully.

5. Lack of clear purpose

Every interactive element should serve a purpose and contribute to your presentation’s objectives. Don’t add interactions just for the sake of it — ensure they add value and align with your message.

6. Failing to engage beyond interactivity

While interactive elements are powerful tools, remember that content is king. Combine your interactive features with compelling storytelling and valuable insights to create an immersive and impactful presentation.

Incorporating animated slides into your interactive presentations enhances the overall appeal and interaction, turning an ordinary presentation into an engaging experience. Try it out with one of our animated presentation templates to get started. 

How do you start an interactive presentation?

Begin by grabbing the audience’s attention with an intriguing question or a surprising fact, setting the tone for a dynamic and engaging session.

Which type of presentation is the most interactive?

Workshops and seminars are often the most interactive types of presentations as they encourage active participation, discussions and hands-on activities.

How can interactive presentations enhance audience engagement?

Interactive presentations foster a two-way communication flow, involving the audience through polls, quizzes, discussions and multimedia elements, leading to increased interest, attentiveness and better retention of information.

What are some common interactive elements to include in a presentation?

Common interactive elements include clickable buttons, hyperlinked text, polls, quizzes, interactive charts, multimedia content and audience participation activities.

Can interactive presentations be used for educational purposes?

Absolutely! Interactive presentations are highly effective for educational purposes as they promote active learning, encourage critical thinking, and provide real-time feedback and knowledge exchange opportunities.

Need inspiration on how to give an engaging presentation ? Here are 120+ presentation ideas you could use. 

Venngage makes it easy for anyone to infuse interactivity into their presentations. From clickable buttons and hyperlinked text to interactive infographics and dynamic charts, Venngage offers a diverse range of interactive elements to captivate and engage the audience. Here’s how you can make your presentation more fun and interesting with Venngage:

• Sign up or log in to Venngage to access the platform.
• Choose a presentation template or start with a blank canvas to begin designing your interactive presentation.
• Add and edit slides in the Venngage editor to structure your presentation content effectively.
• Customize the design by selecting themes, fonts, colors and backgrounds to match your style and branding.
• Use interactive elements like buttons, links, pop-ups and hover effects to engage the audience during the presentation.
• Enhance engagement by incorporating interactive media such as videos and audio clips.
• Preview and test your entire presentation to ensure everything works smoothly before presenting it to your audience.
• Save your interactive presentation on Venngage and share it online or download it in various formats for presenting purposes.

Well, I hope these 15 5-minute interactive presentation examples can help unlock a new level of audience engagement for your next presentation. From fun quizzes and interactive storytelling to multimedia magic and gamified challenges, the possibilities are endless. So, don’t be afraid to experiment, tailor the ideas to suit your audience members and let your creativity shine.  

That said, remember to strike a balance and keep the interactivity purposeful and relevant. Some common mistakes to avoid when creating interactive slides include overloading the presentation with too many interactive elements and failing to align the interactive elements with the overall presentation goals and content. 

Got it? Great. Now let’s turn that boring presentation around!

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18 Ways to Make Your Presentation More Interactive

November 10, 2017 - Dom Barnard

It can be difficult to hold your audience’s attention for the entire presentation. According to a  Prezi study , half of the respondents said they did something other than listen during a co-worker’s presentation, including:

• Sending a text message (28%)
• Checking emails (27%)
• Falling asleep (17%)

An interactive presentation is much more likely to keep your audience’s attention and build rapport with them, and there are a few simple ways to achieve this, from live polling to asking questions throughout.

This article explores several different effective strategies for making the audience feel fully involved in your presentation and keeping your audience’s eyes away from their smartphones.

Why involve your audience?

Listening to a presentation for any length of time can be a difficult process. If you don’t involve the audience, they’ll start to play with their phones, talk to colleagues and generally lose track of what you are saying. Once this happens and you start seeing that the audience would rather be somewhere else, you’ll start feeling anxious and might try to speed up the presentation.

To engage a  large audience  fully, the presentation needs to be energetic, purposeful and staged, as if it is a direct conversation between both you and your audience. That way, they’ll absorb your ideas and insights and they’ll have learnt something in an enjoyable way.

1. Plan from the audience’s perspective

Before you start  writing your presentation , think about these points:

• What are the most interesting parts in my topic?
• How much will the audience know about my topic? What level do I target it at?
• Which members of the audience will most likely be disinterested?
• How can I help them learn and understand my topic?
• What is the size of the audience?

You can do this by researching the event or conference, investigating other speakers at the event and even contacting the organisers to find out more about the demographic.

By asking these questions about your audience and identifying answers, you are starting to think about your audience’s interests and needs. Remember, the aim is to give the impression that your presentation has been planned according to your audience’s specific interests.

2. Use an easy-to-follow structure

When building your presentation, focus on giving it a structure which people can easily follow. Start by introducing the core concepts and goals, then elaborate on the various points in a bit more detail, draw logical conclusions and leave your audience with a clear takeaway message. You want to flow naturally from one part to the next like you are telling a big story chapter by chapter.

3. Get the audience immediately involved

You audience will come to your presentation in a range of different moods. Try using a simple ice-breaker to re-energise them and get them focussed on your presentation.

For example, ask people to stand up and introduce themselves to their neighbours, or have them identify two or three questions they would like to hear addressed during your presentation. By starting with an ice-breaker, you show your audience that your talk will be interactive and require their participation.

4. Ask the audience questions during your presentation

The audience’s attention drops to zero after just 10-15 minutes of your presentation. To get their attention back, take a break from your presentation from time to time and interact with your audience. Ask for their questions and answer them during your presentation. This will help clear up any confusion the audience might have.

When planning your presentation, identify opportunities in your material for your audience to ask questions. If you’re not comfortable breaking the flow of your presentation, mention that you’ll be taking  questions at the end  so the audience can prepare some questions.

Asking rhetorical questions as you move through your presentation involves your audience by stimulating their own thought processes. This technique also helps move between sections of your presentation as it establishes a clear transition from one point to another.

If you’re comfortable with taking questions throughout your presentation, use a tools such as  Slido , which allows your audience to ask questions anonymously at any time, so even shy people can participate in the discussion.

Example of what can go wrong with audience interaction

Audience interaction:

Watch how the presenter tries but initially fails to get the audience to interact with the presentation. Notice how he encourages them to get involved and eventually they do join in.

5. Use storytelling to make it more memorable

Since our early ancestors, stories have always been a huge part of human culture and civilisation. Storytelling is the most universal way to captivate your audience’s attention, no matter where they are from or what they do for a living.

Stories are much more engaging and memorable than lists of facts and figures, but you wouldn’t think so looking at the majority of presentations (particularly academic ones).

People automatically tune in when you  start telling your story  because they want to know what happens next. A popular storytelling technique is when you present the status quo and then reveal an improved path to that end goal.

Think of your presentation as one arching narrative. As we mentioned earlier, give it the proper structure with a clear beginning, middle and end. Introduce conflict and provide a powerful resolution that reinforces your key messages.

6. Use non-linear presentation software

Instead of flipping through slide after slide, you can show the relationships between your ideas and give your audience the “big picture” view of your topic. Try letting your audience drive the presentation by laying out all of your main points, and then let them choose which topics they want to go to. Your audience will get a truly custom presentation based on their interests, which they will appreciate and more easily remember.

Prezi, shown above, is a popular non-linear presentation tool.

7. Add in a short video

Billions of hours of YouTube are consumed each month and advertisers have identified videos as having a high  retention rate  for users. However very few presentations ever use videos to engage with their audience.

Find a short video clip that reinforces your story or explains a concept better than words can. You can either embed the video directly into your presentation software or include a link to an external website. Just make sure you test your method on the day of the presentation and have a backup on a USB just in case you need it.

8. Invite people onto the stage

If you’re preparing a particularly long presentation, consider having other people to come on stage and talk for a bit. This will help you narrate the story and make the whole presentation more interactive.

Steve Jobs never pulled off the entire presentation by himself; he always invited several speakers, including designers, partners, and other executives, to help him introduce their latest product. Of course, this technique should always be arranged with your colleagues in advance.

9. Poll the audience

Polls are similar to quizzes in that they engage the audience during the presentation. Polls encourage participants to think not only about your questions but also about their answers. Moreover, live polls help create mental breaks, so your audience can regain attention and stay focused throughout your presentation.

By including everyone in answering the question, you also create a group experience that leaves the audience feeling like they all have been part your presentation.

10. Use (appropriate) humour

Some of the best speeches and presentations in the world feature plenty of humour. No matter the subject, a great speaker will use natural charisma, humour and language to convey their points and get the crowd excited about what they are saying.

A great example of building rapport with the audience through the use of humour is Barrack Obama talking about the government building Iron Man.

Another example is when  Morgan Spurlock  offers individuals the opportunity to buy the rights to name his TED talk—which he refers to again at the end, where he reveals the title. He peppers the entire presentation with humorous commentary that nonetheless supports his point.

Create relevant jokes or find a way to bring out the humour in your subject, and your audience will be much more engaged and more likely to remember your words.

11. Practice your delivery, again and again

Practicing is the most important part of delivering an interactive presentation. You’ll need to practice where to use live quizzes, when to accept questions, which points to emphasise with body language and many more. There are several options for practicing:

Practice Presentation Skills

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• In front of a mirror  – great for seeing and improving your body language, however it can be distracting to what you are saying.
• To friends or colleagues  – a useful way to get feedback on your presentation, try and action the feedback straight away to improve on it. You can also give the person some key areas to focus their feedback on if you believe you are weaker in those areas.
• Virtual reality  – practice in realistic  public speaking environments , whether it be in a virtual conference room or boardroom. Receive feedback on your speech with voice analysis technology.

With all three of these, you’ll want to work on your tone of voice, accent, pauses between sentences and facial expressions. The most important thing is to talk slowly and loudly enough to be heard and understood clearly.

A list of the best presentation skills courses you can practice with:

• Presentation Skills Training Courses

12. Try and relate to the audience

Make comparisons to events from everyday life that most people are more than familiar with. By making things look simple, not only will you help your audience get a better understanding of the subject by enabling them to visualize the information more clearly, you will also draw a connection between you.

After all, you are all just regular people with similar experience, you just happen to be performing different roles at the moment.

13. Strong body language (position, posture and gesture)

Non-verbal communication plays a large part in how we construct meaning, so it makes sense to consider how to use it in your presentation. You can make things more interesting for your audience by using  your body language  to enhance what you’re saying.

Body language goes beyond reinforcing your messaging – it’s useful from a biological standpoint. As discussed in her  body language TED talk , Amy Cuddy’s research found that using ‘assertive’ body language released testosterone and reduced cortisol in both men and women, thereby increasing confidence and decreasing stress.

An effective presenter pays close attention to the physical relationship with her/his audience. If you stand hidden behind an overhead projector or stand too far away from your audience, they will not develop a bond with you and this will limit the effectiveness of your presentation.

Your posture will also dictate levels of audience involvement. If you’re too relaxed and sit slumped in a chair to deliver your talk, the audience might drift away. Find a comfortable but purposeful position in relation to your audience and adopt an upright sitting or standing posture that allows for movement and gesture.

Audiences respond well to the physical energy and enthusiasm being conveyed by a presenter, and thus the use of clear and controlled gestures will greatly enhance your presentation. Gestures that are open and reach out to your audience serve to extend your presentation to them and thus help them feel more involved.

Examples of good body language:

• Use hand gestures when delivering key points
• Use calm, deliberate movements when highlighting certain information
• Keep arms and legs uncrossed

14. Maintain eye contact with all sections of the audience

Making eye contact is one of the most  powerful techniques  for involving your audience. If used well, eye contact can serve to make your address much more personal and thus more effective. If eye contact is avoided, the presenter can appear to be nervous and unconvincing.

It is important to share eye contact with all members of a small audience or all sections of a large audience. Avoid making eye contact with just the people you know, taking particular care not to deliver your entire presentation to the person who’s assessing your work. Remember that you will need to involve the whole audience if you are to make an effective presentation.

If you are nervous, eye contact can be very difficult to establish and maintain. Remember that some eye contact is better than none and that you should try to build your confidence over time.

15. Use live quizzes to better understand your audience

Live quizzes are a great way to understanding your audience better get them engaging with the material.

For example, if you’re giving a presentation on autonomous vehicles, you could ask questions such as:

• When do you think autonomous vehicles will become mainstream?
• Are you concerned by safety issues?
• If someone is injured or killed by the car, who is to blame?

These will surely create some interesting results which you, as the presenter, can talk about and discuss.

16. Use physical props if possible

You don’t need to be giving a product demo to use props during your presentation. Props are a great way to help the audience visually picture what you are talking about. While talking through your presentation, you can refer to the prop at certain points to highlight your point or make it clear to the audience.

Kenny Nguyen  does this will in his TEDx talk on ‘The Art of Saying No’. He refers to the “sword of yes” and “shield of no.” Naturally he picks up a sword and shield from the table to help demonstrate his points.

Another great example is when  Jill Bolte Taylor  brings a real human brain on stage during her TED talk to explain to what happened to her when she had a stroke. She touched the audience with this demonstration and left the audience in complete awe.

17. Extend your usual vocal range

Your tone of voice, your volume, and other vocal aspects affect how people listen and hear your message.

Julian Treasure’s  TED talk on ‘How to speak so that people want to listen’ is all about this, and at the end offers several tips ‘in our toolbox’ for how to master the use of voice, from changing your speaking pace to speaking in a different pitch.

Get feedback from a friend or colleague to see what works best for you.

18. Use language and literary techniques

Your use of language has a huge influence on the way you engage your audience. It’s important to use language your audience understands and is familiar with.

Avoid using language that is too formal or informal, too technical or too simplistic depending upon the nature of your talk and the knowledge base of your audience. Pitching your presentation at the right level can be a challenge but it is very effective for making the audience feel involved.

There are various  literary techniques  you can use, such as the Power or Three, to give greater impact to your message.

Involving your audience is essential to making an impact. Your presentation should pull them in, get their attention and stimulate their thoughts and understanding. This can be done in a number of ways.

The way that you plan your presentation will be critical in terms of using language and ideas that your audience will understand. You must also ensure that there is sufficient time for questions and discussion. The way that you deliver your presentation should create a bond with your audience.

Your use of eye contact, body language, spoken words and energy should  communicate effectively  and enthusiastically with all areas of the room, thus ensuring that the audience receives positive messages about you and your material.

Guide to interactive content

How to create interactive content: A practical guide

How to create awe-inspiring interactive documents, what is interactive content plus 6 examples, what is an interactive presentation and how is it different.

If you haven’t heard, interactive content is all the rage. It can provide context and clarity, cutting through the noise of the modern digital environment. It can also provide a repository of material for many departments across the enterprise: sales, marketing, HR, and creative.

How do you create interactive content? We’ll tell you.

Step 1: Decide what you want to say and how you want to say it.

Easy enough? Well… You see, interactive content requires you to think differently about the traditional content creation process. When pulling open that Word doc and typing away, you typically construct your thoughts linearly: one word after another.

However, interactive content forces us to think about two things: the multimedia we can use to develop our thoughts, and the ways in which users will, ahem, interact with that media. That is, a book reader will go from one line to the next, beginning at the top left and reading down to the bottom right, page after page. But if there’s a navigable table of contents, she may just skip right over that one amazing insight you had on page 4. You need to account for that behavior.

So, while this first step may seem simple enough, trust us, it just isn’t.

Here are a few more tangible ways to break down this ominous step.

Understand how users consume digital content.

Over the last several decades, the leading firm researching the digital user experience has been Nielsen Norman Group. The NN Group has developed many studies and experiments to test everything you can think of on the web and how people respond.

For example, in one of their most famous studies tracking eye movements, they were able to determine that people on the web read in F-shaped patterns . That is, they read the first headline and a paragraph, and then scan mostly headlines from there down. NN Group has many ( many ) articles like this gathered in categories like “ Writing for the Web .” For the uninitiated, this is a great place to start getting inside the minds of your viewers.

Create content dynamically, not linearly.

Along similar lines, users in a digital environment click around from page to page by what interests them (using what NN Group and others call “ information scent ”). This means you have to think about your content as a system and not as a linear, logical program. Of course, knowledge is stackable — you have to learn algebra before calculus — but not everything is built that way.

Take this piece of content as an example. You really don’t need to read the content in Step 1 to understand Step 2, nor even Step 1A before 1B. If you’re familiar with how users read on the web, skip right on over to the next thing.

More tactically, imagine if the user you’re trying to reach watched the video you placed on one slide before reading what you wrote. How would that change your content? What about if they watched it after? These are important questions to ask yourself before finalizing your content.

Guide the user with clear actions.

Our brains are like machines. They need fuel to function. Sometimes they get overwhelmed with too many operations or too many inputs. That’s why when you’re talking to someone while you’re driving, you usually turn down the music or stop talking while making a left-hand turn in a busy intersection. Your brain focuses its attention, diverting resources to ensure its survival.

A reader on the web is no different. Their brains get overwhelmed with big blocks of text or too many buttons. But clear, simple text and cues help alleviate this strain to focus on what you want them to. There’s even research to suggest that a certain line length or height can put readers at ease .

Let’s say you want the user to read this paragraph before watching the video or listening to the audio track. Why not say, “Read this first” in big, bold letters? Similarly, using animations, descriptive links, and clear calls-to-action (CTAs) can reduce the cognitive load of your users.

Step 2: Use the right media to help convey your ideas.

With linear, traditional content like a PDF or Word document, you have only words and pictures at your disposal. Yet with interactive content, you can use animated graphs, videos, audio clips, and more to further develop your arguments. This opens up a whole new world of possibilities, but also a whole new world of challenges with arranging your ideas.

Know the context of the content.

In the science of hermeneutics , you learn that you read an email differently than you read a poem. You expect certain things within an academic essay that you wouldn’t expect in a podcast. And so on. The context of the medium has a lot to do with the content itself. This is what Marshall McLuhan meant when he wrote, “ The medium is the message .” 

Consider what your readers will have seen first. Are they coming to your piece after they’ve seen some introductory video, or an email, or is it part of a larger series of blog posts or some other content? This informs how you want to build the content and how to use which medium.

For example, let’s think of how to use a video in your interactive content. A video can help illuminate a vivid point of your writing, or it can summarize a lot of written material in a short space. This is the best use of video within interactive content. Say you want to use a video as an aside, nestled beside a scroll function of 300 words of text. A two-minute video in this case is much better than a 15-minute video — the former can illuminate or summarize while the latter is long enough to be its own piece of content. Viewers may forget what you’re writing and focus only on the video content.

That’s why this is the first rule in choosing media: Know the context of where your content lives, which will determine how you express yourself.

Use multimedia like salt: sparingly.

To continue the point above, you’ll want to use multimedia that’s on the shorter side, depending on what you’re trying to get across. Longer media begin to take on a life of their own, which users can easily view in another format, like on YouTube or on Spotify as they drive to work.

Putting an even finer point on it, you’ll also want to use multimedia very sparingly, to expand on a topic that can’t be adequately covered with text alone. This could be a short video or audio clip, a gif, or an image. It should enhance the content, not distract the viewer from it. We’ve seen some interactive content authors throw in all the media they can find that’s relevant to their topic. But, as the saying goes, just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

Find multimedia assets with the right permissions.

Not all content can be used as you find it on the web. Much of it is copyrighted, while other content is in the wrong format. Copyright infringement is a big deal for content creators, and it’s critical that you respect and cite their work. After all, that’s how they earn a living. We’ve seen too many people simply Google the image they’re looking for and slap it into their content, but that can violate copyright laws.

However, you can Google an image you’re looking for as long as you filter for usage rights. After you search on Google and click on Images, click on Tools just below the search bar. Then you can filter using Creative Commons licenses. This allows you to use the media within the Creative Commons framework.

You can also Google “license-free stock photos or videos.” You’ll find results like Unsplash , Pixabay , and Storyblocks . The latter allows you to pay a subscription for licensed images, videos, and audio assets for your interactive content. There are plenty of other sources out there — just make sure you’re using content that you’re actually allowed to use!

Step 3: Design the content with your favorite design tool.

Once you know what you’re saying, how you’re saying it, with the right media to support it, now you have to bring it to life. Use Adobe, Sketch, or Figma to create your layouts and graphics for the piece. Sound intimidating? You can also use Microsoft PowerPoint, Apple Keynote, and Google Slides to create interactive experiences.

View guides, Resources, and the Tiled University to get started.

Creating interactive experiences can be really tough if you’re just starting. That’s why we publish resources to help you get started, from the big picture to the tiny details. So, before you get started on your next project, take a scroll through our Resources page to see webinars, tips, and other content that will help you take your content to the next level.

If that doesn’t have what you’re looking for, dive deeper into Tiled University to see courses, lessons, webinars, and more to build your own content.

Additionally, each design tool has its own resources for helpful hints if you get stuck:

From there, the only limit is your imagination.

Start with a template.

If you’re like most people, you’ve stared at a blank canvas or document for far too long wondering where to begin. We get it. Creating interactive content is hard. But the good news is that you can start with a template! You may not know what to say, but at least it’ll look nice.

Kidding aside, a good template does more than just look nice. It can also give you a structure for arranging your ideas. Many of the resource pages listed in the previous point have similar structures given your setting.

For example, most presentation templates start with a title slide, then an agenda, team members, and problem and solution slides. Whether you need a pitch deck, a quarterly update, newsletter, brand guide, or something else, starting with a template from the resources pages of each design tool is the best way to get started quickly.

And the best part? You can integrate your design files with Tiled’s interactive content editor.

Export, share, and revise.

Once you’ve viewed the resources, picked a template, and composed your piece, you’re ready to export and share your interactive document. There are a few ways to do this. You can either export the file as is to be read in your favorite design or presentation tool, you can send a shareable link to your team, you can broadcast the presentation with specific people, or you can embed the file into a web page.

After sharing your creation, you may need to edit it. It’s the worst feeling when you’ve completed a beautiful PDF document only to realize there’s a major typo on page 3. Oh well. What’s done is done. Similarly, a PowerPoint is editable, but if you’ve already emailed the file over to your boss, that’s the version they have, not the one you’re editing. You need a way to edit the master file that everyone sees. With interactive content platforms, you can do just that, and every edit you make will be live for the rest of the team to see in real time.

