Before you start work on a presentation, you need clarity about the outcome you want from it. This is where objectives come in. Why is it important to identify the correct objectives for your presentation? Objectives give your presentation purpose.

"If you don't know what you want to achieve in your presentation, your audience never will." – Harvey Diamond, American writer

Without clear objectives, you will struggle to achieve the impact that you want your presentation to have. Objectives are crucial to your presentation because they shape its content and influence the way you treat the subject. So, if objectives are so important, what can you do to focus them?

1. Be clear about the outcome of your presentation

Your presentation's desired outcome or goal helps you determine effective objectives. Another way of looking at this is asking: What do you want your audience to achieve from your presentation?

Questions to ask yourself about outcome

1. Do you want to create awareness?
2. Do you want to equip people to take action?
3. Do you want people to connect emotionally with a topic?

2. Collaborate to determine your presentation's outcome

If someone asked you to create the presentation, seek that person out and collaborate to determine the presentation's outcome. This course refers to this person as the requester. The requester could be your teacher, manager, colleague, a conference organizer, or anyone else. However, if you prepare and deliver a presentation that originates with you (the originator), then you can decide the presentation's outcome yourself. Either way, requester or originator, you likely need to carefully consider the same question previously mentioned: What do you want your audience to achieve? Clarity about your presentation's outcome helps you identify the real objectives. You can group your objectives into three simple categories.

Know, act, and feel

Objectives for a presentation can fall into three categories: gain knowledge, take action, and feel emotion. Gain knowledge Your objective falls under this category if you want your audience to learn something that's new and important, or something that would help them with their work. Take action Your objective falls under this category if you want your audience to make a decision, launch an initiative, change direction, adopt new methods, or, in some other way, do something. Feel emotion Your objective falls under this category if you want your audience to make a new emotional connection to your subject. An emotional connection is important if you want your audience to be motivated or if you want to change their perspective.

Putting it all together In this example, you'll see why it's important to know the desired outcome of your presentation, and how that impacts your objectives.

• The situation Sam’s manager, Sneha, askshim to present a status report next week about a project he and a few others have been working on.
• Sam’s thinking, “This is an easy presentation to make. So, the objective should be to provide an update on the status of the project.”But wait, is that the real objective? Could Sneha have other reasons for asking him to do this presentation? What might they be?

Conclusion Ideally, Sam should’ve talked to Sneha first to find out her reason for the presentation before framing the objective.Here are some possible reasons Sneha might have had when asking Sam to make the presentation: •She wanted to find out whether he’s on top of the project. •She wanted to assign people to help Sam with the project in areas where help is needed. •She wanted others on the team to feel motivated to volunteer to help with the project. Notice how the reasons listed fall into the categories discussed in this topic.

• The first reason falls under “gain knowledge,”
• the second under “take action,” and
• the third one under “feel emotion.” Of course, it’s not necessary that your objective would fall neatly into one of those three categories. It could be a combination of any of these categories. But what you need to remember is when you start working on your presentation, identify the categories your objectives align to. This will help keep your objectives focused on the desired outcome.

Key learning points in this topic

1. Focus on your objectives before creating your presentation to avoid rework.
2. When identifying objectives, also identify and consider the reasons why you're creating your presentation.
3. Use three simple categories of objectives to refine and sharpen your presentation's message so that it hits the mark. Is the outcome for your audience to:

Gain knowledge? Take action? Feel emotion?