To The Point At Work uses crowdbeamer to capture and manage the attention of course participants

Providing strategic communication and presentation design services, To The Point At Work helps managers and experts communicate in a more transparent and precise manner. To The Point At Work also organizes courses where teams learn how to translate complex information into crisp impactful presentations using practical and validated methods. During these sessions, To The Point At Work uses crowdbeamer to manage the attention of course participants more effectively.

Managing the brain of your audience is a real challenge.

“Even the most experienced professionals often find it difficult to communicate effectively,” says Edouard Gruwez. “The curse of knowledge, that’s how I name the difficulty they’re facing. The more you know about a specific topic, the more difficult it becomes to understand how your communication is perceived by an audience that doesn’t have your knowledge. Also, presenters systematically overestimate their audience’s ability to multitask and to process large amounts of new information.

That’s precisely why we focus on how an audience experiences the communication during a presentation, and what you can do as a presenter to manage your listeners’ brains more efficiently. There’s no doubt that your verbal and non-verbal communication style matter in that respect. But body language and tone of voice are not the most decisive factors at all. That is an unfortunate but very persistent myth. Our research proves that the quantity of information and the structure of that information are far more important. That’s why we teach our clients to prepare their content in a logically structured way, translate that structure into a compelling story and complete it with clarifying and memorable visuals and slides.”

It’s all about grabbing the full attention of your audience.

“Our courses are usually a mix of presentations by the teacher, experiments and exercises,” Edouard Gruwez continues. “We alternate the various types of presentations: inspiring presentations, informative presentations, data-rich presentations, elevator pitches, presentations with or without slides,… That’s how we make participants feel what makes a message impactful and what doesn’t. In a next step, they build on these experiences by applying the principles to their presentations.

There’s one question that consistently comes back during every course: will we get a copy of the slides? Personally, I find the question fascinating because it illustrates an inherent conflict that every presenter struggles with. In the minds of most business people, the slides ‘are’ the content. But if all information is on the screen and in the handouts, the attention of the audience is all over the place. And in today’s world of information overload, attention has become a scarce resource. Excellent presenters, therefore, handle the attention of their audience very carefully, grabbing it right from the start and keeping it throughout their entire presentation.”

Crowdbeamer helps your audience capture the most relevant information.

Taking selective screenshots with crowdbeamer has far more benefits for the audience than distributing lengthy handouts. The reason is straightforward: people only use information if it is relevant to them. Powerful visual content with limited text is the cornerstone of every good presentation. It prevents your audience from getting lost in words and makes it easier for everybody to keep the focus on your story.”

Crowdbeamer makes it easy to complement quality screenshots with keywords.

“Whenever we use crowdbeamer during a course, we add an extra slide at the beginning of our presentation. While we inform participants about crowdbeamer, they have the time to install the free crowdbeamer app on their smartphone or tablet. We emphasize that it is not needed to add detailed notes to every screenshot. In our experience, a few well-chosen keywords are usually sufficient.

We have done extensive research into how the human brain stores information. So I’m quite confident about our approach and how crowdbeamer can add value. A picture might not be worth a thousand words, but at least a few hundred. Pictures retrieve memories of the presentation afterward, and a few well-chosen keywords further strengthen that process.”