Finally, analytics and insights based on users’ behavior with the content can be even more important than your research before you started (see Step 1). You may think that theoretical users will behave one way, but your actual users may behave completely differently based on your actual content. It’s crucial for content creators to adapt to their audience, not the other way around. Editing in real time with shareable links gives you the ability to adapt your content to produce the most engagement over time.

Give your ideas the tools they’ve been waiting for.

The old ways of communicating limit your imagination with flat text and boring slides. Your storytelling craves a more innovative, engaging experience that amplifies the power of every medium at your fingertips. Your audience, whether for sales and marketing, creative directing, or employee empowering, demands something fresh. Reimagine what content can be with Tiled, an interactive content platform built for the new age of communication. Our no-code story builder lets teams create, share, and edit their content anywhere, anytime, with actionable analytics to scale their impact. Leave behind the static past and rewrite the future.

At Tiled, we help enterprises create engaging experiences easily.

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What is an interactive presentation and how is it different? ‍

In the world of work and education, presentations are a way of life. As the learning landscape continues to grow into one that leans into digital and touchscreen experiences, the need for more dynamic and engaging presentations is expanding with it. However, with these changes also come higher content expectations from audiences.

The days of sitting in a classroom or conference room and learning through a well-designed PowerPoint or PDF are long gone. Well, they’re long gone if you actually want to keep your audience engaged and actively learning from your content. Though there’s a difference between interactive presentations and interactive content, which we’ll explain more later, you’ll see that there is some overlap.

These days, if you want to really reach your audience, you have to go beyond a PowerPoint. Cognitive research shows that to be truly effective, you’ll need to take a multimedia approach . That is, tailor the content to your target audience, source high-quality imagery, develop a compelling story, and implement high-quality design . Traditionally, presentations have included a speaker moving around a whiteboard or slide deck, drawing on the board or using a pointer for the deck, keeping the audience’s attention. 

Yet the world has changed. Now presenters are talking heads on the other side of a screen, using static text and images to communicate to a dulled audience who’s been staring at a screen for hours already. 

Your audience expectations have elevated thanks to high-quality, immersive presentations and consumer content, the likes of which you’d find in a TED talk or Apple keynote. Thankfully, however, content and presentation tools have risen to the occasion. Enter the era of the interactive presentation.

What is an interactive presentation?

In the simplest terms, an interactive presentation is precisely what it sounds like: a presentation you can interact with, complete with multi-dimensional media. They often incorporate web-style functionalities like navigation, hyperlinks, and hotspots. For example, in an interactive presentation, you have the freedom to click on content and have an action occur, such as a video, animation, or popup box.

However, as simple as that may sound, it’s just the beginning of what an interactive presentation can do. Interaction fundamentally changes the way you can engage with your audience. It turns a passive experience into an authentic conversation that benefits everyone involved.

Is an interactive presentation different from interactive content?

Interactive content includes videos, image sliders, animations, polls, and more. An interactive presentation is the means used to combine and bundle multiple types of interactive content all in one place to present to an audience, often in real time. With an interactive presentation, you can combine interactive content with storytelling and questions to engage your audience.

Why do we need interactive presentations?

Preferences and expectations have changed: Today, viewers simply expect innovative companies to present information in a highly engaging, multimedia style no matter the device, location, or time. But there are other benefits to interactive presentations.

Interactive presentations increase engagement.

Interactive presentations allow you to go from talking to your audience to talking with them. Neuroscience research shows that by using interactive presentations, your audience immediately has the motivation to stay engaged and participate . That is, an interactive presentation allows you to navigate in a nonlinear fashion : You can ask the audience what they want to talk about, and the navigation options enable you to jump directly to the content that is most interesting to the audience without disrupting the natural flow of the presentation.

Additionally, asking audience members to participate helps them tune in and bring back those whose attention may have drifted off. Interactive presentations will allow you to include audio and video files. Through an interactive presentation, you can include deeper content within each section and create a greater understanding of what you want to convey.

Interactive presentations encourage team building.

Making a presentation interactive adds surprise, delight, and fun. Getting interactive also makes it easy for team members to break the ice, connect, and work together. Getting away from a traditional lecture is also a welcome break from the monotony of a regular workday. Interactive presentations can contain video, audio, polls, and even games. Using these types of interactive content makes the presentation fun, encourages team-building, and fosters innovation. Not only will your audience absorb and retain more of your information, but they’ll also enjoy doing it. It’s a win-win. 

Interactive presentations make learning easier. 

Distraction is common in presentations. Even the most compelling speaker can struggle to try to keep a large group engaged with just slides and images. It’s easier to remember the content of a presentation when you’re actively participating in the experience. Imagine the difference between reading about communication versus working through an exercise. You’re much more likely to feel comfortable with the tools and information you’ve learned after putting them into practice in a safe space.

Furthermore, better engagement leads to better information retention. No matter what kind of presentation you’re delivering, interactivity brings concepts off the screen and into real life.

Interactive presentations allow for personalized delivery. 

Adding interactive elements to a presentation makes it feel more thoughtful and personalized to your audience. Creating that personalized connection is vital to keeping audiences engaged and informed. You can also add interactive elements into an existing presentation for a customized feel. It also empowers your audience to ask questions, offer feedback, and actively participate.

Ways to use interactive presentations

Elevating your training programs through touchscreens, animations, games, and other interactive elements helps teams onboard or learn information and take action for sustained behavior change.

Conferences

Conferences are often filled with multiple days of boring PowerPoint, PDF, and Google Slides presentations. Can you imagine how refreshing it would be to walk into a conference session and have a chance to move, speak, and participate? As we’ve said before, not only will an interactive presentation make your content more engaging, your session attendees will retain what they’ve learned better as well. 

Website or microsite

Websites need interactivity to lead the user around the page and into the other pages. By providing interactive content throughout, you’ll more deeply engage your audience than with static texts and images.

Leave-behinds

This is a bit of a misnomer, but a “leave-behind” we’re thinking of is an interactive asset you can add to your follow-up email after a conversation with a prospect, customer, or new employee. Imagine the context and clarity you can create by using interactive content to keep the conversation going.

Internal communications

Employees are inundated with communications from every level of the organization. Interactive content can help internal leaders drive adoption for an initiative, take an action, or provide further information.

How can I make my presentation interactive?

With the rapid growth of interactive presentations comes a multitude of new technologies to help you create them. Today’s interactive presentation software offerings make it easy to create an interactive presentation yourself with no need for development skills.

How can interactive presentation software help make my presentations easier?

Much of the media you encounter today comprises various media types, like audio, video, gifs, and more. However, including these media in traditional presentation software is often clunky and unintuitive. Interactive presentation software, on the other hand, makes adding these to your presentations easy and effective.

Professional visual aids

According to a study by venngage.com , 65% of professionals at 2018 Marcom conferences designed their own presentations and relied heavily on imagery. Additionally, over 90% of a person’s daily processed information comes from visual receptors . Interactive presentation software makes it easier to get to a professional and well-designed visual experience that goes far beyond bullet points.

Editable templates

If you’ve ever used PowerPoint or Google Slides before, you know that they provide users with some limited themes and templates. However, today’s interactive presentation software often includes dozens of templates with customizable features built to make interaction easy without having to learn to code. And these aren’t just for PowerPoint users but also for Adobe XD, Sketch, and more, making designers’ lives easier than ever. That way you already have the right formats and media — all you need to add is your branding and company voice.

Intuitive tools

Learning new technology can feel like a daunting addition to your presentation planning. However, editing tools for interactive presentation software are intuitive and straightforward to use. Content creators have less of a learning curve because most of their time will remain in their design tool of choice, from Adobe XD, InDesign, and Photoshop, to Sketch, Figma, PowerPoint, Google Slides, and more. When you combine this with the extensive collection of templates available, you’ll end up with something personalized and professional, and feel ready to drive the results you’re looking for.

Interactive scrolling

Another great feature to add to your content experience is to scroll through other content within the page. Users don’t have to leave the experience. Instead, they can just continue to scroll and explore the content at their own pace. 

Interactive functionality also lends itself well to infographics and animation, and it’s definitely more engaging than a static image or PDF. An in-page scrolling feature also lets you build multi-dimensional components. Elements like scrolling make your presentation feel more like touchscreens and social media feeds that audiences already use and enjoy. 

Data and analytics

Data-driven insights have become a crucial part of how organizations innovate and optimize the work experience. Interactive presentation software is not only an excellent tool for creating engaging content quickly, but it’s also excellent at collecting data and helping you develop and evolve both your content and your presentation style.

While it’s impossible to measure how long a group of people listen in a conference room or open a PowerPoint or PDF attachment, interactive presentations let you collect data on this and more. You can measure clicks, scrolls, and other metrics that can help you continually craft better and more effective presentations. Depending on what software you use, you can even gather all of that information without leaving the platform. 

Now that you’ve seen all the advantages of an interactive presentation and how easily interactive presentation software can help you bring them to life (without any code!), the only limitation to your presentation is your imagination.

What is Interactive Content? Plus 6 Examples 

You have likely heard the phrase “content is king.” This sentiment still holds true. However, there have been a lot of advancements and innovations in the content space. As more and more brands look to engage with their customers through storytelling, “interactive content is king” feels like a more apt phrase to describe the state of content marketing in 2021.

Brands have continually raised the bar for quality content while customers simultaneously expect more and more from their branded interactions. This has led to a rapid increase in the creation of quality interactive content across the marketplace. At this point, just 5% of produced content creates 90% of engagement . That means all content is not equal: Supercharging your top 5% of assets can supercharge your engagement.

What is interactive content?

Interactive content is content that audiences actively engage with. Rather than just passively digesting a video, website, or white paper, interactive content elevates the content experience with personalized interactions. This dynamic content keeps audiences focused on your message while also becoming immersed in your brand.

What are some examples of interactive content?

There is a wide variety of interactive content types. A few examples of interactive content can include e-books, sales decks, onboarding materials, and more. Interactive elements like surveys, infographics, and more also improve the experience and provide meaningful context. There are many different options, so selecting the right one for your organization takes some thought. That’s why it’s important to think through your business needs and goals, and then choose the type of content that will work best to help you achieve those goals. Here’s a closer look at a few different kinds of interactive content:

E-books are publications specifically built for the web. It’s like an interactive PDF but has fewer limitations and usually operates more smoothly across browsers and platforms. An e-book can contain myriad impressive interactive elements like video links, case studies, or animation. On top of all that, e-book technology can improve reports, studies, and white papers by increasing engagement and allowing users to explore information as they choose. In short, why use an interactive e-book rather than a PDF? Because customers and prospects are evaluating lots of different solutions, and you want to have differentiated content that leaves a lasting impression.

See an example of a microapp e-book.

Video has long been the best way to get a viewer’s undivided attention on the internet. Even as new technologies emerge, video remains a tried-and-true way to create high-engagement media. The key is to craft a compelling story that viewers will want to follow until the end. Sparking that curiosity is a mix of finding the best hook, appropriate production, and a strong sense of your audience. Additionally, adding a video within an interactive document can provide context, summarize surrounding material, or simply engage the viewer with another medium.

See an example of using video in a microapp.

Quizzes and polls

Surveys and polls have been a key piece of audience engagement ever since the days of paper magazines. Quizzes and polls feel fun to users as they acquire useful or entertaining information in exchange for sharing data. That’s part of why quizzes are a tried-and-true method for engaging with audiences. This style of content works best as a way to facilitate feedback and capture new user data while keeping the audience engaged. It’s much easier (and more effective!) than methods like email surveys or follow-up calls. 

See an example of a microapp quiz.

Interactive infographics

Infographics combine illustrations, icons, and graphics to create compelling and thematic visualizations of facts and data. Infographics make complicated facts and figures more digestible by using animation, typography, and story to bring data to life. Currently, 60% of B2B companies are already using this format, and similar trends are visible in HR departments, education, non-profits, and more. Interactive infographics are usually single, long-scroll web pages commonly developed in HTML5. Interactive infographics take the clarity of a data visualization a step further. As a result, the reader can better understand the story behind your data and is much more likely to engage with any content.

See an example of data brought to life in this microapp.

Landing pages

Landing pages are a lead generation and conversion staple. However, you can increase their effectiveness by taking an interactive approach to the content on the page. From animation to video, the right content at the right time can trigger audiences to type their information into a form field to become a lead.

See an example of a landing page with a microapp here.

Why is interactive content important?

E-books, infographics, and blog posts are already valuable tools for educating and communicating with your audiences. Adding interactive components make these tools more attractive to your customers through the power of delight and entertainment. And that’s just the beginning. Here are a few reasons that leaning into interactive content is worth it.

Interactive content increases leads and fosters loyalty from customers.

Creating interactive content leads to an overall better customer experience and boosts feelings of brand loyalty across the board. From increasing trust around sharing information, to feeling truly educated, and even being entertained — interactive content just resonates better with consumers. 

Interactive content increases engagement.

Even basic interactive pieces tend to have high engagement levels, simply due to their dynamic nature. When done exceptionally well, research has shown that on average, interactive content receives double the engagement that static content does. While the content may dictate how the user interacts with it, the consumer has a sense of discovery and control that keeps them attentive and interested. Rather than your content acting as a billboard that displays information consumers may or may not see, interactive content acts more like a conversation between you and your audience. Once you give them something of value, they’ll be more likely to continue their customer journey with you. Which brings us to our next point.

Interactive content makes collecting data easier.

Personalized marketing campaigns are quickly becoming the status quo, but to create a robust and targeted plan, you need relevant data. Interactive content is a great tool that makes it easier to capture key information from customers, such as demographic and firmographic information through lead capture forms. Today’s consumers can also be nervous about handing over personal information like email addresses. But by offering a rich, interactive content experience, you’re providing something of value to the customer that makes submitting personal information feel worth it. It feels less risky to share your email address with a company that has created something truly engaging.

Interactive content sets you up for successful testing.

Metrics from passive content can reveal information around scroll depth or bounce rates, but it can’t tell you how much of the content the consumer is actually viewed. Interactive content, on the other hand, works by collecting data while the content is in use. This allows you to measure views, clicks, and interactions with individual elements of your interactive pieces. From there you can test, analyze, and optimize your content around the goals you’re trying to achieve.

Interactive content makes your content better.

As you gather data through your content, you’ll begin to learn about your audience’s content preferences. This makes it easier to refine your content strategy and lean into the tactics that work best for your consumers. This approach to highly targeted content marketing is fantastic at helping you establish trust and authority as well as expand your audience by serving up effective and informative content they’ll want to come back to time and time again. 

How can I start creating interactive content?

Although interactive content creation may seem daunting at first, platforms like this one can do the heavy lifting by offering simple, customizable tools that don’t require development skills. And it’s absolutely worth it. Having a partner or tool that can make your content look and function the way you want is invaluable. 

As you can see, interactive content holds so much potential. It pulls consumers directly into your story, offers them something valuable, and provides you with better insights. If you do it correctly, it can be a catalyst for your business or brand. After you’re done, just take a look at your data, get creative, and watch as your consumers start engaging more and building bonds with your brand.

Communication is tricky. How do you get your message across in a fun and engaging way to ensure readers, customers, clients, or whoever your target audience is retains it long after they hear or read it? It’s time to rethink those flat, two-dimensional resources, switch up your communication game, and look beyond the traditional PowerPoint and Microsoft Word document. How exactly? Two words, my friend: interactive documents. 

What Is an Interactive Document?

Traditional documents and marketing materials have limited space for information and engagement, but interactive documents take it to another level. Let’s start by talking about what makes a document interactive. An interactive document is chock-full of features like video, audio, buttons, page transitions, GIFs, and even podcasts, all neatly tucked inside like a Mary Poppins bag of wonders. It doesn’t stop there. You can even incorporate Google Docs and file sharing so users have a direct connection with the material at hand. The sky’s the limit when it comes to interactive pieces, and depending on which category below you want to address, there’s more than a few documents to consider:

• White papers
• Data sheets
• Research and analyst reports
• Infographics
• Case studies 
• Buyer’s guides
• ROI calculators
• Onboarding and training guides
• Pitch presentations
• Industry/professional best practice guides
• Competitive and cost comparisons
• Sales decks
• Finalist presentations

Employee Experience

• Training playbooks
• Onboarding materials
• Benefits/compensation resources
• Newsletters

You’re probably thinking, great — but how exactly do you make these interactive? Simply put, these six features are what make immersive, engaging content:

• Fillable forms: Especially useful in business, these make the reader an active participant, help collect user data, and contribute to future analytics.  
• Video files: Add life to content and engage readers right off the bat.
• Audio files: Great for samples and a refreshing change from text.
• Buttons: Help you navigate easily and allow users to go at their own pace when reading content like brochures or portfolios.
• Hyperlinks: Direct readers to another section of the document, another document altogether, or separate web address for additional information. ‍
• Photo galleries: Pick images that capture your audience, such as employees in action, relaxing or engaging pictures that evoke emotion, and images that help the reader identify with the content.

Which of these features appeals to you? Now think of your audience. How can you incorporate one or more of these to inspire and engage them? Next up, let’s explore the deeper benefits of interactive documents. 

Why Interactive Documents Are a Must for Your Success

Consider this: 88% of marketing professionals reportedly agree that interactive content separates them from their competitors. Furthermore, another 93% from this same Business2Community survey agree that interactive content is effective when it comes to educating buyers. So they give you a leg up on your competition, educate and engage your staff, and depending on your industry, bring the people to you. What’s not to like? If that’s not enough to convince you, consider these additional top 10 reasons why you need interactive documents, like, yesterday:

• They supercharge your marketing strategy: Take the guesswork out of learning your audience’s wants and needs, and then use interactive documents to generate more leads based on what you find.
• User friendly and more bang for your buck: There’s only so much content you can fit into a traditional PDF, but interactive documents allow you to take a deep dive into data and immerse readers in your content in an engaging and inspiring way.
• Create a lasting impression on readers long after they read it: In the words of the great Maya Angelou, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” What do you ultimately want people to remember and take away after reading?
• Convenience, convenience, convenience: Most attention spans are short. While some readers want all the information, some just want to quickly and easily jump to the information they need. Interactive documents allow you to do both. 
• Take a different approach to feedback: Interactive documents offer an alternative approach to gathering feedback with surveys or just by allowing you to understand where people click, spend the most time, what they ignore, and where they leave. You can then use this data to adapt your content to best meet the customer’s needs. 
• Set the tone for future interaction: Whether it’s a brochure, culture handbook, or quarterly review, when you set the precedent with interactive, engaging, fun content, you pull your audience in from the get-go and keep them coming back for more.
• Boost retention and conversion rates: You heard right. Happy, satisfied readers are not only more likely to keep coming back for more but also move through the sales process.
• Pique their interest and capture the attention of readers: Even the driest subject can be made interesting with the right format if you appeal to your audience and clearly show them what’s in it for them.  
• Increase interaction: Use fillable forms to your advantage and identify prospective client needs and preferences so you’re catering to them right from the start.
• Add an innovative approach to professional documents: Take otherwise dry content and make it engaging and memorable.

Now that you know what exactly interactive documents are and why you need them, let’s take a look at some examples to inspire you.

10 Interactive Document Examples to Bring Down the House

• This Seismic Media Kit captures you from the moment you start watching the intro video. It only gets better from there as users navigate through a series of slides, sure to engage and captivate even the toughest crowd.
• Do you have a culture book? Could it use some updates? Paycor’s culture book is a prime example of how you can bring your company culture to life and leave a lasting impression on your employees from the very first day they start.
• What comes to mind when you hear quarterly reviews? Fun? Engaging? A delight to the eye? Probably not. But what if they could be? Compass Development’s Quarterly Review is sleek, smart, and a refreshing change from the traditional approach to sharing market insights. 
• Say sayonara to boring newsletters and check out this eye-pleasing, interactive, and engaging Paycor newsletter that incorporates videos, GIFs, and audio to engage and inspire staff as they read along.
• Recruit the right people and attract talent with this innovative job recruiting template . With crisp, clear, and easy-to-read content, it will leave your prospects scrolling for more.
• Make onboarding new staff a fun and easy experience with this self-paced, customizable resource guide .
• Revamp your product guide with video, scrolling pictures, and a contact form at the end to help you easily gather user info.  
• Does your presentation need a modern update? Take a look at this webinar template . It’s simple and visually appealing with video, key takeaways, and highlights.
• Case studies are tricky. They can be really good or really boring. Many are text heavy and they’re not exactly the crowd pleasers of marketing. But what if you could change that and engage readers from the onset with a structured and easy-to-read format that makes them want to click through to the very end? Look no further and download this case study template .
• User guides don’t have to be lame. This user guide template does all the work for you with its bright, colorful, and easy-to-follow format.

Still craving more? Check out even more examples in our showcase .

How to Create Interactive Documents That Make You Stand Out From the Crowd

The answer is simple: microapps. It sounds complicated, but it doesn’t have to be. Not sure what a microapp is? Microapps are interactive digital assets that enable immersive experiences. Ultimately, they connect your brand with your customers, prospects, and employees so everyone can be part of your story. Sure, you could take a stab at it on your own, or perhaps you’ve already downloaded one of the templates previously mentioned. The thing is, microapps allow you to build interactive documents effortlessly so you have more time to invest in your content — and ultimately your people. Consider Tiled’s seven steps as you go about creating:

• Think like your audience: What are the deeper benefits for them? How do you address their struggles? And speak to them in a format that they identify with? Remember, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach.
• Establish the outcome: What’s your intent? Educate? Train? Buy? And what’s the ultimate end goal? Are you assessing their comprehension if it’s training material or convincing them to take the next step, whatever that may be?
• Create your structure: Think back to the interactive features you can include: videos, graphics, statistics, quotes. What will speak to your audience?
• Be dynamic by default: What interactive features attract people and which ones will you incorporate into your interactive document? Maybe it’s simple, with navigation and galleries, or perhaps you want more videos and/or surveys.
• Make actions obvious: Ensure the next step is clear so it’s easy for the reader to take action. For example, watch this video, click here to continue, etc.
• Improve with analytics: Remember that it’s a team effort. Work with your team to ensure the flow, visuals, words, interactive content, and call to action are obvious. 
• Measure engagement: With microapps, you can track KPIs like open rates and engagement easily and remove the guesswork. 

