Public-speaking coach Haritosh Srivastav shows how to get your audience to stay engaged: ask them to choose between a boring slide deck and an interactive format with questions and activities. Once they pick interaction, they're committed to paying attention.
I use this technique for my presentation and it works almost every single time. So as a public speaking coach, mentor, and storyteller, I get opportunity and invited to speak at multiple places. And yes, it does involve PowerPoint, etc. And at the start of my presentation, I generally ask that there are two ways to do this presentation. One is the corporate style presentation where I will run through 250 slides and bore you to death. Or the other way is we have more interaction, we ask questions, we understand, and we have activities. Can you guess what everybody wants? Yes, option number 2. What does this do is it gets the buy-in from audience because then I can keep them accountable that, hey, you said you are going to be interactive, now you can't get away from that. So next time you have a presentation, think about how creatively can you get your audience to buy in.
