10. Measuring Success

Decide how you will measure the success of your presentation

The final step in the Extreme Presentation™ method is to measure the success of your presentation. At one level, the success or failure of your presentation should be obvious rather quickly – either your audience did what you asked them to do, or they did not. Informally, another measure of success is to observe the quality of the discussion that accompanied or followed your presentation.  Success is often indicated by your audience starting to work out the details of what you are proposing, right during your presentation.

In addition, you may want to be more deliberate in how you measure success. You have already taken the most important step in measuring your presentation success, and that was back in step 2, where you wrote clear and specific objectives for how you want your audience to change what they are thinking and doing with respect to your subject.  To measure success, you want to know if you have achieved these objectives. A simple way to do this is to inform your audience at the end of the presentation that you would like their feedback on the presentation and will be sending them a very brief (2-4 questions) survey via email.

Resources

See Advanced Presentations by Design (p. 142-143) for more information on measuring presentation success.