Learn More and Get Started Today

The idea of creating interactive documents may sound daunting at first, but now that you know how to go about it the right way and have come to realize just how simple the process can be, it’s time to say goodbye to static content. Join the interactive document revolution. Make your people an active part of your story, inspire, and engage them with meaningful content. 

For more resources including webinars, e-books, and other inspiration, check out Tiled’s Resource Library .

Are blogs more your thing? Read up on the latest and greatest food for thought on our blog .

Let’s do this .

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Home Blog Presentation Ideas How To Make a Presentation Interactive

How To Make a Presentation Interactive

This article provides a short list of proven techniques for adding interactivity to your presentations. Based on our experience and available research, we know applying them will enhance your presentation experience.

Table of Contents

Definition of Interactive Presentation

Benefits of interactive presentation, interactive presentation techniques, recommended templates for interactive presentations.

An interactive presentation actively engages the audience, transforming them from passive listeners into active participants. It incorporates various elements that invite audience interaction, encourage learning and discussion.

• Interactive presentations generate connection, bringing audiences and presenters closer. 
• They enhance comprehension, simplifying complex concepts. 
• They boost engagement, keeping audiences active and interested. 
• They encourage cooperation, promoting collaborative learning and problem-solving.

The following list is a suggestion of audience interaction techniques that, in our experience, helped presenters make their presentations interactive. They all present an actionable example that can be easily implemented in your next PowerPoint presentation .

Use of Icebreakers

In recent years, researchers have theorized that Icebreakers help establish a conducive communication environment, favoring participation. Effective icebreakers can range from simple questions to fun activities to break down barriers and encourage interaction. The key is to choose an icebreaker that aligns with the audience and the topic of the presentation.

Icebreaker examples

We present two examples of the same technique based on the context of the presentation delivery method.

Scenario 1 – Physical Audience (in the Context of a Summit)

In summits, the audience is gathered for a shared interest. So, the hypothesis is that the people in the room, ready to listen to the presentation, have some interests in common. The presenter can break the ice with a simple “know the people around you.” Each participant should present themselves to the person at the right and the left and ask them the purpose of their assistance.

The presenter will then share the 3 “possible answers,” introducing how the presentation will cover those interests. If time is well measured, it can even do a “rise the hands” round to roughly estimate the answers.

This technique requires good control of the room, so it is important to constantly gauge the possible distraction generated vs the communication effect that wants to be reached. We suggest our subscribers present quickly, clear the icebreaker exercise, and invest time in the wrap-up (post-exercise) activity.

Scenario 2 – Virtual Audience (in the context of a course)

During virtual presentations (like in Google Meet or Zoom ), the interaction between participants requires separate meeting rooms or moderated chat, which incurs complexity and additional effort. So, our experience in virtual presentations shows that a single round of attendee introductions is a good icebreaker for the audience-presenter pair. 

The main task the presenter needs to prepare is to define beforehand the number of people that will introduce themselves and the 3 questions they should answer about them.

For example:

• What’s your name? (or any demographic that might fit the audience)
• What do you expect from the presentation?
• Do you have a specific question or topic you would like the presenter to address?

This technique of micro-interactions increases the audience’s affinity with its remote peers and triggers curiosity. For the presenter, it sets a standard of expectations to focus on during the speech. [3]

Incorporation of Multimedia Elements & Other Interactive Presentation Ideas

According to audience studies , incorporating multimedia elements into presentations significantly enhances audience engagement . This technique uses videos, reels, TikTok, audio clips, animations, memes, and images to convey information more effectively. These elements can simplify complex concepts, stimulate discussion, and maintain audience interest. They also cater to different learning styles, ensuring a more comprehensive understanding of the presented material.

Use of Non-linear Flow

Non-linear flow in interactive presentations allows for a flexible, audience-driven progression. It consists of allowing the listener to decide the path of the presentation. This technique enhances engagement by adapting to audience responses. Two studies ([1],[2]) conclude that the use of a non-linear presentation reinforces learning and improves understanding of concepts and results.

Storytelling Approach

The storytelling approach involves weaving a narrative around your topic, connecting facts and figures with characters and plots. This method engages the audience emotionally, stimulating their imagination, making it more relatable and memorable, and enhancing their understanding of the subject matter. The interaction materializes between the message and the emotions of the receiver. 

Do not misunderstand the usage of storytelling presentations as merely fictional creative plots. The presenter needs to create a story that delivers the message and also, is backed up with arguments or data.

Storytelling Example

For instance, imagine a mid-manager working on customer trends and behavior analysis in a retail company. In the previous quarter, numbers show a decrease in the sales of brewed coffee. The trends and survey analysis show that consumers prefer to brew at home.

So, instead of just showcasing numbers, the presenter elaborates on a customer persona (“Emily”) and creates a story about Emily’s regular day and decision-making process.

“Emily is a hard-working mom of 2 boys. She has a white-collar job, 9 to 5, in a big city. She is a conscious mom about their children’s nutrition and makes her grocery every morning in our stores. She values our quality and freshness. As part of her daily routine, she picks a fresh coffee from our store barista and quickly covers her shopping list., ready to deliver the goods at home and run to her job.

Her morning routine has recently been affected since Emily’s budget has seen an increase in groceries, and a detailed analysis of cost benefits has replaced the almost automatic process of selecting top-of-the-line healthy products. Prices have seen alterations due to inflation and have hit the shelves. Emily’s routine has changed so that she does not even take her “to go coffee”; she decided to brew at home.”

This story is more relatable and can trigger the audience’s experience about the topic. This is no bidirectional communication but generates an internal action in the audience.

Use of Q&A and Discussion Sessions

Question and Answer (Q&A) sessions and discussions complement interactive presentations. They provide a platform for the audience to drill down into concepts and exchange ideas. This methodology promotes dynamic involvement, inviting passive spectators to become active participants. Moreover, the presenter can extract invaluable insights from these sessions, transforming the presentation into a reciprocal learning experience. For further reading and techniques of Q&A sessions, please check our post on how to moderate questions and answers .

Quizzes and Polls

In interactive presentations, quizzes and polls are frequently employed to receive input from the audience at scale. Using technology, you can get quick answers to a grid of questions predefined or even built during the presentation itself. The audience input is received and quickly processed to share in a summary. Results can then be discussed during the presentation. 

Quizzes and Polls Examples

As technology for this technique, we suggest using Microsoft Forms or Google Forms. Booths are proven technologies that can be accessed from almost every network and guarantee you will not fail during your presentation. This tool reduces the risk of having a glitch failure.

If you have an Office 365 subscription, you can use Microsoft Forms, which integrates with PowerPoint to show the results of a poll or quiz.

If you use Google Forms, even though you do not have direct interaction, you can use the web viewer add-in of PowerPoint and, after some time, edit the presentation, refresh the preview, and show the examples.

Here is a list of interactive presentation ideas & templates that you can use in PowerPoint or Google Slides.

1. Interactive Jeopardy Game Template for PowerPoint & Google Slides

Welcome to Jeopardy! If you intend to make a memorable presentation and evaluate your attendees’ knowledge of the topics you disclose, this is the ideal resource to make a presentation interactive.

Use This Template

2. Quiz Maker for Interactive Presentations Template

When looking for how to make presentations interactive, this slide deck with a quiz theme can bring light to training sessions or even inspirational presentations. Easy to edit, you can build expectation with multiple-choice format, or work with true/false statements.

3. Six Thinking Hats PowerPoint Template for Interactive Presentations

Induce interactive activities for presentations by implementing this creative thinking template featuring the Six Thinking Hats model. It is ideal for teams to discuss a problem from different points of view.

4. Futuristic Concept Roadmap for Interactive Presentation Ideas

When looking for how to create an interactive PowerPoint presentation, this roadmap template stands out by its highly detailed graphic aesthetic, which makes facts easier to remember. Participants can add their insights to collectively build a roadmap for the organization, highlighting 3 key milestones.

We presented several methods to make your presentation interactive. You can navigate our presentations gallery and choose professional PowerPoint templates to apply these new techniques.

• Das, Anup & Dutta, Bidyarthi. (2002). Presentation of Results of Research: Linear and Non-Linear Forms.
• Rumpa, Lantana & Sampelawang, Petrus & Lolang, Enos & Tangkeallo, Daud & Rubianus,. (2018). NON-LINEAR PRESENTATION ON STUDENT PERFORMANCE: APPLYING PREZI ON ENGINEERING EDUCATION.
• In-person vs. virtual conferences: Lessons learned and how to take advantage of the best of both worlds

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Presentation Approaches, Presentation Ideas Filed under Presentation Ideas

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• Mastering Event Presentation
• Enhancing Engagement and Interaction

Creating Interactive Presentations That Engage and Inspire

Aayush Jain

Principles of interactive presentation design.

Engaging the Modern Audience with Interactive Design Principles

In the realm of presentations, engagement is king. Interactive presentation design represents a paradigm shift from the traditional, often passive, audience experience to a dynamic, participatory form of communication. This approach not only captivates attention but fosters a deeper understanding and retention of presented content. At its core, interactive design principles advocate for the inclusion of elements that invite audience members to become an active part of the narrative. These principles are anchored in understanding the audience's needs, leveraging multimedia and storytelling, and creating a two-way communication channel.

The Foundation of Interaction

Interactive presentation design is rooted in the cognitive and emotional aspects of learning and communication. It employs strategies that cater to diverse learning styles—visual, auditory, and kinesthetic—ensuring that all audience members are engaged and absorbed. The historical background of interactive design reveals a journey from straightforward lectures to the incorporation of interactive elements like Q&A sessions, live polls, and real-time feedback. This evolution mirrors the broader trends in technology and audience expectations, where engagement and interactivity have become paramount.

Real-World Applications and Impact

The practical application of interactive design principles can be seen in the increasing use of interactive presentation tools such as live polls, Q&A platforms, and collaborative whiteboards. These tools transform passive listeners into active participants engaging presentations, encouraging them to contribute their thoughts and questions in real time. For instance, companies like Slido and Mentimeter enable presenters to create live polls and word clouds, enhancing audience interaction. Similarly, educational institutions leverage platforms like Kahoot! for gamifying learning, thus making educational presentations more engaging and interactive.

Evidence of Efficacy

The effectiveness of interactive presentation design is supported by numerous studies and real-world examples. For instance, a report by the Event Technology Engagement Barometer highlighted that events utilizing interactive technologies saw a 33% increase in audience engagement. Furthermore, a survey conducted by Microsoft Teams revealed that presentations incorporating interactive elements were more likely to hold the audience's attention, thereby improving retention and satisfaction rates. These findings underscore the importance of adopting interactive design principles to create engaging and memorable presentations.

Tools and Technologies for Creating Interactive Elements

Empowering Presentations with Cutting-Edge Tools

In the digital age, the powerful tools and technologies at our disposal have transformed how we create, deliver, and experience presentations. The cornerstone of any engaging presentation is its ability to interact with the audience in real-time, and this is made possible through an array of innovative interactive presentation tools. From advanced software that integrates live polls and surveys to platforms that facilitate immersive storytelling, these technologies are designed to break the fourth wall of presentations, inviting audience members to step into the narrative and actively participate.

A Historical Perspective on Interactive Technologies

The evolution of interactive presentation tools mirrors the technological advancements of our times. From the early days of slide projectors and overhead transparencies to the sophisticated digital platforms of today, the journey has been marked by a constant endeavor to make presentations more engaging and informative. Modern tools like PowerPoint, Google Slides, and Prezi have incorporated interactive features such as clickable links, embedded videos, and dynamic animations. Moreover, the advent of cloud-based collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams and Google Drive has revolutionized the way presentations are created and shared, enabling real-time collaboration and feedback.

Showcasing Success Through Technology

Real-world examples of these technologies in action are a testament to their impact on audience engagement. For instance, during a global sales conference, a leading tech company leveraged an interactive conference solution to conduct live polls, gaining instant feedback on product preferences and market trends. This immediate interaction not only kept the audience engaged but also provided valuable insights for the company. Another example is an educational workshop where the presenter used gamification tools to create a quiz competition, making the learning process fun and memorable for participants.

Strategies for Real-Time Audience Participation

Crafting Interactive Experiences for Immediate Engagement

Real-time audience participation is the heartbeat of interactive presentations, turning passive observation into active involvement. Developing effective strategies for this participation is crucial for presenters aiming to foster engagement and maintain the audience’s attention. These strategies range from leveraging technology to facilitate instant interaction to creating content that demands audience input. The goal is to design a presentation where audience members feel compelled to contribute, whether through questions, opinions, or responses to live polls.

The Evolution of Audience Participation

The concept of audience participation has evolved significantly, thanks in large part to technological advancements. Historically, participation was limited to verbal questions at the end of a presentation or hand-raising during a session. Today, digital tools have broadened the scope of interaction, allowing for a variety of participation forms. Live presentation software now supports real-time feedback, live Q&A sessions, live subtitles, and the ability to tailor content on the fly based on audience responses. This shift not only enhances engagement but also democratizes the presentation process, giving every audience member a voice.

Implementing Participation in the Digital Age

Effective real-time audience participation is evidenced in a range of scenarios, from academic lectures to other presentations interactive corporate webinars . For instance, a university professor may use live polls during a lecture to gauge students’ understanding of the material, adjusting the pace and focus of the lecture based on the results. Similarly, a marketing webinar might employ live Q&A sessions, allowing the presenter to address audience queries and concerns immediately, thereby increasing the relevance and impact of the presentation. These examples highlight the potential of real-time participation strategies to transform the presentation experience.

The effectiveness of these participation strategies is underscored by data and research. A study in the Journal of Education and Work found that presentations incorporating strategies for real-time audience participation significantly increased student engagement and learning outcomes compared to traditional lecture methods. Additionally, a survey by an interactive conference solution provider revealed that events facilitating real-time audience interaction reported a 50% higher satisfaction rate among participants. This data reinforces the importance of integrating audience participation strategies to create more engaging and effective presentations.

Designing Interactive Polls and Surveys

Unlocking Audience Insights Through Interactive Tools

Interactive polls and surveys serve as a bridge between presenters and their audience, facilitating a two-way exchange of information that can significantly enhance the engagement and effectiveness of a presentation. By carefully designing these interactive elements, presenters can gather real-time feedback, gauge audience understanding, and tailor their messages to meet the audience's needs and interests. This section delves into the principles of creating compelling polls and surveys that captivate and engage your audience as members and encourage their participation.

Foundations of Effective Poll and Survey Design

The effectiveness of polls and surveys in a presentation hinges on their design and implementation. A well-crafted poll should be concise, relevant, and thought-provoking, prompting immediate reflection and response from the audience. Similarly, surveys should be streamlined and purposeful, designed to gather actionable insights without overburdening participants. Historical perspectives on audience feedback highlight the shift from paper-based surveys and hand-counted votes to sophisticated digital platforms that offer instant analysis and visualization of responses. This evolution underscores the importance of integrating these tools thoughtfully into presentations to maximize engagement and feedback.

Real-World Applications and Success Stories

Incorporating interactive polls and surveys into presentations has proven successful across various settings. For instance, a corporate trainer conducting a workshop on communication skills used real-time polling to assess participants' understanding of key concepts, adjusting the focus of the session based on the results. Another example comes from a national conference on sustainable development, where organizers used surveys to gather attendees' opinions on priority topics, shaping the agenda and discussions of future events. These cases illustrate how interactive elements can be leveraged to make presentations more responsive and audience-centric.

Evidence of Impact and Best Practices

Research supports the positive impact of interactive polls and surveys on audience engagement. A study published in the Interactive Learning Environments journal found that presentations incorporating real-time polling significantly improved participants' attention and retention of information. Additionally, best practices for designing these tools emphasize clarity, relevance, and timing to ensure they enhance rather than interrupt the presentation flow. For instance, deploying a poll at the beginning of a presentation can pique interest, while a concluding survey can gather feedback and measure the presentation's effectiveness.

Incorporating Gamification into Presentations

Elevating Engagement through Play

Gamification, the integration of game-design elements in non-game contexts, has emerged as a powerful tool to increase audience engagement and participation in presentations. By incorporating elements such as competition, rewards, and interactivity, presenters can transform traditional presentations into dynamic, engaging experiences that captivate audience members. This approach not only makes learning more enjoyable but also enhances information retention and fosters a deeper connection between the presenter and the audience.

The Psychology Behind Gamification

The effectiveness of gamification in presentations is deeply rooted in psychology, particularly in how humans are motivated by achievement, competition, and the joy of learning in an interactive environment. Historical applications of gamification show its progression from simple educational games to sophisticated digital platforms that engage users in learning and development contexts. This evolution highlights the growing recognition of gamification as a potent tool for enhancing engagement and learning outcomes in various settings, including professional and academic presentations.

Success Stories Across Industries

The impact of gamification is evident across diverse fields. In the corporate world, companies have leveraged gamified presentations to train employees, resulting in improved knowledge retention and increased motivation. For example, a sales team might participate in a quiz competition that tests their product knowledge, with real-time scoring and rewards for top performers. In academic settings, educators have used gamification to make complex subjects more accessible and engaging for students, leading to higher participation rates and better learning outcomes. These real-world examples underscore the versatility and effectiveness of gamification in making presentations more interactive and enjoyable.

Validating Gamification's Effectiveness

Research supports the benefits of incorporating gamification into presentations. A study published in the Journal of Educational Technology & Society found that gamified learning environments significantly enhanced student engagement and academic performance compared to traditional teaching methods. Moreover, feedback from participants in gamified presentations often highlights increased attention, motivation, and enjoyment, further validating the approach. Best practices for implementing gamification include defining clear objectives, selecting appropriate game mechanics, and ensuring the gamified elements are relevant and aligned with the presentation's goals.

Case Studies: Successful Interactive Presentations

Exploring the Impact of Engagement

The value of interactive presentations is best illustrated through real-world examples that demonstrate their effectiveness in captivating and maintaining audience interest. This section delves into diverse case studies across sectors, showcasing how innovative presentation strategies can lead to meaningful engagement and transformative outcomes.

Theoretical Foundations and Methodological Approach

Begin by discussing the importance of case studies in understanding the practical application of interactive presentation principles. Highlight the criteria for selecting case studies, such as diversity in industry, audience size, and the types of presentation skills interactive elements used. This background sets the stage for a deeper exploration of each example, providing readers with a framework for analyzing the success factors of interactive presentations .

Real-World Examples and Lessons Learned

Detail several case studies, focusing on

The objectives of each presentation and the audience it targeted.

The specific interactive elements incorporated (e.g., live polls, gamification, real-time Q&A, interactive slides).

The challenges faced in designing and delivering these presentations and how they were overcome.

The outcomes of each presentation, supported by feedback, engagement metrics, or other measurable impacts.

For instance, you might describe a tech conference where live polls were used to tailor the presentation interactive content flow in real-time, or a university lecture series that incorporated gamification to enhance student participation and learning outcomes. Each case study should highlight how interactive strategies were tailored to the presentation's goals and audience needs, providing insights into the versatility and effectiveness of interactive elements.

Overcoming Challenges in Interactive Presentation Design

Navigating the Roadblocks to Engagement

Even the most meticulously planned interactive presentations can face challenges that hinder audience engagement and the overall success of the event. These obstacles range from technical difficulties to audience reluctance, and overcoming them requires a blend of preparation, flexibility, and creativity. This section explores common challenges encountered in interactive presentation design and offers strategies for mitigating these issues to ensure a smooth and effective delivery.

Understanding the Challenges

Begin by identifying the typical challenges presenters face when designing interactive presentations. These might include technological glitches, such as software failures or connectivity issues; designing content that resonates with a diverse audience; encouraging participation from reluctant or shy audience members; and ensuring the interactive elements do not distract from the core message of the presentation. Providing a background on these challenges sets the stage for discussing practical solutions.

Strategies for Success

Offer detailed strategies to overcome each challenge, drawing on expert advice and successful practices. For instance, to address technological issues, recommend thorough testing of all interactive elements and having a backup plan in case of failure. To encourage audience participation, suggest techniques such as anonymous polling or gamification, which can make involvement less intimidating. Highlight the importance of tailoring content to the audience's interests and knowledge level, ensuring that interactive elements enhance rather than detract from the presentation's message.

Real-World Solutions and Adaptations

Incorporate examples of how presenters have successfully navigated these challenges in live presentations in the past. These anecdotes can demonstrate the application of the strategies discussed and provide tangible evidence of their effectiveness. For example, share a case where a presenter turned a technical glitch into an opportunity for a spontaneous Q&A session, thereby maintaining audience engagement despite the setback.

Best Practices for Facilitating Audience Q&A Sessions

Mastering the Art of Interactive Dialogue

Audience Q&A sessions are a cornerstone of interactive presentations , offering a platform for direct communication, clarification, and deeper exploration of the presented topics. However, facilitating these sessions effectively requires more than just opening the floor for questions. It involves strategic planning, active listening, and adaptive communication techniques to ensure that this interactive component enriches the audience involved overall presentation experience. This section outlines best practices for managing Q&A sessions that engage and add value for both the presenter and the audience.

Foundational Strategies for Q&A Facilitation

Start by addressing the preparatory steps essential for a successful Q&A session. Emphasize the importance of setting clear guidelines for questions at the beginning of the presentation, such as the topics covered and the format for submitting questions (live, through microphones, or via digital platforms). Discuss the role of technology, like interactive conference solutions, in streamlining the Q&A process, allowing for real-time question submission and voting to prioritize audience interest.

Engaging Every Participant

Highlight techniques to encourage participation from all audience members, not just the most vocal ones. This could involve soliciting questions from different parts of the room or using digital tools to allow anonymous submissions, thereby lowering the barrier for participation. Share tips for maintaining a respectful and inclusive atmosphere, ensuring that all questions are valued and addressed appropriately.

