Using handouts in presentations

Many people use handouts to convey their message to their audience. While handouts are a useful tool to help your audience understand what you are talking about, they can often be distracting. If you use handouts, wait until the end of the presentation. Giving them at the beginning of the presentation will cause many audience members to read it while you are talking and they will miss your presentation because they were paying attention to the paper, not to you.

Handouts need to be clean and neat. Avoid using a bunch of colors and fancy fonts, this is distracting. Try to avoid placing too much information on the page and just try to keep it as simple as possible. Depending upon how many handouts you are using, they need to go in a flowing series that corresponds with your presentation. This will make it much easier for your audience to follow along with your presentation. Page numbers work great to help your audience stay on track. Leave some extra white space on the handouts so your audience can make note during the presentation.

Before you use handouts with your presentation, ask yourself how the handout will benefit your audience. Do they need it in order to follow along with your speech? Do you want them to have the handout for after your presentation so they can reference it in the future? If your presentation is going to have a lot of factual information, a handout with some of those details is a helpful tool. If your presentation is emotional, steer clear of the handouts, they will just become distracting to your audience.

The nice thing about a handout is that it also gives the audience somewhere to write down their thoughts and things that stand out from the presentation. This is great if you want your audience to take away information from your presentation and share it with others.

Handouts are great if you have a slide from your presentation that is engaging and people want to have a copy of. To find out which slide leaves people with this feeling, you need to do a couple test runs on some colleagues, they will be able to let you know which parts of your presentation really stand out and if it would be useful to have a handout to follow along.

If your audience needs information to follow along with your presentation, have the handouts delivered before you start your presentation. Then your audience is ready to follow along with your speech. However, there are always some people that are naturally curious and they will read ahead on the handout. This can be helpful and hurtful to your speech, especially if you allow for questions to be asked during the presentation.

Some presenters like to send the handouts during their presentation. Even if the handouts go along with your slides, this is a major "no-no". When you pass along the handouts during your presentation, it will be distracting and it can take some time before you re-gain the attention of all of your audience members again. You can lose a lot of time waiting for your audience members to get the handout, look over it, and then pay attention to you again.

Finally, the last method is to send the handouts to your audience members after the presentation. This has its ups and downs. First, it is not distracting like a handout can be before or during the presentation. Second, it gives your audience something to look forward to after the presentation. Third, the downside is that some people won't have any interest in the handout by this point because they have no connection to it. When they have the handout during the presentation, they can make notes on it, allowing them to recall certain key points from your presentation.