Presenter Network 2024
By Caspar Reeves
We arrived at the site in glorious morning sunshine, and after a kafuffle with parking meters we made it inside for registration. The Royal Observatory Greenwich planetarium felt epic, like walking into a cathedral for Astra. There were about 40 guests to the conference, and all were friendly and approachable.
The day started with a keynote speaker from Cardiff university who had a wealth of knowledge about presenting in a general sense. This was followed by three speakers covering the topics of: ‘presenting as a pitch to investors’, ‘presenting to clients of different backgrounds’ and ‘how AI is changing the world of presenting’ (by Dr Claire Malone) the latter being the most impactful.
General points to take away from these talks were:
- Structure your presentation for greatest impact; for example, the hero's journey.
- Use creative visuals or props to improve viewer engagement (e.g. plushy neurone).
- How to answer questions is important; experiment with putting a positive spin on answers (like politicians) to gain a better response from the audience.
- Improve engagement by asking open or generative questions.
- AI is coming and it will radically change the way presenting is done; e.g. news organisations having generative AI to create scripts for avatar presenters constantly pumping out info (a bit Orwellian – eeek!) or personalised AI education software for children.
We got lunch from the pavilion across the road (my sandwich was expensive, but tasty). After lunch we took part in two workshops back-to-back: ‘presenting to adults’ and ‘using humour in presentations’. Both were interesting, using structure, emotional connection and storytelling to improve audience impact. In the comedy workshop we watched different comedy skits to see what made things funny and how we could apply that to our own presenting. The workshops were only 30 minutes each so went quite rapidly.
After this we went downstairs to network. Ellie connected with a presenter from We the Curious, and we exchanged details for potential future collaboration. All in all, there were some good take home messages and techniques to add to our shows. We are excited to try them out! It was a long day especially fighting through London traffic, but apart from that it was a great day.