Handling Difficult Questions and Situations

Offer insights into navigating challenging aspects of Q&A sessions, such as dealing with off-topic, controversial, or complex questions. Provide strategies for staying composed under pressure, redirecting questions to stay on track, and acknowledging when an answer isn't immediately available. Illustrate how these situations can be turned into opportunities for further engagement, such as promising to follow up after the presentation or inviting the audience to explore the topic through additional resources.

Measuring Engagement in Interactive Presentations

Quantifying the Impact of Participation

In the landscape of interactive presentations, measuring engagement is crucial for understanding the effectiveness of your approach and the extent to which your audience connects with the content. Engagement metrics provide tangible feedback on what resonates with the audience, allowing presenters to refine their strategies for future presentations. This section explores the methodologies and tools available for assessing audience engagement, offering insights into how data-driven decisions can enhance the interactive presentation experience.

The Pillars of Engagement Measurement

Begin by outlining the key metrics and indicators that signify engagement during a presentation. These can include quantitative data such as poll participation rates, number of questions asked during Q&A sessions, and interaction rates with live quizzes or surveys. Also, consider qualitative indicators, like the depth and relevance of audience questions or feedback collected through post-presentation surveys. Discuss the importance of setting clear objectives for what you wish to measure, ensuring that the engagement metrics chosen are aligned with the goals of the presentation.

Tools and Technologies for Gathering Data

Highlight the role of interactive presentation tools in facilitating engagement measurement. Many platforms come equipped with analytics features that track participation in real-time, offering insights into audience behavior and interaction patterns. For example, digital platforms can provide detailed reports on audience participation in polls, time spent on different presentation slides, and engagement levels throughout the presentation. Explain how integrating these tools into your presentation strategy can offer a comprehensive view of audience engagement.

Analyzing and Interpreting Data

Offer guidance on analyzing the collected data to draw meaningful conclusions about audience engagement. Discuss the importance of comparing metrics against benchmarks or previous presentations to identify trends and areas for improvement. Share examples of how data analysis can reveal insights into audience preferences, enabling presenters to tailor content more effectively to their audience's interests and engagement patterns.

Future Trends in Interactive Presentation Technology

Anticipating the Next Wave of Engagement

As we navigate through an era marked by rapid technological advancements, the domain of interactive presentations is poised for transformative changes. Emerging trends in presentation technology not only promise to enhance the ways we interact with our audience but also to redefine the very nature of engagement and participation. This section explores the cutting-edge developments forecasted to shape the future of interactive presentations, offering a glimpse into how presenters and audiences might connect in the years to come.

Immersive Technologies and Virtual Realities

Begin by discussing the integration of immersive technologies such as augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) into presentation platforms. These technologies offer the potential to create fully immersive presentation environments where audience members can experience content in a highly interactive and engaging manner. Illustrate potential applications, such as virtual walkthroughs for architectural designs or interactive 3D models for educational purposes, highlighting the possibilities for deeper engagement and understanding.

Artificial Intelligence and Personalization

Highlight the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in personalizing presentation content in real-time based on audience feedback and participation. Discuss how AI algorithms could analyze live audience reactions to tailor the flow of the presentation, adjust the level of detail, or even generate new content on the fly to address audience interests and queries. This trend points towards more dynamic and responsive presentations that actively adapt to the needs of the audience.

Enhanced Collaboration Platforms

Focus on the evolution of collaboration platforms that facilitate more interactive and participatory presentations, especially in remote and hybrid environments. Describe advancements in tools that enable better audience interaction, such as shared digital workspaces, real-time co-creation of content, and more effective ways to simulate the energy and engagement of in-person events online. These platforms are expected to break down geographical barriers, making interactive presentations more accessible and inclusive.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an engaging presentation.

An engaging presentation captivates the audience's attention through interactive elements, storytelling, and relevant content. It encourages active participation, making the audience feel involved and invested in the topic being discussed.

How can I be more engaging when presenting?

To be more engaging, focus on connecting with your audience through eye contact, storytelling, and questions that invite participation. Utilize interactive tools like polls and Q&A sessions to foster real-time interaction and keep your presentation dynamic.

What is the 2 4 8 rule in PowerPoint?

The 2 4 8 rule suggests limiting each PowerPoint slide to no more than 2 minutes of speaking time, 4 bullet points, and 8 words per bullet point. This guideline helps in creating clear, concise slides that support rather than detract from key points of your presentation.

What is a live presentation?

A live presentation involves delivering content in real-time, allowing for direct interaction with the audience. This format can be in-person or via a digital platform, and it often features interactive elements like polls, Q&A sessions, live reactions, and live feedback.

How do you make a presentation alive?

Make a presentation alive by incorporating interactive elements, storytelling, visual aids, and personal anecdotes. Engage the audience with questions, live polls, live captions and opportunities for them to contribute their thoughts and experiences.

How do you make a live presentation on PowerPoint?

To make a live presentation on PowerPoint, utilize its features like Presenter View for seamless delivery, and integrate interactive elements from previous slides such as hyperlinks, embedded videos, and animations. Consider using live polling software that integrates with PowerPoint to add real-time audience interaction.

How do I share a live presentation?

Share a live presentation by using platforms mobile devices that support live streaming or web conferencing tools such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams, or Google Meet. These platforms allow you to present your screen or specific application windows to a remote audience in real-time.

How do you make a conference interactive?

Make a conference an interactive experience by incorporating workshops, breakout sessions, live polls, and Q&A segments. Utilize digital tools to facilitate engagement and ensure there are opportunities for attendees to interact both with speakers and with one another.

What is interactive conference?

An interactive conference is an event designed to foster engagement and participation among attendees. It goes beyond traditional lectures by incorporating elements such as workshops, panel discussions, and technology-enabled interactive sessions.

What is the best virtual meeting platform?

The best virtual meeting platform depends on your specific needs, but popular options include Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet. These platforms offer a range of features designed to facilitate communication, collaboration, and interaction in a virtual environment.

How do you engage people in a conference?

Engage people in a conference by offering diverse formats of presentation, including interactive panels, workshops, and networking sessions. Use technology to enable real-time interaction, such as live polls, Q&A apps, and social media channels for ongoing discussion.

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How to make a presentation interactive and exciting

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What makes a presentation interactive?

Main benefits of interactive presentation, 9 ways to make your presentation interactive, types of interactive presentations, take your presentations to the next level.

An impactful speech or lecture requires more than being an articulate speaker . If you want the information to stick, your audience should engage with you and the material you’re presenting.

And that audience is changing. Among people with teleworkable jobs, 76% worked remotely some, most, or all of the time . Presentations are tricky when you’re catering to a virtual audience and don’t have the benefit of a physical space. And they’re even trickier when the people you’re speaking to are a mix of in-office and remote workers.

Creating a good presentation that incorporates the needs of both in-person and online audiences can feel like a tall order. But there’s a way to transform your spectators from passive listeners to active participants, giving them a memorable experience no matter the platform. And that solution is interaction.

Learning how to make a presentation interactive can grab and keep your audience's attention so they remember your session and its key takeaways. Here’s how to use interactive elements like Q&As, live demonstrations, and fun quizzes to make your presentations more exciting.

An interactive presentation has elements that involve the audience. The presenter engages with the group in real-time, asking and answering questions or encouraging participants to voice their opinions. Interactive presentations can also include online polls, quizzes, and face-to-face activities between audience members.

You’ve probably experienced a standard presentation where the speaker stands at the front of a projected PowerPoint slideshow, talking at you. Your only chance to engage comes when they open the floor to audience questions, and that’s only if there’s enough time. 

The presenter will still get the point across, but this approach can get boring, and it might be hard to pay attention if you’re not engaged. Around 90% of people admit to daydreaming during meetings and presentations , which can impact comprehension. An interactive presenter transforms the audience from viewers into active contributors and collaborators, making it easier to pay attention and gain from the meeting. 

A captivating presentation does more than just get the audience involved. It improves comprehension, helps you connect, and personalizes the experience. Here are more benefits to including interactive elements in presentations: 

• Connection: Human connection benefits everyone involved . An interactive presentation offers more back-and-forth between yourself and your audience, creating a sense of familiarity and an outlet for connection.
• Comprehension: Studies show that during conversations, the speaker’s brain activity and the listener’s brain activity mimic each other, which improves understanding . Interactivity helps the audience better absorb the information you’re presenting. 
• Engagement: Employee engagement leads to a happier workforce and improved company culture . Making the audience part of every meeting can contribute to their experience at work overall, and it’ll hold their interest in the moment. 
• Cooperation: Soliciting contributions or setting up participation activities means you won’t be talking for the whole presentation, which can help you feel less tired. You’re letting the audience do some of the work for you.
• Personalization: When you draw on your audience’s input, you’re creating a customized experience that is more meaningful and memorable. And interactivity means you’ll never give the same presentation twice, so your material will stay fresh.

Choose one (or a few) interactive elements to add interest to your presentation and improve comprehension. Experiment with different options and find the activities that stick. If you aren’t sure how it went, ask for presentation feedback to learn what the group enjoyed most and what you could improve. 

Here are a few interactive methods to try:

1. Icebreaker questions

Using a fun icebreaker to kick off your presentation creates a connection between yourself and members of the audience. You can keep it simple by asking a straightforward question or separating participants into small groups for an activity like charades. Whatever method you choose, you’ll help everyone relax, set the tone, and encourage participation for what’s to come. 

2. Storytelling

Listening to a good story makes your brain more engaged and helps you relate to the storyteller . Introduce your talk with a personal anecdote and use it to create a framework for your presentation. Try using music clips, video clips, or sound effects to add an extra level of interest.

As your speech progresses, you can refer back to your narrative and connect your ideas, creating a clearer line of thought. Telling a good story can also create a rapport with your audience, helping them relate to you through empathy or shared experience.  

Using interactive polls for presentations demonstrates that you care about your audience’s opinion. You can use a poll to gauge interest in a specific topic, learn how the group is feeling in the moment, or segue into a new section of the presentation. A live poll will also provide immediate feedback, helping you gauge whether your content has the effect you want it to.

Adding an interactive quiz for a presentation can help you read the room and assess your audience’s comprehension. Giving a quick quiz at the end of every section also lets you know if you need to follow up and explain your point further or open the floor to questions. Apps like Kahoot work well because everyone can pull out their smartphones and join in. The friendly competition of a quiz can also be a good motivator.

5. Question and answer

If you hold a Q&A session at the end of your presentation, the group might be too tired or rushed to find it meaningful. Instead, invite participants to ask their questions at key points throughout your talk. The information will be fresher in their minds, and a moment of conversation breaks up the lecture.

6. Demonstrations

If your presentation is about a product or concept, try showing it instead of telling it. Talking about the new app you’re launching isn’t as exciting as showing how it works. Demonstrating a concept, product, or service offers hands-on interaction and can make a more significant impact than words alone could.

7. Movement

Spending the whole presentation at the front of the room might bore both you and your audience. And it can be hard to create a personal connection when there’s a separation between you.

When you’re speaking, close the gap by moving through the venue space, pacing around, or speaking directly to different sections of the audience. Proximity and body language can help reinforce the connection you’ve built throughout your presentation.

Using props might sound gimmicky, but they can be powerful tools to help audiences engage with your material. Allowing your audience to interact with an item related to your speech can help break the third wall and add an element of fun.

Find an object that represents what you’re talking about, either literally or symbolically. For example, in Jill Bolte Taylor’s TED talk about her stroke, she shows the audience a real human brain to explain what happened .

You may have many methods for gauging your presentation’s success. Did the audience laugh at the jokes? Did you receive thank-you emails after ? This kind of indirect feedback can be telling, but it doesn’t provide you with actionable data.

Instead, incorporating a post-event survey gives your audience one last chance to share their thoughts and opinions with you. It gives the group a moment for self-reflection on what they’ve learned, and the feedback can help you improve your presentation skills before your next talk.

To apply interactive techniques that work the way you want them to, you need to be clear on the type of presentation you’re giving. Presenting the past quarter’s sales numbers has vastly different requirements than a lecture inspiring high school students to start volunteering. Understanding your audience and having clear goals will inform the format of your presentation and what kind of interaction suits it best. You have some freedom to mix and match elements of one format into another as long as they're complimentary, like adding persuasive characteristics to an inspirational speech. Here are five types of interactive presentations, with examples.

1. Informative

The goal of an informative presentation is to educate your audience. The structure shares factual information in a direct, unadorned fashion. For this kind of presentation, quizzes and polls work best because they test the audience’s knowledge. You can also use props to help them better understand complex information.

EXAMPLE: You present a workshop about your company’s style guide to new members of the marketing team and use a quiz to gauge their understanding.

2. Persuasive

You use a persuasive format when making a sales pitch or convincing an audience to take specific actions. Props, movement, and Q&As all work well for this format because they keep your audience engaged and give them the chance to learn more about the topic.

EXAMPLE: You’re leading a public meeting to encourage citizens to begin recycling and composting, and you bring a full garbage bag to represent the amount of waste each person produces in a day.

3. Inspirational

If you’re familiar with TED talks, you’ve likely experienced an inspirational presentation format. These speeches use storytelling to boost morale or inspire audience members to change their behavior or perspective. Try moving around the space or asking the group an icebreaker question to get them involved with the story.

EXAMPLE: You give a speech about how you moved up the ladder at your company, and you move around the room to better connect with the audience and tell them they could do the same.

4. Outcome-related

This collaborative presentation structure generates the most interaction between yourself and the participants because its goal is to work together. Use it to brainstorm solutions to a problem or determine the process you need to reach a desired outcome. Polls, quizzes, and surveys all work well for outcome-related presentations. EXAMPLE: You hold a meeting to develop a social media strategy for a new client and give an anonymous survey where team members can submit ideas.

5. Instructive 

An instructive presentation takes a deep dive into a topic. By the end, audiences expect to better understand an idea, concept, or possibly a product. Using storytelling and props can help demonstrate difficult concepts and give an audience more ways to connect with the topic.

EXAMPLE: You give a lecture on the benefits of solar panels on domestic buildings, and you bring in a solar panel with a lightbulb to show how it works.

Speaking in front of a group can be a little intimidating. But learning how to make a presentation interactive can elevate the event and relieve some of the nervousness associated with public speaking .

Whether you’re reviewing the results of a marketing campaign or speaking about an issue near and dear to your heart, interactivity helps transform a one-sided lecture into a participatory event. Meaningful audience interactions help your audience remember what you’re talking about and connect with the story you’re telling.

So next time you develop a virtual team-building exercise or present last month’s sales report, you’ll have the interactive presentation ideas you need to create an engaging experience, no matter your audience.

Understand Yourself Better:

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Elizabeth Perry, ACC

Elizabeth Perry is a Coach Community Manager at BetterUp. She uses strategic engagement strategies to cultivate a learning community across a global network of Coaches through in-person and virtual experiences, technology-enabled platforms, and strategic coaching industry partnerships. With over 3 years of coaching experience and a certification in transformative leadership and life coaching from Sofia University, Elizabeth leverages transpersonal psychology expertise to help coaches and clients gain awareness of their behavioral and thought patterns, discover their purpose and passions, and elevate their potential. She is a lifelong student of psychology, personal growth, and human potential as well as an ICF-certified ACC transpersonal life and leadership Coach.

How to give a good presentation that captivates any audience

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How to Make an Interactive PowerPoint Presentation: An Expert Guide (Free Downloadable Playbook)

Zhun Yee Chew

Are your PowerPoint presentations lacking impact and failing to engage your audience? You’re not alone. I experienced that before. I used to spend hours carefully crafting the perfect PowerPoint presentations only to be met with disinterested faces.

In a world where attention spans are getting shorter, traditional PowerPoint presentations often struggle to hold the interest of the audience. So here’s the hard truth: unless you adapt and embrace interactivity in your PowerPoint presentations, your valuable hard work and content run the risk of getting lost in presentations.

Fret not, as in this comprehensive guide, we will share with you expert tips on how to make an interactive PowerPoint presentation through interactive animations, transitions, hyperlinks, quizzes, games, and many more.

And perhaps the sweetest part of the deal is that you will also have access to a downloadable playbook of 60+ pages with a wealth of tutorials, templates, cheat sheets, resources and tools to elevate your PowerPoint skills from average to extraordinary through interactive PowerPoint presentations.

Are you prepared to impress those who once found your presentation dull? If your answer is a resounding ‘yes,’ then let’s begin.

What is an Interactive Presentation?

What is an interactive powerpoint presentation.

Interactive PowerPoint presentations are simply PowerPoint presentations that are made interactive to convey information in a more dynamic and engaging manner.

Creating an interactive PowerPoint presentation involves deciding if you want to make your slide content interactive or if you want your audience to interact with your slides. 

Interactive PowerPoint presentations can generally be divided into two main dimensions: interaction with slide content through interactive elements and fostering interaction with the audience.

Interaction with Slide Content:

In the first dimension, PowerPoint presentations are made interactive through enhancing the slides content with interactive elements, usually native to PowerPoint. 

We will cover interactive elements including:

• Transitions
• Interactive data visualization
• Annotations. 

They function to enhance slide interactivity through adding movement to static objects, enabling non-linear slides navigation, as well as adding a dynamic touch to data and information presentation. 

Audience Interaction:

In the second dimension, PowerPoint presentations are made interactive through interaction between the presenter and the audience, usually with the help of PowerPoint add-in tools. We will cover: 

• Assessments
• Brainstorming
• Collaborative multimedia uploading

Once you have decided which strategy you would like to use, you can then follow  these step-by-step guide  and the following expert tips to turn your PowerPoint slides into an interactive experience!

Benefits of an Interactive Presentation

The fact that you are still reading this suggests that you don’t need further convincing on the benefits of interactive PowerPoint presentations. 

However, if you do, here are some quick statistics:

68% of individuals hold the belief that interactive presentations have a greater potential for being remembered. Webinar Care

This means that a simple action of making your PowerPoint slides interactive has a profound impact on how your presentation is received by the audience. From our years of experience creating interactive PowerPoint presentations, they generally: 

• Increases  engagement , motivation and knowledge  retention . 
• Result in better  impression  and more impactful messaging being conveyed.
• Allow presenters to better tailor their content or offerings to the audience or clients because they can gather  real-time feedback .
• Open up room for  creative   storytelling  and showcases.

Interactive Puzzle PowerPoint Templates

Master the tricks to turn your PowerPoint into an interactive experience today!

Expert Tips on How to Make an Interactive PowerPoint Presentation – Before Presenting

1. add animations, but use them judiciously.

The first and most straightforward way of making your PowerPoint presentations interactive is through adding animations to your slides. However, so many people use PowerPoint animations the wrong way. PowerPoint animations are more than just making bullet points or images appear or fly in during your presentation.

Remember, using animations excessively in your PowerPoint presentation will only reduce the appeal and professionalism of your slides. The key is to use them judiciously and purposefully. Before you hit the “Animations” tab, ask yourself, “Does this animation enhance the message I want to convey to my audience?”  

2. Add 3D PowerPoint Animations Using PowerPoint Native 3D Stock Elements

Did you know that PowerPoint has free animated 3D elements you can use? We recommend you to try them up to instantly upgrade your presentation from ordinary to extraordinary. 

❓ How?  Simply go to Insert > 3D models > stock 3D models > animated models. And you will find a wide range of free 3D models ranging from food and animals to plants and characters, and many more. You can also select different animation scenes by heading to the Animations tab.

3. Add Animations With Triggers for Visual Excitement

You can take your PowerPoint animations up a notch by incorporating combining animations with triggers to create interactive pop-ups with extra information . These on-click pop-ups are valuable when presenting a map or when you want to explore specific aspects of an object or topic in more detail. You can also use these pop-ups as markers to alert the audience to exciting elements within different parts of the slide, as such: 

❓How? To create on-click pop-ups in your PowerPoint slides, first add shapes that will become clickable buttons, one to “open” the pop-up and the other to “close” the pop-up. Then, add text boxes with extra information you want to show, as well as entrance and exit animations. Combine the animations with “triggers” to activate the animations when the open or close buttons are clicked on. 

For a more detailed tutorial on this pop-up animation, download our Interactive PowerPoint Playbook  below. 👇

4. add non-linear slide transition.

A quick way to add interactivity to your PowerPoint slides is by using PowerPoint transitions. The first we want to discuss is PowerPoint Zoom. PowerPoint Zoom enables you to zoom in and out of and navigate to specific sections or slides on click, anytime during your presentation.

To  access the PowerPoint Zoom feature : click on Insert in the  PowerPoint ribbon  >  Zoom  > then choose  Slide ,  Section , or  Summary   Zoom . Each of these PowerPoint Zoom option serves slightly different functions:

• Slide Zoom: zooms into specific slides
• Section zoom: zooms into specific sections
• Summary Zoom: creates a summary slide for the different slides or sections in your PowerPoint presentation for easy navigation.

❓ How? To  set up PowerPoint slide zoom , select the starting slide where you wish to implement the Zoom effect. Next, click  Insert  >  Zoom  >  Slide Zoom . Here, you can pick the specific slide or slides you want to zoom in on. Click the Insert button, and thumbnails of the chosen slides will be added to your current slide.

Alternatively, for a more manual setup process, you can also set up a navigation menu at the beginning of your presentation that allows the audience to jump to different sections or slides using hyperlinks.  Read more in the Hyperlinks section below. 

5. Add PowerPoint Morph

Like PowerPoint Zoom, PowerPoint Morph empowers presenters to create dynamic transitions that elevate the visual storytelling in their presentations. But PowerPoint Morph brings storytelling to a whole new level and adds a layer of intrigue to your slides by simulating object transitions or evolution across slides. It functions similarly to animations but offers a smoother and more organic visual experience, without the need for complex setup steps. 

Personally, we think the outcomes generated by PowerPoint Morph are more professional and polished-looking as compared to traditional animations. And if you are looking for a more advanced-looking presentation, try this 3D morph animation In PowerPoint .

We’d also like to share with you the numerous applications of PowerPoint Morph contributed by our colleagues and PowerPoint professionals at ClassPoint:

• Moving background
• Rotating wheel
• Rotating cogs
• Photo gallery
• Slide Zoom with Morph
• Creative reveal
• Parallax effect
• Continuous slide transition
• Phone frame
• Movie frame

Gain access to free templates for all these PowerPoint Morph applications and effects by downloading our Interactive PowerPoint Playbook. 👇

6. add hyperlinks – they can link to so many more places than just websites.

Much like PowerPoint Zoom, hyperlinks enable presenters to create interactive menus and navigation structures, allowing audiences to jump to specific slides or sections effortlessly. However, while PowerPoint Zoom primarily focuses on creating a visual and interactive overview of content within a single presentation, hyperlinks extend this capability to connect with external resources, web content, or even additional PowerPoint files. 

There are a few ways you could add hyperlinks to your PowerPoint presentation to transform  it into an interactive experience effortlessly: 

4 Ways You Can Add Hyperlinks to PowerPoint: 

• Slide Transition : You can navigate to specific slides in a non-linear manner by simply inserting a hyperlink into your current slide. Head over to Insert > Link > This Document and select the slide you want to link to. You can apply hyperlinks to text, shapes, or pictures. 

• Interactive Navigation Menu : Adding an interactive navigation menu at the beginning of your presentation allows clear navigation between different slides and sections in your presentation. Head over to Insert > Link > This Document and select the slides you want to link to.

• Action Buttons : With hyperlinks, you can also create Action Buttons in your PowerPoint presentations to make your PowerPoint slides behave like interactive web pages, allowing users to navigate, explore, and engage with the content in a dynamic and user-friendly manner. Head over to Insert > Action Buttons and choose from the selection.

• Embedded Content : You can also hyperlink your PowerPoint slides to embedded content like PDFs, spreadsheets, and even web pages. Simply click Insert > Object and select the file you would like to embed in your PowerPoint slides. This way, you can remove the hassle of toggling between various files or windows during your presentation.

Expert Tips on How to Make an Interactive PowerPoint Presentation – When Presenting

1. turn your powerpoint slides into interactive quizzes.

The traditional way to add interactive quizzes to PowerPoint is through an unfavorable process of combining complex animations with triggers and hyperlinks. Let’s be honest, it takes an eternity! Even though PowerPoint offers an extensive range of presentation tools, it does not have audience interactivity built at its core. 

The good news is, audience interactivity can actually be effortlessly achieved with the various PowerPoint add-ins as listed below: 

We will get to polls and games in a bit. For now, let’s show you how you can turn your PowerPoint slides into an interactive quiz in a just a few clicks with PowerPoint add-ins like  ClassPoint , which offers a wide range of interactive quizzes from  Short Answer  and  Word Cloud , to Multiple Choice questions.

How to Create An Interactive Quiz in PowerPoint In A Few Clicks

Once you have downloaded ClassPoint, you will have a suite of additional interactive quiz features added to your PowerPoint ribbon. 

To turn  your PowerPoint slide  content into interactive  quizzes, simply  click on any of the interactive quiz features and add them to your slide. Enter PowerPoint Slideshow mode and you can start the quiz immediately. 

2. Run Gradable Assessments inside PowerPoint

With the versatile PowerPoint add-in,  ClassPoint , you can also create assessments and collect real-time responses right inside PowerPoint. This is wonderful news for teachers! All you have to do is set up  interactive Multiple Choice questions  and enable  Quiz Mode . 

ClassPoint’s Quiz Mode introduces an  automatic grading  feature to your Multiple Choice questions within PowerPoint presentations created with ClassPoint. This feature not only automates the grading process but also includes automatic star ratings, the option to select difficulty levels, and provides a quiz summary along with an exportable quiz report, making it the perfect tool for classroom formative assessments in PowerPoint!

3. Incorporate Annotations During Slideshow

Another unique way to interact with your PowerPoint slides is through the use of annotations. With annotations, you as the presenter can interact with your slides to draw your audience’s attention to specific details, highlight key points, and tell a more coherent story. 

There are 3 ways you could use annotations in PowerPoint: 

• PowerPoint Draw Tab:  To utilize the PowerPoint Draw Tab, click on the “Draw” tab in your PowerPoint ribbon and begin annotating anywhere on your slides using built-in features like the pen, highlighter, and Ink to Shape. However, please note that PowerPoint Draw only allows annotation in Edit mode.

• PowerPoint Pen Tools:  Another option for native PowerPoint annotation tools that permit annotation during slideshow mode can be found by clicking the pencil icon located in the bottom right-hand corner of your screen during a presentation. You can use the pen, highlighter, or laser tools to annotate any part of your slides during the presentation.

• ClassPoint  Toolbar:  The ClassPoint toolbar serves as an enhanced, free alternative to PowerPoint’s existing pen tools. It offers a broader range of additional annotation features, including text boxes, shapes, spotlight effects, fully customizable pens and highlighters, and more. This enables you to transform your PowerPoint slides into a creative canvas that will captivate your audience throughout your presentation.

4. Run Ice Breakers and Brainstorming Sessions in PowerPoint

The uses of interactive PowerPoint add-ins like  ClassPoint  are not only limited to teaching and learning. Give your PowerPoint meetings and presentations a strong start with a collaborative and dynamic brainstorming experience.

You can enhance your PowerPoint presentations and turn them into an interactive brainstorming experience by incorporating  Word Cloud  in PowerPoint, inviting participants to instantly contribute ideas, keywords, or concepts. This allows everyone to dynamically visualize emerging trends and interesting ideas.

❓ How? To start a brainstorming session in PowerPoint, click on the “Word Cloud”  button in your PowerPoint ribbon once you have downloaded ClassPoint to add the “Word Cloud” feature in your PowerPoint slides. Then enter PowerPoint slideshow mode to start brainstorming! 

5. Add Draggable Slide Objects (And Why It’s Better than Animations!)

Similar to animations, draggable objects allow you to interact with your slide objects freely during slideshow mode, except than you can do so with full control of where you want the slide elements to go!

This dynamic presentation feature adds an element of visual interest that captures your audience’s attention and can be a valuable tool for explaining complex ideas. Moreover, it has the potential to serve various purposes, such as revealing hidden information or acting as a movable marker to indicate your position on the slide content. You can also use it for group drag-and-drop activities, such as matching, categorizing, sorting, and more. You can either perform these actions yourself to provide a visual explanation or engage your audience by letting them instruct the movement of images and text on the slide.

❓ How? Draggable objects is a unique tool that is possible inside PowerPoint with the use of the add-in ClassPoint. Download ClassPoint, free PowerPoint add-in, the select any shape, image, illustration, or text on your slide to become draggable by clicking on “Draggable Objects” in your PowerPoint ribbon, and toggling “Drag enabled” on the side panel.

In slideshow mode, click on the draggable objects hand from the ClassPoint toolbar at the bottom of your screen to start dragging your slide objects around!

6. Create Playable Games In PowerPoint (Without Animations or Hyperlinks)

Much like interactive quizzes, PowerPoint games add a layer of interactivity and fun to PowerPoint presentations. However, what sets PowerPoint games apart is their ability to introduce competition through gamification. 

Here are  3 ways  you can instantly gamify your PowerPoint slides with  gamification elements :

• Set Up a Point and Reward System : Define how your participants can earn stars and points, and  award stars  to them when they have accomplished a goal during your presentation. 
• Add  Levels and Badges  to PowerPoint : Every game benefits from having levels and badges, and your PowerPoint game is no exception. You can create a simple game within PowerPoint by incorporating  questions  into your slides and defining the points and scores needed to progress to higher levels. When it comes to badges, you have the creative freedom to tailor them to your audience. For example, in an educational setting, badges can be skill-focused, while in a social gathering, they can take the form of fantasy characters that participants aspire to collect
• Add a  Leaderboard  to PowerPoint : Leaderboards are essential to keep track of scores or points during a PowerPoint game. You can of course create a manual leaderboard using PowerPoint’s tables and hyperlinks, but an easier and more straightforward way of implementing a leaderboard in your PowerPoint is using add-ins like  ClassPoint  and  Vevox .

With these fundamentals of gamification in place, you are now ready to create fun and exhilarating games in PowerPoint. 

Here is a full walk-through on  how you can create a PowerPoint game  in a few simple steps. 

If you are an educator, this  free trivia PowerPoint template and these 5 interactive PowerPoint game templates tailored for the classroom will be useful for you.

Expert Tips on How to Make an Interactive PowerPoint Presentation – After Presenting

1. run real-time polls in powerpoint.

Think of a memorable presentation you have attended? Did it use live polls? We bet it did! Live polling are especially helpful after a PowerPoint presentation to gather feedback for future improvement.

Traditional poll tools require presenters to switch between tabs during presentation. Thanks to PowerPoint add-ins such as  ClassPoint ,  Mentimeter  and  Poll Everywhere , this is no longer the case. And by eliminating the need to switch between different applications or tabs, the presentation experience becomes more fluid and engaging.

2. From Static to Interactive Data Visualisation

Incorporating interactivity through data visualization after a presentation concludes is a potent strategy for enhancing audience engagement and comprehension. Once the primary content delivery is complete, you can transition into a dynamic display of data or feedback you have gathered from your audience using interactive charts, graphs, or infographics.

This approach empowers your audience to explore the information at their own pace, dig deeper into specific data points, and ensure a two-way communication between the presenter and the audience. Whether it’s zooming in on specific trends, toggling between different data sets, or going through feedback, interactive data visualization encourages active participation and a deeper connection with the presented information. 

We recommend the following 2 ways to display data into your presentation:

• Insert tables, charts and graphs, and add a touch of interactivity through animations.

Below is a list of 10 PowerPoint animations most suitable for different kinds of graphs and charts: 

• Embed a website with data you want to go over. I’m not talking about a link that leaves PowerPoint for your default browser, but an actual embedded browser that loads your websites without leaving PowerPoint! Plus you can insert the page as a picture into your slide and start annotating on it!

Now that you have a collection of strategies and tips at your disposal, you are better prepared to leave your old and dusty PowerPoint toolkit behind and embrace these refreshing ideas. Whether your ultimate aim is to create a captivating classroom experience, deliver a memorable business pitch, or simply wow your friends and peers during  PowerPoint nights , don’t forget to: 

• Add animations, but use them sparingly.
• Make use of non-linear transitions and storytelling. 
• Turn simple transitions into stunning visual experience with PowerPoint Morph.
• Make creative use of polls, quizzes and games. 
• Make your presentation human with Bitmoji.
• Build anticipation with interactive presentation tools like annotations and drag and drop.
• Try out these 160 fun PowerPoint ideas for your next presentation!

To read more about Interactive PowerPoint Presentations, you can download our Interactive PowerPoint Playbook, which includes comprehensive guides, tutorials on various interactive PowerPoint presentation methods, cheat sheets, and a wide range of resources for mastering the art of creating interactive PowerPoint presentations.

About Zhun Yee Chew

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How to Nail Interactive Presentations, According to HubSpot Experts

Updated: March 16, 2021

Published: December 07, 2020

I can distinctly remember being extremely excited to attend a presentation from a speaker whose book I had read and loved in class. Unfortunately, the speaker was not as engaging as I’d hoped, and I found myself getting bored and distracted.

Marketers know better than anyone that capturing audience attention goes hand in hand with keeping people engaged. If people are bored, their thoughts will drift somewhere else, and you’ll miss out on the opportunity to impact their behavior. This is true regardless of the marketing medium, from advertisements to presentations.

That being said, marketers need to create effective ways to gain audience attention during their presentations — one of those is interactivity. According to the Oxford Dictionary , interactivity is defined as how two people work together and influence each other. Therefore, creating interactive presentations means using strategies that will capture and hold audience attention. It makes it easier to leave lasting, meaningful impressions about the content you’re sharing with them.

This post will outline the importance of interactive presentations and share tips from HubSpot experts for giving engaging, interactive presentations.

Why are interactive presentations important?

Interactive presentations are those where audience members and presenters feel like they’re in conversation with each other. It’s a pivot away from the lecture and listeners feel, as presenters entice audiences to participate and interact with them.

The reason for creating interactive presentations is simple: marketers who make a connection with their audience are more likely to have them leave feeling as though they’ve learned something from you.

All marketers want to leave good impressions, so understanding how to do this during presentations is important. Below we’ve listed nine interactive presentation ideas that you can use when planning your next virtual or in-person events.

Interactive Presentation Ideas

Use a powerpoint., draw comparisons to your passions., tell a story..

• Start with an ice breaker.
• Break away from the expected format.

Have Q&A or AMA sessions.

Use data representations., get off the stage., share resources for later..

PowerPoints help you incorporate various media into your presentations, like text, images, and even videos. This ensures that there is an aspect of your presentation that appeals to every audience member, as everyone learns differently.

For example, someone may have an easier time digesting your content when they can see visual examples. In contrast, their neighbor may retain more information if they can follow along by reading a brief summary. When you tailor your presentation to meet the differing needs of your audience, it’s easier for everyone to interact with your content and learn from your talk.

Should you choose to use a PowerPoint, this HubSpot download gives you four different slide templates to choose from that can be used to create high-quality presentations. Alternatively, you could use a smart presentation maker like Beautiful.AI , which also includes interactive presentation elements and design. 

It’s probably safe to say that the presentation you’re giving is about a topic you’re an expert in. It’s also probably safe to say that your audience isn’t necessarily as informed as you are, so they’ll need more context to catch up to your level of understanding.

Content Creation and Lead Acquisition Marketing Manager AJ Beltis says that drawing comparisons to your passions during presentations can engage your audience and enhance their understanding of new concepts, especially if they aren’t contextually related. This could look like drawing in references to sports, movies, and pop culture.

Beltis says, “Help your audience better understand what you’re presenting by referencing something outside of the context — sports, movies, and pop culture references can work really well if they make sense.”

This keeps your audience engaged because you’re relating the information to real-life examples that may be more readily available to them. Bonus points if you use a humorous reference, which can cause your audience to create a positive association with the information and retain more of what you’re saying. If you begin with a cheerful anecdote, you’ll set the tone for the rest of the presentation.

Use an ice breaker.

One way to ensure that your presentation is interactive is to generate rapport with your audience with an ice breaker .

Ice breakers are short activities that audience members can participate in that are meant to inspire a sense of community and help audience members meet their neighbors. Ice breakers can also diffuse any sort of tension or anxiety from being around unfamiliar people.

If you’re at a loss for ideas, you can always try Two Truths and a Lie. Every audience member comes up with two factual statements about their life and one lie, and the rest of the audience works together to pick out the false statement.

Ice breakers are great because they are adaptable to both in-person and virtual meetings. For in-person events, per safety regulations, presenters can pre-select an ice breaker, and small audiences can go around the room responding to a question. For larger audiences, participants can simply introduce themselves to a neighbor.

For virtual events with small audiences, you can use the same structure as in-person presentations, but larger audiences can be broken down into smaller, more intimate break-out rooms. Either way, people are still breaking the ice, so to speak, and interacting with each other.

Use your presentations to interact with your audience by telling a story. It could be a personal anecdote, a story from a customer, or a well known-story that you adapt to illustrate your presentation’s message.

Senior Marketing Director Emmy Jonassen recalls one of the most memorable presentations from a HubSpot Marketing Team planning session: “There was a group that used Goldilocks and the Three Bears to illustrate how they went about solidifying the perfect strategy. The story paired with the imagery kept the audience engaged, and people were listening and laughing.” Jonassen says that, almost a year later, that was one of the most memorable presentations of the two-day session.

By telling a story, you’re using interactivity to influence your audience and help them remember what you’re sharing with them. A story gives your audience something to associate the information with, which may make the information you’re sharing easier to recall. You’ve used a story to influence their retention of the information you’re presenting.

Using data representations is a valuable way to showcase your content in a digestible format. For reference, data visualization is using things like charts and diagrams to help viewers understand the significance of the information you’re showing them. It’s easy to say the words out loud, but using pictures gives the audience a visual representation of your words.

Say you’re a marketer giving a presentation on the benefits your business has found from advertising on different social media sites. You can certainly verbalize how Twitter was the best, but using a chart that shows the difference in return on investment (ROI) between different platforms gives audience members a visual representation of your success.

If you’re a HubSpot user, Marketing Hub allows you to create visualizations from the data in your HubSpot analytics reports. The image below is a pie chart that was created using HubSpot reports.

All-in-all, data visualization increases the impact of your words because audience members get a picture of the significance of the information you’re giving them.

Breakaway from the “expected” format.

The disappointing presentation I mentioned earlier followed the typical structure of an introduction, content presentation, brief Q&A, and then it was over. I expected more interactivity from the author, but it really felt like a regular college lecture. I wish the author had mixed it up and varied their structure, maybe by asking us questions about our interpretations of the book, but she didn’t.

Many presenters follow this structure, and there’s nothing wrong with it, but the framework can become boring to your audience. If you mix it up and vary your style in a way that your audience wouldn’t expect, you can capture their attention by throwing them off (in a good way), and they’re likely to stay attentive because they don’t know what’s coming next.

Amanda Sellers, Historical Optimization Writer, says that breaking away from expected format could mean playing a game, or subverting expectations. She recalls giving a presentation on a Monday afternoon where she knew that the audience would likely be a bit quiet. For part of her presentation, she had the audience stand up and repeat the words she was saying; “Standing up got their blood flowin’, and I encouraged them to participate at full volume. This shook up the presentation, and it helped with information retention because the attendees were listening and repeating back the information.”

Breaking away from the expected format doesn’t necessarily mean that you should do something at the beginning that you’d usually do at the end — get creative with what this means to you personally and how it would benefit your presentations' interactivity.

A great way to interact with your audience is to have question and answer (Q&A) or ask me anything (AMA) sessions during your presentation.

When you do this, audience members can ask clarifying questions about what you’ve already said to gain a full understanding before moving on to the next concept. For example, if you’re presenting your recent marketing campaign , consider stopping after each step of your plan (like plan goals, measurement, target audience, etc) to allow the audience to ask clarifying questions before you move on to the next section.

You can also switch it up and ask audience members questions, as they likely have valuable input into the topic at hand. Consider creating quizzes and polls where they can respond to your questions and submit feedback. You can make submissions anonymous so audience members feel comfortable to share anything (within reason) that they have on their mind.

Weaving Q&A and AMA opportunities throughout your presentation is also a great way to re-capture audience attention if they have become distracted, as it requires them to think critically about your content and their own information retention.

During virtual presentations, audience members may not feel as comfortable interrupting you to ask clarifying questions, so purposely taking the time to ask participants questions or have them ask you questions is worth considering. Becca Stamp, Senior Learning & Development Operations, says “It’s important to give everyone space to come off mute and contribute throughout the session. The participants add so much value to the session, either through discussion or over the zoom chat.”

During in-person presentations, getting off the stage and quite literally leveling yourself with your audience is worth considering.

Most people expect presenters to remain on stage and separated from them, so varying your delivery style and being closer to your audience may inspire a sense of interaction that is different from simply standing in front of a podium for 20 minutes.

If you employ this strategy, you can also have Q&As and where you walk over to audience members and respond to their questions as if you’re having a one on one conversation. Referring back to the definition of interactivity, you’re leaving an effect on your audience by being more approachable than they’d expect.

A useful way to inspire continuous interaction with your audience is to leave them with something to take away from your presentation. Depending on the content you’re sharing, maybe you’ll hand out brochures to advertise your service, provide them with a link to your website, or have them sign up for an email list.

Whatever your desired action is, giving them a way to remember you and your presentation is a great way to inspire continuous interaction with them.

Spend Time Making Your Presentations Interactive

All-in-all, the goal of creating interactive presentations is to influence your audience members. Whatever your presentation content is, using strategies that center audience engagement is a valuable way to connect with them and teach them something new.

Feeling like they’ve been in conversation with you rather than being talked at can help you fulfill the ultimate goal of marketing: to leave a lasting impression.

Don't forget to share this post!

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• Entrepreneurship

12 Interactive Presentation Ideas to Engage Your Audience in 2024

Too often, presentations are thought of as one-way communications. The speaker is on the stage delivering their presentation and it's the audience's role to listen attentively. Interactive presentations are different because they involve the audience.

As freelancers and small business owners, our clients hire us for our expertise and solutions to problems that they have. That's why I firmly believe that when the opportunity arises, it's a great idea to give a presentation and share your knowledge.

You can involve the audience by giving an interactive presentation. In this tutorial, I'm going to share ideas on how to make an engaging presentation by including audience participation in your presentation. With an interactive presentation you'll make a memorable impression. I'll share seven interactive presentation ideas to engage your audience.

Guide to Making Great Presentations (Free eBook Download)

Before we dig into the tips though, there's another resource we've got that can help you to improve your presentations. Download our FREE eBook: The Complete Guide to Making Great Presentations .

It'll help you with the complete presentation process, taking the interactive presentation ideas you'll learn in this article further.

Now, let's take a look at how to make your presentations more interactive:

1. Use Social Media

Most people have social media these days, so why not include it in your interactive presentation?

Twitter is the easiest to use for this purpose. Create a hashtag that people can use for their questions or thoughts. Tell your audience what your hashtag is before the presentation starts. Then, let your audience know that you’ll answer questions during or after your presentation.

You can also use Facebook and create a Facebook group for audience members to post their questions about your presentation. Social media is an excellent way for people to interact with your presentation. Try this if you're looking for interactive presentation ideas for students.

2. Print Out a Handout

Print the main points of your interactive presentation topics on a handout and give it to your audience. This allows the audience to look back over previous parts of your presentation. This can also allow the audience to take notes if they choose to

3. Use Props

Looking for interactive activities for presentations? If you've got a small audience, using props is a great interactive presentation idea. Use a prop to reinforce important points.

You can also use props to help explain a problem or situation. Props can allow you to visualize what you’re talking about. And it can be a way to get your audience involved with the presentation.

4. Lead a Q&A Session

One of the most popular ways to engage an audience is to open the floor for a  question and answer  (Q&A) session. These sessions give you the opportunity to take questions from the audience and interact with them.

Leave time at the end of your presentation to take questions from the audience. Not only will a Q&A session spark direct interaction with the audience, it gives you a chance to share your knowledge and build up your expertise. The audience may even consider the way you're answering your questions and picture working with you. Here's a sample slide to add to your presentation: 

When you open up questions to the audience, it opens the floor for discussion. The presentation might go in a direction it may never have gone without the audience input. 

Check out the full tutorial below for a complete guide to preparing for a Q&A session with the audience.

5.  Host an Experts Panel

One interactive presentation idea is to have an experts panel during your presentation. An experts panel is like a Q&A session on steroids. Instead of directing all the questions to one speaker, design your presentation around a group of experts who are well-equipped to answer any question that may arise.

Most expert panel sessions feature a mix of questions you'll prepare for the audience and questions from audience members.

Let's take a look at an interactive presentation example. The video below from TechCrunch's Disrupt conference is a great example of an expert panel:

You might be afraid that you can't find qualified candidates for your own expert panel. Don't forget that there's plenty of benefits for the experts who take part, as it gives them a chance to showcase their expertise. The experts don't have to be industry leaders to add insight, they just have to be more knowledgeable than the audience.

6.  Get Audience Feedback in Real-Time

What if you could find out what your audience is thinking while you're giving a presentation? You could use this feedback to not only understand your audience, but also to tweak the presentation as you go.

Audience participation in presentations can help. This could be as simple as a show of hands question, such as "How many of you freelance for your primary source of income?" But there are even better ways to take a poll and feedback from your audience.

I recently attended a presentation where the presenter used a tool called DirectPoll to ask for feedback from the audience. This tool lets you create a quick poll that your audience can access and vote on from their mobile device.

A poll is an engaging way to let your audience know that you care about their opinions and are speaking directly to them. Consider a poll to grab attention and build trust by showing that you're interested in their background.

7. Use a "Choose Your Own Adventure" Approach

When I was younger, my favorite books were ones that had a fork in the road where I could choose my path. Instructions like "turn to page 43 if you want to take the door on the left, turn to page 55 if you want to take the door on the right" made me feel like I was in control of what happened to the characters.

What if we brought this same mindset to giving a presentation, except we let the audience influence which direction we go? Using either the polling approach I showed you earlier or a simple show of hands, consider designing a presentation that's got many branches. Here's a sample interactive presentation slide you could use:

Those presentation branches could vary the anecdotes you tell the audience, the videos you show, or any piece of content that you've got more than one option for.

This approach requires a bit more preparation, but it also has some advantages. First, having many paths for your presentation means that you may never give the same presentation twice. 

The best part of making the audience choose the path for the presentation is that your audience may ask for the stories they didn't  hear as a follow-up. 

A branching presentation is yet another chance to interact with audience during the presentation. Giving the audience a role in deciding the direction of a presentation is one of the best ways to interact.

8.  Follow-Up After the Presentation

Follow up is another way to interact with  your audience. There's no reason that giving a presentation has to be the last contact you can have with the audience. What if your presentation could become the beginning of a dialogue between you and the audience members?

Many freelancers and small businesses use presentations and speaking engagements to gently promote their businesses. There are many great stories of using a presentation to gain new clients. 

The wrong way to approach presentation follow-up is as a heavy-handed sales pitch. Instead, educating the audience and showing your expertise will make them think of you the next time they need to hire someone. Here's a slide that invites continued audience participation:

Here are three interactive presentation ideas to ensure that your presentation won't be the last time you speak to the audience:

• Make sure to include a  Contact Us  slide that gives your audience the chance to reach out to you. An email address or social media handle can be the start of a conversation with the audience to find collaborators or potential clients.
• Consider taking contact details from your audience before the presentation. If they're willing to share their email address, for example, you could reach out to them after the presentation in a personal way.
• Send anyone who signs up and shares their contact details a bonus, like a PDF supplement with your top tips from the skill you taught.

It only takes a few successful presentations to launch your business with enough clients to make the leap from your day job. But, you've got to give the audience a chance to connect with you after the presentation to launch those opportunities. Interactive presentations can be a key part of that.

9.  Ask for Audience Action

Interacting with your audience is a start, but what if you directly asked for action from the audience? Audience activities during presentations are a good way to keep them engaged.

Those activities could include audience exercises such as greeting one another before you get started. You could also offer an intermission for everyone to stretch and take a break. You could also ask for follow-up action after the presentation. Here's a sample slide lead-in for an audience get acquainted time:

What I've found when I've used these techniques is that they generally increase audience engagement, even if that engagement is between audience members. Breaking down those invisible barriers during a presentation can continue the conversation long after the fact.

10.  Publish an Interactive Presentation Online

Some presentations transcend themselves because they're shared online with others. When you've put so much time into your interactive presentation, why limit yourself to sharing with an audience only in person?

You never know what will happen when you share an interactive presentation online. Maybe the presentation takes on a life of its own.

Here's an interactive presentation example. This Netflix culture slide deck was published online and has now been viewed over 20 million times:

When you publish your interactive presentation, you give your work a chance to be seen by others. It can reach a greater audience than just those who can attend your live presentation.

Before you publish your presentation online, you may want to adjust the slides before you upload them. Here are three tips to help you get your presentation ready for sharing online:

• Consider adding an extra slide to explain the context of where your presentation was given. This helps an audience understand the reason you were giving the presentation.
• Since your audience may only see the slides, you may want to add  Speaker Notes  to the presentation. They'll help explain the slides in more detail to an online reader.
• Above all, make sure that your interactive presentation is okay to be shared online. For example, slides that you prepare for your company shouldn't be shared online without permission if they contain sensitive information.

Check out the tutorial below for ideas on how to share and popularize your presentation using popular services. You'll learn how to use SlideShare and PowerPoint Online so that a broader audience can see your presentation.

Remember, if you're using presentations to build your business, it's all about giving your audience value. The goal is to share your expertise and make yourself valuable and useful. You never know when your next client is sitting in the audience.

11. Create Discussion Questions

Another interactive presentation idea is have discussion questions for your audience. Have your audience break up into groups to discuss the questions. This allows the audience to interact with each other.

12. Use Music

Some interactive presentations have music added to the slides. This could excite the audience and break up the material you’re presenting.

For example, you could add fun music to some slides and light background music to other slides. You can also add fun music to one or two slides to add interaction.

Common Interactive Presentation Questions Answered (FAQ)

Do you have more questions about creating interactive presentations? Here are common presentation questions and answers:

1. Is It Possible to Personalize My Presentation?

Yes, it’s possible to personalize your interactive presentation. A key to personalizing your presentation is knowing your audience. Another tip is to use personal, relevant stories in your presentation.

2. Are There Different Presentation Styles?

Many different presentations styles can be used for your interactive presentation. If you're comfortable with your subject, there's the instructor style . If you need to convince your audience of an idea or product, then there's the persuasive style .

For more information on different types of presentation styles, read this article:

3. How Can I Use PowerPoint to Make a Better Interactive Presentation?

PowerPoint makes it easy to use premium premade templates. Plus, PowerPoint has a Slide Master where you can easily edit your slides from one screen. Slide Master controls the design for each slide that uses the master.

Another helpful feature is the Align Objects button. This helps your slide to look less messy. Learn more in the tutorial below:

4. What’s a Tip for a Good Presentation?

Rehearsing is an essential tip to have a good interactive presentation. When you rehearse, you find mistakes that you didn’t catch before and fix them. It can help to rehearse with a friend watching. They can tell you what the audience will see and whether they see any mistakes.

For a complete list of presentation tips to use for your interactive presentations, review the tutorial below:

5. How Do I Create an Impactful Ending to My Interactive Presentation?

One way to have an impactful ending is to stimulate the audience’s curiosity. Do this by stating a question or problem and then giving the audience the answer at the end of the presentation. This will cause the audience to look for clues for the solution throughout your presentation.

Learn Even More About Creating an Engaging Presentation

Download our free eBook: The Complete Guide to Making Great Presentations ,  which comes with a subscription to the Tuts+ Business Newsletter.

This 30 page PDF guide with included checklist will help you with the complete presentation process. Learn how to write your presentation, design it like a pro, and quickly prepare it to present powerfully.

A presentation isn't just a megaphone to speak to an audience. Instead, think of them as an opportunity for two-way communication with the attendees. You never know what connecting with audience members will lead to for your freelance business.

The tips in this tutorial are designed to engage your audience through interactive presentations. Try them out if you want to create a presentation that's less like a megaphone and more like a phone call.

Here are some tutorials that'll help you learn more about PowerPoint:

Build Your Interactive Presentation Today

What do you do to engage an audience when you're presenting? Do you use interactive presentations? If not, what's holding you back?

Now that you know how to make a presentation interactive, give it a try. Save time by starting with a presentation template from Envato Elements or GraphicRiver .

Editorial Note: This post has been updated with contributions from Sarah Joy . Sarah  is a freelance instructor for Envato Tuts+.

• Alternatives

10 Interactive Presentation Techniques | 2024 Reveals

Ellie Tran • 31 July, 2024 • 12 min read

All you need is the right tool and the right tact. Check out the ten best interactive presentation techniques below! These days, you might find your presentation audiences lost somewhere in your words, staring dead-eyed at you in the room or through Zoom. It's time for a change.

You might have heard that the secret to a good presentation comes from creating great interactive experiences with your audience, but the big question is how ?

Table of Contents

• Why interactive presentation techniques?
• #1: Icebreakers to warm up the room
• #2: Tell a story
• #3: Gamify the presentation
• #5: Present with props
• #6: Ask short questions
• #7: Brainstorming session
• #8: Host speed networking
• #9: Use a social media hashtag
• #10: Pre and post-event surveys
• 3 general tips for presenters

Frequently Asked Questions

Practice for better presentation.

• Complete Guide to Interactive Presentation
• Interactive Presentation Games
• Interactive Presentation Software for Mac

Start in seconds.

Get free templates for your next interactive presentation. Sign up for free and take what you want from the template library!

Why Try Interactive Presentation Techniques?

Ever stood before a crowd and spent every bit of your nerve presenting something, but all you could see was the audience yawning or looking at their phones? 

You’re not alone here…

• One in five people constantly looked at their phones or laptop screens during a presentation. ( Decktopus )

Audiences get bored and lost quickly during one-way presentations, so making it more interactive and engaging is best. Let us walk you through some stats:

• 64% of participants found two-way presentations more appealing than linear ones. ( Duarte )
• 70% of marketers believed that interacting with the audience was essential to making presentations more effective. ( Duarte )

10 Ways to Create a Fun Interactive Presentation

Interactivity is the key to your audience’s heart. Here are ten interactive presentation methods you can use to get it…

1. Icebreakers to warm up the room

It can be daunting and make you more anxious if you jump into your presentation without a short introduction or warm-up. Things are easier when you break the ice and allow the audience to know more about you and others.

If you’re hosting a small workshop, meeting or lesson, go around and ask your participants some simple, light-hearted questions to make them feel more comfortable.

That could be about their names, where they come from, what they expect from this event, etc. Or you can try some questions in this list:

• Would you rather be able to teleport or fly?
• What was your dream job when you were five?
• Coffee or tea?
• What’s your favourite holiday?
• 3 things on your bucket list?

🧊 Check out top 21+ Icebreaker Games for Better Team Meeting Engagement | Updated in 2024

When there are more people, get them to join the icebreaker to build a sense of connection through an interactive platform like AhaSlides.

Save time with ready-made icebreakers

Word Cloud Icebreakers

Monthly Team Meeting

Icebreakers for Class

2. Tell a story

People love hearing a good story and tend to immerse themselves more when it’s relatable. Great stories can help boost their focus and understanding of the points you’re trying to get across.

Finding compelling stories that engage the audience and relate to the content can be challenging. As many people have different backgrounds, it’s not easy to find common ground and come up with something mesmerising to tell.

To find things in common between you, your content and your audience and craft a story from that, try asking these questions:

• What are they like?
• Why are they here?
• How can you solve their problems?

💡 More interactive presentation tips with AhaSlides:

3. Gamify the presentation

Nothing rocks the room (or Zoom) and keeps the audience bouncing better than some games. Fun games, especially those that get participants moving or laughing, can do wonders for your presentation.

With the help of many online tools to host live quizzes , icebreaker games , word cloud tool , and spinning wheel , you can make interactive presentation games directly and effortlessly.

Need some inspiration? Try out these interactive games in your next face-to-face or virtual event:

🎉 Pop quiz - Liven up your presentation with fun polling or multiple-choice questions. Let the whole crowd join and answer by using an audience engagement platform ; there are many for you to choose from (AhaSlides, Quizziz, Kahoot, etc.).

🎉 Charades - Get participants up and use their body language to describe a provided word or phrase. You can divide the audience into teams to make it more competitive and heat up the atmosphere.

🎉 Would you rather? - Many participants prefer sitting on their chairs while enjoying games, so juice up your presentation with an easy-peasy one like Would you rather? . Give them two options, like would you rather live in a forest or a cave? Then, ask them to vote for their favourite option and explain why they did.

💡 We’ve got heaps more games for an interactive presentation , along with games for virtual team meetings , games for adults and games for students !

Presenters usually host an ‘ask me anything’ session at the end of their presentations to collect questions and then address them. Q&A time ensures everyone is on the same page after getting a bucketload of information to digest while also giving you a chance to talk and interact directly with your audience.

To not miss a beat, we recommend using an online Q&A tool to collect and display questions so you can answer one-by-one. This kind of tool helps you manage all questions flocking in and allows people to ask anonymously (which is a relief for many people, I’m sure). 

5. Present with props

This old trick brings more power to your presentation than you might think. Props can grab the audience’s attention faster than when you only speak or show 2D images, and they’re great visual aids that help people understand what you’re talking about. That’s a presenter’s dream.

Bring some props that link to your message and help you communicate visually with the audience. Don’t pick something random irrelevant to your topic, no matter how ‘cool’ it is.

Here’s an example of how to use props the right way…

6. Ask short questions

Asking questions is one of the best interactive presentation methods for checking in on your audience and making sure they’re paying attention. Still, asking in the wrong way can result in an awkward silence instead of a sea of hands in the air. 

Live polling and word clouds are safer choices in this case: they let people answer anonymously using just their phones, which guarantees that you’ll get more answers from your audience. 

Prepare some intriguing questions that can spark creativity or debate then choose to show everyone’s answers however you want - in a live poll , word cloud or open-ended format .

7. Brainstorming session

You’ve done enough work for this presentation, so why not turn the table a little bit and see your participants put in some effort?

A brainstorming session digs deeper into the topic and reveals the audience’s different perspectives. You can gain more insights into how they perceive your content and even be surprised by their brilliant ideas.

If you want everyone to discuss directly, instruct them to brainstorm in groups and share their combined ideas with everyone.

Try a live brainstorming tool to let everyone have their say and vote on their favourites amongst the crowd 👇

📌 Tips: Divide your team randomly to generate more fun and engagement within your brainstorming session !

8. Host speed networking

One of the main drivers that bring your participants to come and hear you present is networking. Joining social events like yours means that they have more chances to meet new people, socialise, and maybe add new meaningful connections on LinkedIn.

Host a short networking session, ideally during a break or after you finish your presentation. All participants can freely mingle, talk to each other and dig deeper into any topic they’re keen on. This is one of the best interactive presentation ideas for large groups of participants.

If you do it online or hybrid, breakout rooms in Zoom and other meeting apps make it very easy. You can automatically divide your audience into different groups, or you can add a topic to each room’s name and let them join based on their preferences. Having a moderator in each group is also a good idea to help people feel comfortable at first.

There are also some tips for hosting a networking session in real life :

• Prepare a tea break - Food heals the soul. Participants can talk while enjoying the food and hold something when not knowing what to do with their hands.
• Use colour-labelled cards - Let each person choose a card with a colour representing a popular hobby and tell them to wear it during the networking session. People sharing things in common can find and make friends with others. Note that you need to decide the colours and hobbies before the event.
• Give a suggestion - Many people want to but shy away from talking to a stranger at an event. Write suggestions on pieces of paper, such as ‘say a compliment to a person in pink’, ask the participants to choose randomly and encourage them to do so.

9. Use a social media hashtag

Make your event go viral and keep people interacting virtually before, during or after the event. When you have a hashtag to accompany your event, all participants can join related conversations and not miss any info.

This is a great way to promote your event. Not only can your audience engage with your message, but so can other people on the net by interacting with posts using hashtags. The more, the merrier, so get the hashtag trending and let more people know about the fascinating things you’re up to.

Here’s how to do it:

• Choose a (fabulous) hashtag containing your event’s name.
• Use that hashtag in each post to let people know you have one.
• Encourage audience members to use that hashtag when sharing photos, opinions, feedback, etc., on their social accounts.

10. Pre and post-event surveys

Surveys are smart strategies to connect with the audience when you’re not with them. These surveys help you understand them better and measure your success.

In this tech era, sending surveys via emails and social media is convenient. There are some common questions you can put in the surveys and customise them based on the purpose of your event.

• Common questions - Ask about their names, age, hobbies, preferences, areas of interest and more .
• Tech-specific questions - It’s helpful to know about their internet connection and tech devices to set up activities in an online event. Find out more here . 

Post-event:

• Feedback questions - Collecting audience feedback is vital. Ask about their opinions on the presentation, what they liked and didn’t, what they want to know more by relevant survey tools , to gain better engagement by asking the right questions.

3 General Tips for Presenters

Presenting is much more than what you say or write on the slides. Well-prepared content is great but not really enough. Practice these amazing hidden languages to show your charisma and nail the presentation. 

#1. Eye Contacts

A quick gaze in the eyes helps you engage with the audience and further impress them. It’s key for grabbing their attention; you’re talking to them after all, not to your presenting screen. Remember to cover every part of the room and not stare at only one or two; that’s pretty weird and awkward…, right?

#2. Body Languages

You can make this non-verbal communication to build a deeper connection with your audience. A good, open posture with appropriate hand gestures can give you a confident and persuasive vibe. The more they trust you, the more they focus on your presentation.

#3. Tone of Voice

Your tone of voice matters. Your voice, manner, and language affect the audience’s mood and how people perceive what you’re saying. For example, you shouldn’t make it too casual and playful during a conference or don’t speak too seriously and bombard the participants with technical terms when presenting in a workshop. 

Sometimes, in more informal speeches, add a bit of humour if you can ; it’s relaxing to you and your listeners (don’t try too hard, though 😅).

What are interactive presentation tools?

Interactive presentation tools are software or web-based applications that allow users to create and deliver presentations with interactive elements that engage the audience. These tools provide a range of features and functionalities that enable presenters to create dynamic and engaging presentations that can be customized to meet their specific needs. Key features of interactive presentation tools are to add quizzes, polls, and surveys, to make the presentation more interesting!

Can you make PPT interactive?

Some ways to make a PPT interactive including adding hyperlinks, action buttons, using animations and transitions, interactive quizzes or polls, and also adding videos or audio

Which type of presentation is the most interactive?

Various types of presentations can be made interactive. Still, some types lend themselves more easily to interactivity than others, with the following types, including workshop-style presentations, Q&A sessions, Polls and surveys, Gamified presentations and Interactive multimedia presentations.

A lifelong learner, a traveller and content creator eager to explore the best of both worlds: the real and virtual one full of interactive activities with AhaSlides.

Tips to Engage with Polls & Trivia

More from AhaSlides

13 Hacks to Add Engagement and Interactivity to Your Presentations

It’s a no-brainer as to why a presentation should be engaging. Of course, you wouldn’t want your audience snoozing with eyes open in the middle of your talk. 

Whether you are presenting live or have a presentation embedded in your website, creating an engaging presentation is a must if you want to get your message across. As you might have compelling content, but if you don’t present it right, a lot of it can go unnoticed.

And let’s face it, having an ocean of bored faces in front of you wouldn’t help you as a presenter as well. It will only make you nervous and talk faster to get over with the presentation quickly. 

Engaging your audience isn’t that tough. Adding elements of interaction is all you need (of course, with good relevant content) to keep people hooked to you. We have compiled some sure-shot ways to get it done right. But before that, let’s find out what an interactive presentation is.

What Do You Mean by Interactive Presentation?

As we all know, we learn and retain better by being a part of something rather than being just a watcher. An interactive presentation, unlike a static, gives your audience a chance to get involved in your talk. Your audience might be visual or auditory learners, and adding interactive elements, such as polls, quizzes, chat/discussions, will help you target as many senses as possible to drive engagement in your content. 

Why Should Your Presentation Be Interactive?

There are a lot of benefits you can reap by incorporating interactive elements in your presentation. Let’s find out why you should work on interaction.

a). Build Active Participation

It is easy for us to drift away, and everyone knows about the short attention span. If you don’t involve people, chances are you see them looking at their screens, dozing off, or speaking to neighbors. If that happens, it will negatively impact you as a speaker too. Your presentation should be purposeful and properly staged/structured as if a direct conversation between you and the listener.

b). For Better Retention

Adding different interactive elements will keep your audience constantly alert and engaged with your presentation. They will be active and better remember the content of your presentation. According to research, conversational presentation helps in better retention, with participants reporting the two-way presentation helped them engage more.

c). Helps You Build a Connection with People

If you want to influence people or drive them to take some action, building connections is imperative and the first step in doing so. Your audience needs to connect with you and trust you in some way for some fruitful action eventually. Things like icebreaker games, humor, personal anecdotes, and one-on-one interaction will help you form that connection.

d). Less Workload

It might sound funny to you, but it’s true! When you involve your audience through questions/quizzes or activities, you will share your workload with your audience, where they would also be a part of the presentation, meaning a little less work for you.

e). More Personalized

When you make your presentation interactive, you will also end up making it a little less general by involving individuals in your work. People are likely to be more focussed as they will feel a part of your talk. It will make your presentation more customized and purposeful.

13 Ways to Make Your Presentation Interactive and Engaging

There are different types of presentations with different purposes and goals (informational, inspirational, result-oriented), which influences the tools you can use to make your presentation fun. Pick and mix/match the ones that seem most relevant to your format and make your presentation stand out.

1. Icebreakers are Important

It is essential to build an initial connection whenever you get involved with new people. It creates a sense of ease in the environment and helps people open up to each other for further communication. If you are addressing a small group, you can easily go around and converse with people to create a positive environment. In the case of a larger setting, you can ask people to converse with their neighbors or have them answer questions for you or each other. 

You can also go for fun icebreaker games and activities like asking people their favorites and best work moments, or create polls, etc. Have people prepare a list of topics or information they would like to learn and ask them later if they received what they were expecting out of the talk. 

2. Share Tangibles

People use their auditory and visual senses when they watch and listen to your presentation. You can make the experience more memorable for your audience by targeting more of the senses, like using tangibles to reach their tactile senses.

Anything people can touch or hold will bring them more into your talk. You can hand out material like project reports, print out of slides, prototypes, maps/diagrams, handouts to take notes, etc. Share tangibles with people to incorporate some physical movement/activity in your presentation.

3. Address People by Name

If you have access to people’s names or know your audience, calling them by their names in the presentation works wonders. Addressing people with names might seem simple, but it’s a key strategy emphasized by various coaches in their tips for interactive presentations.

If your meeting isn’t that formal and allows you to have side talks or get input from the audience, you will have no issue calling people names. In the case of formal setup, you can still use the tactic by mentioning things like you received inputs from XYZ person or if you are talking about something that interests a particular person (calling their name).

4. Make Your Presentation a Discussion

It might seem a little more advanced compared to other ways and will require you to have in-depth knowledge of your content. Instead of delivering a one-way presentation, you take on the teaching role by posing relevant questions and giving people a chance to answer. You can move from person to person, adding your comments and insights to the responses and helping them have a better understanding. It will help people be engaged with your content and make the talk interactive . However, be comfortable enough with the topic at hand, on stage, and with managing the roomful of people for it to work.

5. Include Live Quizzes, Q/A, Polls, and Surveys

Host quizzes, Q&A rounds , live polls, surveys, etc., to help your audience interact with you. Learn about their opinion through the show of hands or divide them into groups for discussions. Organize Q&A rounds after every few slides where you can ask people what they think or if they have doubts. You can also enquire if they got to learn what they had expected through this interaction (an activity you got done in the icebreaking part of your presentation). 

Interactive quizzes will help you improve your presentation by getting to gauge the knowledge your audience has and how well they can grasp the information you are relaying. Reward people to help them be more proactive and take part.

6. Go for an Immersive Experience

Incorporating elements that add a visual story or something that enables people to better relate to your words will enhance engagement in your content.

Create an immersive experience by adding elements like music/sound, live performances, walk-in exhibits, etc. You can also show the prototype of your product or demonstrate your service to help people see a clear picture. Bringing props relevant to your content will help people connect to your words.

Include your team members or people from the audience to create a skit or live demo. There are many ways to create an immersive experience. Think of ways in which you can use animations, GIFs, video clips, etc., to heighten the experience.

For instance, Bill Gates, in one of his Ted talks on mosquitos and malaria, released a swarm of live mosquitos in the audience. Scary? Yes. But it did catch a lot of eyeballs.

7. Share Your Presentation

One great way to boost interaction would be to give people more control by including them in your presentation. Share your presentation with the audience so they can navigate as and when they want. It will enable them to like or speak on anything while you deliver the presentation. People can view the slides on their smartphones and be a part for the entire duration. 

It will unarguably give your audience a sense of autonomy and participation and keep you alert and engaged as a speaker, not going ahead with the linear flow of the presentation.

8. Include Humor in Your Talk

Humor works everywhere . It’s great as an icebreaker, eases the environment, and engages people with the content. And guess what; pick up some of the best talks and presentations, and you will find most of them feature humor in different degrees. 

You don’t have to go for mindless humor, which doesn’t relate to the subject at hand. Rather, try to find things that are relatable to your topic. For instance, in his Ted Talk, filmmaker Morgan Spurlock asked his audience to name his talk (revealing the title at the end) and used humorous comments throughout the talk supporting his point. 

9. Make Use of Technology 

We use technology for anything and everything now. Making use of it in the presentation will help you up your game considerably. Rather than going for the same everyday slides, you can try a 3D demonstration to engage your audience.

It might seem a little challenging to use due to budget constraints or technical prowess. But these technological innovations are the future now, so it makes sense to incorporate them in your presentation too. 

Pro Tip – It will help you get the visual engagement and interaction you seek and bring newness to your slides (since these technologies are not that common in presentations right now).

10.   Embrace Storytelling

If you want people to really get attentive or retain information in the best way possible, take the help of storytelling . Your audience is likely to remember your data 22 times more if you weave it into a story. Even if your presentation covers a lot of data, facts, and figures, you can still use storytelling, incorporating it into someone’s or your personal anecdote.

Stories tap into people’s emotions, taking them on a journey with the storyteller and creating an immersive experience. Therefore, it is a great tool to involve people in your presentation entirely.

11.   Don’t Go for a Linear Presentation

You can get creative and avoid going linearly in your presentation, i.e., from slide 1 to slide 2. See if your presentation will make sense if you go ahead non-linearly. To make that easy, connect your slides to a table of contents . It will also help you and your viewers navigate the presentation. Rather than going through slides one by one, viewers can choose which part they want to see and when.

Also, while talking, it will help you sense the environment and improvise accordingly (like which part to be delivered first and in what sequence). So, try to create slides with a link to each other.

12.   Use Hashtags

Everyone uses social media to connect with people. If you are speaking at an event that already has a brand hashtag, you can encourage people to comment on social media using the hashtag. In case of a standalone presentation, create your hashtag to create a thread on social media, involving more and more people.

Using hashtags for your talk will help people connect later and spread it further to other connections (helping to popularize your content). People can also post bits and parts of your presentation online using the hashtag or pose questions throughout the presentation or later on. What’s more, with hashtags, you can also create competitions (online) on relevant websites.

13.   Use Interactive Transitions and Animations

Using animations and interactive transitions is great for evoking curiosity in the content. You can incorporate animations and transitions in a lot of exciting ways, like animating different elements of your slide or creating seamless transitions by elements sliding in on their own on each slide. Add fun elements to your facts and figures (graphs, charts) by adding animation.

However, remember to be consistent and not clutter your presentation by going for different animations and transitions. Creating a similar look and feel in your slides is important for a coherent and professional presentation.

It is essential to have a properly structured presentation with quality, relevant content. But that is not enough to turn your slides into memorable ones. For that, you need to include factors that keep people interested throughout and not lose focus and interest. You can include the factors mentioned above to add fun and engagement to your slides. Incorporate methods that help you interact with your audience (as much as you can) with excellent content, and you are all set to steal the show.

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A division of bold new directions training, 5 tips for including interaction in your presentation.

Giving a presentation is enough to make just about anyone nervous and nervous speakers will do anything to avoid interacting directly with the audience.  They almost act as if there is a barrier between them and the audience.  However, audience interaction is the key to giving a compelling presentation.  The best speakers know how to connect with their audience, but this can be quite a challenge for most people.  Nonetheless, audience-centered presentations are more dynamic and will captivate the attention of everyone present. It’s time to tear down the wall and build a meaningful rapport with your audience.  Here are a few tips for successful audience interaction during your next presentation.

Lead a Q&A Session

One of the easiest and most popular ways to engage your audience is to lead a Q&A session.  When it comes to presentations, most of us are used to be talked to rather than having the opportunity to talk ourselves.  This can be a great way to open your presentation and ask the audience what they want to get out of the presentation.  It can also be used in the middle or at the end of a presentation to give audience members the chance to ask questions about something you spoke about during the presentation.  Questions are a great way to open up the floor for discussion and interact with your audience.

Poll Your Audience

What if you could find out what your audience is thinking while you’re giving your presentation?  You could use this information to spark discussion or to tweak your presentation as you go.  Polling the audience allows you to learn more about them and gives them a chance to share their opinion.  You could do this a couple of ways.  You could do it by simply asking for a show of hands or you could go with a super tech savvy approach by using a tool called DirectPoll.  This tool allows you to create a quick poll that your audience can access from their mobile device.  The results can be displayed on the presentation screen and you can use the results to tailor your presentation.  A poll is a great way to interact with the audience and show them that you care about their opinions.

Break Into Small Groups

Countless studies have shown that being asked to participate in a presentation makes listeners more interested and engaged.  One way to do this is by asking listeners to divide into small groups.  People actually enjoy getting the opportunity to talk with those sitting around them and this brings some variety to the presentation.  You can give the small groups a few questions to discuss and report or you can also turn it into a game by giving each team a task.  Either way, it will capture the attention of your audience while deepening their learning.

Get People Moving

When most people think about attending a presentation, they think about sitting.  That’s why incorporating physical activity makes your presentation engaging.  Even simple movements like asking for a show of hands or asking audience members to stand up and sit down to show agreement can get audience reenergized.  It can even be effective to have people pick up and change seats.  For example, you could ask a question such as, “Where would you most like to travel: the beach or the mountains?†and group people together who have the same answer.  Find a question that is relative to your presentation and use it as a tool to get audience members moving.

Include Audience Members in Your Presentation

We have all attended a show or concert where a random audience member got pulled on stage to be part of the show.  Even if you weren’t the one who was chosen, it was captivating to know that someone just like you was being pulled into the show.  It’s interesting, entertaining, and a great way to captivate audiences.  Finding a creative way to interact with audience members will make your presentation more dynamic and certainly more memorable.

How to Make an Interactive PowerPoint in 3 Easy Steps

Why Interactivity?

It's important for engagement. The more you allow your audience to participate and listen to them, the more they'll be engaged with your material and listen to you, right back.

How to go from PowerPoint to Interactive Slide Deck

To make any PowerPoint deck interactive, you can use Slides With Friends to give prompts and get responses from your audience, while still using the slides you created in PowerPoint. So whether you're looking to run a live poll of your conference audience, do an icebreaker before you start, build a wordcloud during your talk, or just get feedback from your audience members, this is the tool for you.

It's easy to do!

Step 1 - Get this interactive deck

To copy, you'll first need to create an account on Slides With Friends by clicking "Create free account". You can create the account and copy the deck for free, but the PowerPoint upload itself is a premium feature.

Once you've got an account, copy this sample deck: Interactive PowerPoint Deck Template . It's a template that you can add your own PowerPoint slides into. We'll walk you through how to customize it for your own slides!

Step 2 - Add your PPT slides to your deck

Note, to upload your PowerPoint, you'll need an upgraded account first. Here's details on our pricing and how to upgrade to unlock this premium feature.

Complete your PowerPoint deck, save it, then add it to the deck you copied! Here's how:

• Head to your account and open the sample deck you copied
• Click "Import" to upload your .ppt, .pptx, or .pdf slide deck presentation.
• Select "replace" — this will remove the sample imported slides, and replace them with your own.
• Drag your file into the upload box. The fewer slides you have, the quicker it will be to upload.

Step 3 - Add interactions

Once you've got your PPT slides in your presentation, you can now add the interactive portions.

Each interaction is added like a new slide to your deck. So for instance, if you want to add a Poll question to a PPT slide, this would be a new slide that you would place directly after your static PowerPoint slide.

Add these interactions by opening the "+" button in the top menu, and selecting what type of interactive slide you want to add. Here are the options of all the interaction types you can add:

‍ Multiple Choice Question: A slide that asks a question and supplies a set of answers that your players can choose between. You can show who guessed what, and the correct answer(s), optionally after each question. These slides are best for surveys, trivia questions, quizzes, polls, and anywhere else there are a fixed set of responses.

Text answer question:   A slide that asks a question but doesn't give answer options to choose from, instead your audience types their response. The system will determine if a response is correct or incorrect by comparing it to the answer(s) you have input.

User Vote: An Apples to Apples or Cards Against Humanity style interaction. Give a prompt or ask a question, and players send in responses. Then they can vote for their favorite, from all the other player's responses.

Answer roundup: If you've hidden the correct answers from the any previous multiple choice or text answer questions, you can display them all in a row with this slide.

Score summary: Show the leaderboard! Display those with the highest scores so far. You can set how many players to show in a row.

Pass the mic: Display each participant's avatar, one at a time in a random order, to give them a chance to speak. You can set how many players you'd like to go through — from everyone in the game to just one person.

Picture share: Players can upload or take images with their phones. The slide will then show a however many images you selected that it display, in random order, one at a time. Think of it like photo show & tell.

Wordcloud: Players can send a word or short phrase, and it will pop up on your display screen. They can tap on words from others to make those words larger. The end effect is a cloud of words with the most popular words appearing larger.

Rating: Allow participants to select from a set of pre-determined rating options, from Likert scores, to agree / disagree, to Emoji faces.

Poll slide: Allow participants to select from up to 6 answer options that you've type in. Then display the responses in a graph, donut chart, or by player name.

Last thing — Try it out!

It's time to see how everything works!

Start an event and join in yourself using your phone to scan the QR code. You'll be able to see how the event will look to your players, how your PPT slides look on the phone, and send responses to see how everything works.

Watch the video for an in-depth tutorial:

You can watch the video, or simply follow the steps below.

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10 ways to interact with audience members while you present

Presentation expert Clif Atkinson tells a great story about a 2009 education conference where two speakers got very different reactions from their audiences. The first speaker started off with interactive exercises, he was entertaining, and overall, he was a hit. The second speaker launched in with a more traditional PowerPoint presentation , and he … didn’t go over quite so well.

In fact, while he presented, bored attendees started a “backchannel” on Twitter. They critiqued his slides, his content, and his delivery until finally, someone suggested a t-shirt. By the end of the keynote, you know exactly what happened: a t-shirt was made and for sale on CafePress.

All this to say that audience participation isn’t always a good thing. What you’re aiming for isn’t just participation for the sake of participation, but an interaction that gets the audience closer to embracing your ideas.

You want to keep them engaged, on their toes, and show them that you value and want to connect with them. To that end, we offer you these 10 positive ways to interact with audience members to foster engagement and participation.

10 audience engagement examples to keep interaction up to

Audience engagement example #1.

Ask a series of “raise your hand if… ” questions. The first simple thing to try is to ask your audience a series of questions. Each question should demand a gradually-more-difficult response throughout your presentation.

Within the first 60 seconds of a presentation, I like to ask the audience a simple question about themselves — then get them to respond by raising their hands. (“Raise your hand if you’ve ever…”)

Why do this so early? A  recent study on attention span during lectures showed that the first lapses in listener attention tend to happen within the first minute of the talk. So, by asking a question like this right away, you spark an interaction and establish a small, immediate connection.

If they’re willing to raise their hand at the beginning of a talk (and answer a poll, agree to a premise, etc.), they might be more willing to follow your call-to-action by the end of your presentation.

Audience engagement example #2

Tell a joke. Another simple way that you can forge a connection at the beginning of your presentation is by telling a joke. A joke is, in itself, a smart way to interact with audience members since it’s a natural back and forth. It either asks the audience to answer a question (Why did the chicken cross the road?), or it elicits laughter (hopefully).

A  study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology proved that using humor improves peoples’ perception of you in a professional setting. So try making your listeners laugh, and they’ll think even more highly of you from the get-go. (Note: joke-telling requires subtlety; get lots of feedback on your joke-telling abilities before trying it in front of an audience. Seriously! Telling a bad joke, or even a good joke badly, is a great way to lose your audience, too.)

Audience engagement example #3

Use a polling tool. Polls are one of the best ways to interact with audience members. They cause people to think critically about what they hear and urge them to share their own opinions and expertise. Aside from the typical hand-raising poll, technology can help here. Put a question on the screen, then ask people to respond via their smartphone or laptop.

There are many polling tools out there that you can use to collect responses, including  Polleverywhere.com , which is a popular app that can collect and broadcast poll results in real-time.

Audience engagement example #4

Turn to X (formerly Twitter). I’ve always been a fan of the power of Twitter, especially when it comes to boosting audience engagement during a presentation or event. Sure, it can be used to design a t-shirt about your boring talk. But better yet, you can use it to interact with audience members who are responding to your ideas in real time.

One of the simplest techniques is to create a unique hashtag for your talk. Ask them to send tweets with that hashtag, and make it easy for them by keeping your hashtag visible during your talk. You can even use a tool like  Everwall to easily project what people are tweeting about your talk onto a screen in front of them.

Be strategic though, about when and how often you display Tweets. You don’t want to distract people. Choose a strategic moment in the talk when you can step aside and let the opinions of the audience speak for themselves. Or, in a day packed with presentations, use Twitter in between talks to help boost audience participation.

Displaying live content from Twitter works twice as hard as other interaction techniques. It encourages listeners to grapple with what they’re hearing during a talk (and to wait and see their own tweet up on the stage), and the tweeted content is available to the entire internet. This means that you can increase the reach of your event (organically!) beyond just the people who are in the room.

Audience engagement example #5

Get the slides in peoples’ hands. Presentation slides  help you communicate your ideas clearly, but they can also get people to participate while you speak. Give people a closer look at slides by using a tool that can bring those slides directly into their hands. You can use a tool like a Slidedo c™ to create visually-digestible versions of your slides for your audience in advance.

Another way to help people engage more with your slides is to simply invite them to snap a photo. Pause a moment, then say, “Okay, everyone, take out your smartphones. This is the slide you want to take home with you.” Not only do they get a nice visual takeaway, but you also get another moment to do a call-and-response with your audience.

Audience engagement example #6

Prop it up. Physical, tangible props or visual aids are another one of the easiest ways to interact with audience members while you present. You can use a prop onstage to demonstrate ideas, or you can pass it around the audience so that they can engage with it. Anything tangible increases the number of senses engaged and boosts your audience’s attention.

One example of a great speech that uses a prop is Jill Bolte Taylor’s TED Talk “My Stroke of Insight” in which Taylor used a human brain model as a prop to explain what happens during a stroke. Many props end up becoming a  S.T.A.R. Moment ™, as well, which adds even more impact.

Audience engagement example #7

Get active. The fact that you’re giving the talk doesn’t mean it has to be one-sided. You can get people to interact with activities. For instance, you can instruct audience members to pair off, then give them 5 minutes to complete an exercise. This exercise could simply be an icebreaker to get to know someone else in the room.

On the other hand, it could be an exercise that helps them develop useful skills you’re trying to impart (i.e. sales techniques, communication strategies, and more). Whatever you ask of them, just remember that each back-and-forth helps you work toward your big ask or call-to-action at the end.

Audience engagement example #8

Get people to repeat information out loud. It may seem like an elementary exercise, but if you want to be memorable and engaging, ask people to repeat key concepts out loud. In a  study on memory , researchers at the University of Montreal found that repeating information boosts a person’s ability to recall that information. So, by asking your audience to repeat key facts and concepts from your talk, you increase the chances they’ll remember it.

Audience engagement example #9

Take questions along the way. Questions make it easy to interact with audience members, yes, but they can also help educate them about your information or idea. Don’t wait until after your talk or for when you can meet one-on-one with audience members to answer their questions.

Designate times within your talk when you collect and answer questions from attendees. You can use a tool like  Slido which allows audience members to submit questions in real time. Then you can sort through those questions and answer the ones you deem best or most helpful.

This allows you to create more of a curated Q&A experience, instead of relying on strong, high-quality questions from your audience that also happen to reinforce your main message. Collecting them through an app this way allows you to have some quality control, as well.

Audience engagement example #10

Create an interactive experience. You can take action a step further — with interaction. Your goal here is to make the audience feel like they are participating in something. Have them move around the room. When you create a space that doesn’t feel like an auditorium or allow to physically interact with the audience, it feels like something is happening to them.

One great interactive talk I attended was about the effects of war on the availability of different spices in certain regions of the world. Stapled to the program for the show were two small plastic envelopes. In each envelope was a flavored marshmallow, labeled A and B.

At the right moment in the presentation, the presenter asked everyone to eat marshmallow A, then compare it to the taste of marshmallow B. And in that moment, everyone in that room shared the same flavor experiences (and a moment of realization about one of the many indirect costs of war).

How to engage an audience in any scenario

At the end of the day, your audience is going to participate in your talk one way or another. You want to be sure to control the nature of that participation by being smart about the ways you interact with audience members while you present.

If you try out some of the ways to interact with audience members discussed above, you can be pretty sure that no one will be bored enough to create a t-shirt about how boring you are. You may even end up with an audience who feels moved to make a t-shirt about how engaging you are – but who can’t do it because they are just so busy participating in your fascinating talk.

For more tips on keeping engagement high in your next presentation, take our Resonate® workshop . It’s designed to help you structure your presentation in a persuasive and engaging manner naturally. Get equipped with the course, today!

This article was originally published on September 23, 2020. It has been updated in July 2024 for relevancy.

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What is Conversational Presenting and Why You Should Give It a Try

Presentations are far from being dead.

With 30 million PowerPoint presentations delivered every single day, they’re doing better than ever.

But the fact is that many of these presentations are broken. They just don’t work.

Many blame it on “Death by PowerPoint”, but it’s not about the tool.

It’s about the way we deliver information.

We are stuck in a century-old, passive style of one-way information broadcast. And that format simply doesn’t comply with the 21st century.

The numbers speak for themselves: According to Prezi’s recent research, only 4% of people said that they find linear, one-way presentations engaging and memorable.

Alarming number. Yet, presenters around the world still follow the status quo because there seem to be no immediate consequences for not changing it.

But what about the $37 billion wasted yearly on ineffective meetings, largely due to ineffective presentations? Or, the 58% of content forgotten, in just 20 minutes into the presentation?

The stats have it that poor presentations do translate into real consequences.

Now let’s take a look at how to fix them.

What is Conversational Presenting?

Here comes the only definition in this article.

Conversational presenting is about delivering a presentation that gives your audience multiple opportunities for structured interaction.

This is what it means in reality.

Let’s think about a traditional presentation for a moment. What words come to your mind?

We asked this question to people during dozens of our presentations.

And this is what we got. Each time.

Then we asked our audience what word comes to their minds when they think of an impactful presentation?

The responses flowed in and this was the result:

Conversational presenting is ultimately about making your presentations everything that’s on the second word cloud .

Interactive, engaging, fun. But above all, impactful.

How is Conversational Presenting different?

At its core, Conversational Presenting does not differ much from a presentation format that you know – you still deliver your content.

But unlike traditional presentations, Conversational Presenting brings another element into the equation: Interaction .

Adding interactive activities and facilitation techniques into your flow will help you break the one-way content stream into bite-size pieces.

In practice, it’s about creating a short break for structured interaction after each chunk of content and allowing your participants to think about and respond to your talk.

There are various tech-based and non-tech-based interactive activities and facilitation techniques you can leverage, but more on that later.

Let’s take a closer look at how conversational presentation differs from a traditional presentation format.

Traditional presentation

• Speaker talks one-way with minimal breaks
• Participants are locked in to listen passively
• Speaker questions are rhetorical and don’t invite participation
• When participants’ attention shifts, it is rarely regained
• Participant-to-participant discussions are not created

Conversational presentation

• Speaker talks with frequent breaks to receive feedback from the audience
• Participants are encouraged to participate and share their views
• Speaker questions are responded to by show of hands or voting on live polls
• As attention drops, the speaker uses an interactive activity to regain it
• Speaker creates a space for people to have a discussion

Who is Conversational Presenting for?

You can make use of Conversational Presenting in various different situations.

You may be an educator, looking to maintain your students’ attention. Or, you may be a professional speaker, whose goal is to connect with your audience and make your speech more powerful.

Let’s break down the four main use cases and see to what end you can leverage Conversational Presenting strategies.

1. Company meetings & Team meetings

If you’re a manager or a leader who runs meetings on a regular basis, you’ve surely contemplated ways to make sure your gatherings don’t make the infamous stats of ineffective meetings. See what Conversational Presenting can do for you:

• Increase meeting efficiency
• Make sure the team get the message
• Communicate more transparently with the team
• Give a safe space for your team to give feedback
• Re-engage the team during a lengthy meeting

Conversational Presenting in real life: During Slido’s monthly all-hands meetings, our CEO, Peter Komornik, likes to re-engage our teammates by sparking discussions in the room. For example, he asks our colleagues to turn to their partner and discuss the biggest highlights of the last month. He then encourages us to submit our highlights into Slido to see what others have picked. He often asks several people in the audience to share the reason why this particular thing means a lot to them.

2. Conferences

You may only have a few speaking gigs spaced out during the year, but why not make the most of the opportunity and give a speech that your audience will remember. Employ Conversational Presenting methods to:

• Make your presentations stand out
• Engage your audience
• Open conversations with your attendees
• Bring an entertaining element to your talks

Conversational Presenting in real life: Mark Cooper, CEO of IACC, used a series of five live polls to make the delivery of the report on ‘Meeting Room of the Future’ more engaging. He spaced out polls every 10 minutes to hear audience feedback on the findings and to look at where the industry is going. Midway through, he also created a roundtable discussion on the topic ‘What do you think a venue focused on meetings will look like in 5 years?’, to get people to connect and share ideas.

3. Lectures & classes

If you’re in the EDU sector, you probably know best how hard it is to make every presentation interesting and inspiring. Conversational Presenting can arm you with a toolkit to:

• Maintain your students’ attention
• Maximize the learning during your class
• Check for student understanding
• Create a safe space for discussions
• Receive your students’ instant feedback
• Add some fun into your classes

Conversational Presenting in real life: Brian McFee, Assistant Professor at NYU, uses Slido to run a problem-solving exercise every 10-15 minutes of his lecture. First, he lets each student work on it individually and submit the answers into Slido. Then, he poses the same question, but this time, he asks students to work on the problem in pairs. Seeing the real-time answers from students allows him to see if students understand the content he’s presenting, and uncover any weak spots.

Related read: Free Ebook: How to Improve Conversation in Your Classroom

4. Training sessions & workshops

Being a trainer, you’ve probably never stopped looking for ideas to make your training as valuable as possible for your participants. Conversational Presenting can offer you a helping hand there to:

• Make your training more participatory
• Maximize the value of the time spent together
• Encourage people to take learning into their own hands
• Create space for people to put theory into practice

Conversational Presenting in real life: During the 2-day leadership workshop, Lukas Bakos, managing director at Maxman Consultants, split the group into pairs and ask everyone to write their TOP 10 on a certain topic for each round (topics ranged from the 10 most visited sites according to Lonely Planet, to the 10 best-selling cars in history). He spaced out the rounds after breaks throughout the day, so the group had an incentive to get back to the room on time.

How do you give a Conversational Presentation?

Now, to the fun part. How do you actually make your next presentation engaging and conversational? 

Don’t worry, it’s not rocket science. With the right toolkit and some skill in facilitation, you can start giving presentations that your audience will love as quick as lightning.

Learn the basics of Conversational Presenting in the article below.

Start with Conversational Presenting

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11 Engaging Ways To Interact With The Audience

Hrideep barot.

• Body Language & Delivery , Presentation

While delivering a speech, have you ever glanced at the audience to see their reaction to what you’ve said, only to realize that there is no reaction at all because almost everybody has zoned out? Alternatively, have you ever found yourself sitting in the audience, daydreaming your way through an incredibly boring speech?

In both of these cases, it wasn’t the audience but the speaker who was responsible for the audience’s lack of attention.

That’s because it’s the speaker’s responsibility to interact with the audience, and to deliver a speech that’s not just informative but also engaging.

And avoiding–sometimes downright shaking off–this onus is a mistake that many, many speakers make. Often at the cost of the success of their own speech.

Audience Participation is active response by an audience to a live show or broadcast.

Grabbing and holding onto the audience’s attention is not an easy fear. However, it’s not impossible either.

If you don’t want crickets from the audience the next time you deliver a speech, it’s important to not deliver crickets from your end too. That is, don’t just dive into your speech and refuse to resurface from it. Instead, you need to interact with your audience. You don’t have to talk at them. You’ve got to talk to them. And since talking is a two-way process, you want to hear their response too.

Interacting with the audience might sound difficult, but it’s not, really.

There are many engaging ways of interacting with the audience, like playing games, having live Q & A sessions, getting them to join you on the stage, using props, and organizing Give-Aways!

The strategies you chose depend on the overall goal as well as the duration of your speech. Also, you need to do some advance preparation by researching your audience and what it’s going to be primarily composed of.

But first, why should you interact with the audience?

Importance Of Interacting And Connecting With The Audience

There are many reasons why it’s absolutely imperative for a speaker to interact with their audience. One of the primary reasons is that speeches often last for a very long time.  Interacting with the audience gives them a reprieve from listening, and offers them an opportunity to speak out. This makes them feel more involved with and connected to the event and with you i.e the speaker.

 The interaction will also work to make your talk memorable, and make the audience connect with you. If the audience has fun and feels a kinship with you, they will make conscious attempts to pay attention to your speech and engage with you. Also, it’s more likely they will be drawn in to hear you speak again in the future.

Another reason why it’s important to interact with the audience is because audience’s attention span is limited. If you don’t successfully keep them engaged, then sooner or later, they will start fiddling with their phones or simply zone out. Yikes!

Engaging Ways To Interact With The Audience

Now that you know the importance of audience interaction, let’s move onto the next step: how to interact with the audience.

1. Tell A Story…And Ask Them To Guess The End 

Stories are a necessary ingredient in most public speeches. This is because they lend a personal note to the talk, and make the experience more memorable for the attendees. However, one way of taking storytelling up a level is to involve your audience in it. A great way of doing that is by asking your audience what you think will happen next.

This will make your audience think and even analyze what you’re saying. This renewed attention is likely to last for longer than the duration of your story and to spill into your general talk, as well.

Even better: ask your audience what happens in the end, but don’t immediately tell them if they’re right. Hold onto the ending for a while, and weave in the answer where you feel it fits better during the rest of your talk. For instance, when you feel like you’re beginning to lose their interest again–throw in that ending!

The following is a great example of how you can use storytelling to ramp up your presentation! Notice the speaker’s body-language, their story selection, as well as the delivery of the same. 

2. Ask Them Questions

Another great way to make your presentation interactive is by asking your audience questions. Like guessing what happens next in a story, this will pique their interest, and get those analytical wheels in their head turning.

You could directly ask an audience member a question. Or, you could request the audience to answer with a show of hands. There are many ways of going about this. Just make sure that you prepare your questions beforehand.

Here’s an excellent way through which you can incorporate questions to ask your audience! Notice how the audience interaction improves with the speaker actively asking them questions.

3. Use Props!

Another excellent way of engaging your audience is by using props. Props not only make the presentation more fun and visually appealing, but if used right, will also make it easier for the audience to understand your message.

However, one thing to keep in mind before using props to spruce up your presentation is to keep in mind that the prop shouldn’t just be an added accessory. It’s not just there to be an entertaining element. Don’t choose a prop that seems redundant.

Rather, choose a prop that drives forward the point you’re trying to make. There are many props that you can use: a chair, a doll, a stick, a flower…Anything can be turned into a prop!

Below is an excellent example of how you can effectively use props to ramp up your presentation! Keep an eye on the speaker’s use of prop, and the way they use it to make the presentation better!

4. Play A Quiz!

Another way to engage your audience more deeply in your presentation is by quizzing them!

If you wish to quiz the audience to get an idea how of how familiar they are with the topic, you can add the quiz at the beginning of your speech. This can be a great bonding experience for them. Alternatively, you could add the quiz somewhere in the middle of your presentation, when you feel like the audience’s attention has begun wandering to other things.

Like the props, make sure that the quiz is relevant to the topic at hand. Also, keep in mind to prepare the questions beforehand. If you don’t want to hand out actual papers to the audience, you could have them directed to a website that they can use to solve the quiz on their phones.

Following is a how to on making an interactive quiz using PowerPoint! You can use the format in the video. Alternatively, you could take inspiration from it and come up with your own idea or go the other way and use a quiz website!

5. Invite Them To Join You On The Stage! 

If you want to take the audience’s involvement in your speech to the next level, you could invite them to the spot traditionally thought to be reserved for the speaker: the stage.

This is an excellent way of adding a kick of anticipation to your speech.

There are many ways in which you could do this. You could ask for volunteers, and then invite them on stage for an activity or game. Or, you could ask if anyone would like to add something to what you’ve just said, or talk about their experience, and hand over the mic to them!

6. Alternatively…YOU Get Off The Stage!

If you aren’t comfortable inviting people on stage, you could go the other way and step off of it yourself.

This is an amazing opportunity to directly interact with the audience and to make them feel like you’re one of them. Direct, face-to-face interactions with the audience members are a great, great way of making your speech memorable. Not just this, but the increased proximity adds that personal touch to the speech that so many speeches lack.

So, next time you’re delivering a speech, don’t be scared to push past the boundaries of the stage!

7. Get Them Moving!

Having to sit still for prolonged periods of time is a doorway to boredom. And boredom is what makes the audience tune out your awesome speech.

So, if you feel like you’ve spoken for a long time without giving your audience a break, get them moving! You could do this by making them play a game. Or, you could simply request them to stand and do a couple of fun exercises like clapping their hands or jumping!

Not only will it increase the overall energy level in the room, but it might also successfully draw out that sought-after burst of laughter from the audience!

Ellen DeGeneres is known for her audience interaction! Here’s a clip of how she keeps her audience moving! You can take inspiration from her approach to improve your audience’s engagement and get them moving!

8. Play Games With Them!

Who doesn’t like a good game, right? Especially if it’s a two-hour presentation, games are a great way of refreshing your audience and giving them a break from the monotony of listening.

Also, games don’t necessarily have to be just for fun and frolics. You can customize a game that actually adds to your topic. For example, you could use live polls or have a live Q & A on a website. You could also have an impromptu debate competition to give them a chance to tell what they think about the topic.

9. Get Them To Tweet

Gone are the days when cellphones were a luxury–or a distant dream. Today, anybody and everybody have a cellphone in their pocket. Although the general goal is to keep the audience’s attention off of the cellphone and focused on your presentation, there are ways in which you can use to your advantage the underlying human instinct of fingers twitching towards phone screens.

One way of doing this is by using Twitter. You can have a unique hashtag for your talk, and encourage the audience to tweet their questions, suggestions, or ideas on it. Then, address them live! This is an excellent way of engaging people who are shy or simply don’t wish to speak up.

10. Invite An Expert Panel

An expert panel is a great way of piquing your audience’s interest. Inviting guest speakers also gives the audience a break from having to listen to the same speaker for long stretches of time, and also makes it a more educational experience.

However, make sure that the speakers are relevant to and well-versed with the topic at hand. You could ask the audience to prepare any questions that they’d like to ask the speakers in advance. This will keep them interested and engaged throughout. Also, having distinguished speakers will improve the attention level as well as anticipation for your event!

Following is an excellent expert panel discussion that shows how it can improve audience’s interest during a speech! As you watch, try understanding why particular experts were invited to the panel. You can use the information to invite a panel to your discussion, depending on the topic at hand.

11. Incorporate Giveaways And Gifts!

Giveaways are a great, great way to increase your audience’s excitement levels. After all, who doesn’t like to win something, right? You could have a prize for a game, or simply give a small token of your appreciation to the audience at the end of your speech.

The giveaway doesn’t necessarily have to be something grandiose either! In a room full of people, the chance of winning even a small gift will work to boost anticipation–and competition! Also, gifts can also be branded to work as a Brand Goodwill, which will work to promote your company!

Need more tips for how to interact with the audience? Check out our article on Interactive Presentations: 7 Foolproof Ways To Engage The Audience!

12. Adding Augmented Reality

Another excellent way of getting the audience up and engaged is by using augmented reality. Virtual event planning is in high demand, and while the cost might be a little steep, it definitely pays off. That’s because AR is slowly seeping into all aspects of our life, and events are no exception! 

AR is an excellent way to visually engage the audience. Not only this but its relative “newness”, when compared to the other items on this list, make it a novel and memorable audience experience. It also boosts audience interaction and makes the event more lively and fun. 

So, if you can work through the tech and cost required, make sure to use it in your next speech!

Here is an example of how augmented reality can be employed to take your presentation’s visual engagement to another level! As you watch, keep a careful eye on the speaker as well as how they use AR to draw in their audience.

Here is an example of augmented reality use in a presentation. As you watch the video, notice the way in which the speaker employs the technology and drives forth his point

13. Introduce A Fireside Chat

Fireside chat are another great way to boost your audience’s involvement. Fireside chats are an excellent alternative to traditional Q & A sessions and speeches. So what’s a Fireside Chat?  Basically, a Fireside Chat is an informal conversation between a presentation moderator and the audience. The concept has evolved into a two-way debate and has been popularized by tech startup community events like TechFire and StartUp Grind. 

Fireside Chat are an excellent way to glean the audience’s insight in a first-hand manner. If done successfully, they can make the speech or presentation a wholesome, interactive and unforgettable experience. 

The following video demonstrates how having a Fireside Chat can boost the audience’s overall experience and also make it a better experience for the speaker. As you see it, keep a lookout on both: the audience as well as the moderators and how they both interact with each other. 

The following video demonstrates how having a Fireside Chat can boost the audience’s overall experience and also make it a better experience for the speaker. As you see it, keep a lookout on both: the audience as well as the moderators and how they both interact with each other.

14. Using Live Barometers

Live Barometers are an excellent method to not only engage the audience but also to get their insight into important parts of the presentation. Live Barometers, also called body voting, involves the moderator introducing a statement to the audience. Say, something like, “The Glass Ceiling Doesn’t Exist.” 

Next, the audience members move either left or right depending on what they feel about the statement. The degree to which they move depends on how much they agree/disagree with the statement.

Next, the moderator can ramp up the interaction by asking people why they feel a certain way about the presentation. Audience members can also debate with each other. If, by the end of the session, someone’s opinion alters, they can move along the two extremes! 

Here’s an excellent example of how you can incorporate live Barometers in your speech to make it more engaging & how you can frame your questions for the audience. 

Here’s an excellent example of how you can incorporate live Barometers in your speech to make it more engaging & how you can frame your questions for the audience.

15. Gamefying The Presentation 

If you don’t want the audience to be physically moving while playing a game, you could also have them play virtual games. Virtual games not only add a dose of fun, but they are also more feasible as not all members are required to physically move, which can be a barrier if you have limited space.

There are many different games that you can get the audience to play. Polls are one example. You could also have a live quiz set up for the audience. You could also have a trivia–or even play charades! 

16. Using Videos 

Using Videos in your presentation to increase audience’s interest might sound like overused advice, however, it’s overemphasized for a reason. Videos are an excellent, cost-effective way to add a dose of creativity to the presentation.

If you’re on a tight budget or have time constraints that make it difficult to be more creative with your involvement tactics, sticking to the basics is a great way to not totally neglecting it. Videos provide a reprieve from the monotony of a slideshow, and if your lineup is creative and novel, videos can work just as well as the other elements mentioned above! 

Understanding The Learning Pattern Of Your Audience 

If you want to have an out-of-the-ordinary and personalized strategy to ramp up your audience’s engagement, figuring out their learning pattern well in advance is a great way to go! 

We’ve written extensively on this topic here 6 Types of Learners (And How to Speak Them for Maximum Impact) . But you can read on to get the gist…

Broadly speaking, people’s learning types are as follows: 

Here is a more in-depth explanation of how you can use the audience’s learning pattern to make your presentation more interactive:

Visual/ Spatial Learners

Visual Learners gain information through visualizing relationships and ideas. They learn from essays, charts, diagrams, maps, pictures, etc. i.e through a variety of visual elements.

How To Engage Them: If you wish to engage them, ramp up your use of the above-mentioned elements in your presentation, and also use videos, games, props, and Augmented Reality! 

Solitary Learners

Solitary or interpersonal learners prefer learning alone, as opposed to learning with other people or a crowd. They retain information best when they’re doing it by themselves, rather than when they have company.

How To Engage Them: While it’s not possible to be physically alone during a jam-packed presentation, you can use their individualized temperament by employing interactive methods that require them to work alone like quizzes, using Twitter, having a one-on-one discussion by inviting them on stage, having individual giveaways, etc. 

Kinesthetic Learners

As the name itself explains, kinesthetic learners have a more hands-on approach to learning, as they learn through the use of their body and experiential learning. They learn through body and hand movements, and by physically manipulating objects in their surroundings.

How To Engage Them: To involve this type of audience, it’s best to use live Barometers, getting them moving, giving physical giveaways, and playing live games. 

Reading/Writing Learners

Writing Learners have a learning pattern that follows putting things into pen-and-paper to glean a better understanding of things. They learn through text perusal, note making, exhaustive research, etc.

How To Engage Them: If you feel that your audience is going to be composed majorly of writing learners, then increase your use of quizzes, questionnaires, and surveys to ramp up their involvement. 

Group/Interpersonal Learners

These types of learners learn best with group collaboration rather than by themselves. They’re the opposite of solitary learners, and work excellent in group settings and with other people.

How To Engage Them : Group discussions, team games, panel discussions, fireside chat, etc. Are great ways of getting them up and involved in your presentation! 

Auditory Learners

Auditory learners, as insinuated by the name, learn best when information is narrated or verbally spoken. Learning, for them, is better done through means like a creative song, or a podcast, or other auditory mediums.

How To Engage Them: If you wish to involve them better in your presentation, then the best way to do so is by using audio stimuli like group discussions, podcasts, videos, live debates, physical and virtual games, etc! 

How Do You Get The Audience To Participate?

You’ve done the research. You’ve done the prep. And so, using every ounce of your courage, you go ahead with your strategy to engage the audience…

…And they don’t respond.

What do you do in this situation?

Do you just give up and move onto the next part of your speech?

Or do you attempt to get them to engage again?

Hint: It’s the second option.

To help you out, here are a few ways using which you can deal with an unresponsive audience:

1. Focus On The Ones Who Are Responsive

When a presentation isn’t going as expected, a lot of us tend to hyper focus on the bad instead of the good. This might make you even more nervous, and cause you to mess up your presentation.

So, instead of focusing on those who aren’t paying attention, try to keep your eyes on the ones that are. Involve them further in your presentation. It will help you plow through the rest of your speech with confidence.

2. Encourage Them To Participate

There are many ways in which you can do this. You could directly ask someone to answer a question. Or, if you prefer a more roundabout way, you could ask the question to the audience in general. It’s important to create an atmosphere that encourages audience participation. Don’t shut down people if you don’t agree with what they’re saying.

Let them speak, and then tell them respectfully where you think they went wrong. Don’t lose your cool if someone asks too many questions or keeps repeating the same question. Also, try and give the audience regular breaks to collect their thoughts and themselves.

3. Change Your Strategy

Another way to get the audience interested is by switching up the format of your speech. While this might seem daunting at first, if you’ve practiced your speech well enough, shuffling things around shouldn’t be that much of a problem.

So, if you’ve just wrapped up a long stretch of talk and feel like you’ve lost the audience and the next part of your speech involves more talk…

Switch it up.

Push ahead that Q/A you’ve saved for the end of the speech.

Or, play that game you were supposed to play halfway through your presentation.

Switch your strategy!

4. Don’t Take It Personally

Another important thing is to not take your audience’s lack of attention personally. Or, even worse: To get offended and let them know you’re taking it personally. There’s nothing worse then losing your cool at the audience, and once you do this, there’s no going back.

Rather than letting it get to you, move on. If you get angry or let your frustration show, it will show the audience that you’re truly not worth their attention. Not to mention you’ll lose the few people who were actually interested in what you had to say–as well as future public speaking opportunities that might’ve come your way from someone watching in the crowd.

5. Make It A Learning Experience

Use what you learned from your experience with an unresponsive audience to prepare for any future instances when your audience might not be as interactive as you’d hoped them to be.

List out where you think you went wrong, what you could’ve done to improve the speech, how the audience reacted to the things you did to refocus their attention, etc.

Next time you’re preparing to deliver a speech in public, prepare in advance. This way, you’ll have a strategy to fall back on if things go south.

Need more tips? Don’t worry! We’ve written article on 5 Ways To Grab An Audience’s Attention When You’re Losing It! Check it out for some more help!

To sum up, keeping the audience interactive and encouraged doesn’t need to be a daunting task. All you need to do is strategize beforehand by sprinkling interactive activities like games, Q & A sessions, give-aways, etc. throughout your presentation, you can keep your audience’s attention piqued. And keep your cool if things don’t go the way you planned: after all, you can always switch things up.

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