Chapter 78 How to Present to a General Audience

In the last lesson we discussed general guidelines for presenting data science projects and discussed the fact that considering who is in your audience is essential. In this lesson we’ll break that down a little further to discuss how to approach presenting a data science project to a general audience and what considerations to make when preparing such a presentation. (In the next lesson we’ll dive into presenting to a technical audience.)

78.0.1 The Audience

When considering presenting to a general audience, this would be an audience that doesn’t know a lot about data science or quantitative analysis. This would be an audience that generally does not code or analyze data on a regular basis. This could be individuals at your company who are more focused on day-to-day operations or an audience of high schoolers getting their first introduction to data science.

78.0.2 The Goal

Regardless of exactly to whom you’re presenting, the goal of this type of presentation is to teach at a high level what you did. Your presentation should still inspire, educate, and entertain, but it should leave out some of the nitty gritty details and keep in more background and general explanation of your approach.

78.0.3 The Presentation

When it comes to presenting this information, the slide design guidelines discussed in the last lesson are still pertinent; however, there are considerations to be made when deciding what to talk about, how much detail to include, and what to emphasize.

78.0.3.1 Emphasize

When presenting to a general audience you want to emphasize a number of different things. Your presentation should certainly still tell a story, but you may want to spend more time on background and introduction than you would to a more technical audience.

In your introduction you want to be sure to include:

why you did the analysis
why your audience should care
what specific question you set out to answer

A large focus of your presentation will likely be in this section of your talk. This will provide your audience with the necessary information to understand the rest of your presentation. It’s ok to spend more time on the beginning of your talk when addressing a general audience.

In the body (middle) of your presentation, you should always:

describe the data
explain what you did
provide results
explain limitations or caveats

With regards to a general audience, the details of this part of the presentation should not be the focus. You never want to lose your audience because you’ve left out important explanations or assumed they know more than they do. So, be sure to be clear in your explanations for this part and refrain from including every single detail of what you did.

At the end of your presentation, it can be helpful for a general audience to:

include a conclusion slide
tell them exactly what they should take away from your presentation

78.0.3.2 De-emphasize

In a presentation to a general audience, you should de-emphasize:

details of your approach
issues you ran into in your analysis

IF we were to summarize this graphically, where the size of each box is relative to how much you should emphasize it in your presentation, the introduction and background will likely be the bulk of your talk, whereas the details you include about your analysis may be less. Your conclusion will be succinct and wrap everything up for your audience.

Summary of presentation parts

Remember, your audience will be hearing a lot of this information for the first time. There is only so much any individual can learn at once! Because of this, be sure to focus on the introduction, including the question you asked and the necessary background information. While you will certainly provide your audience with what you did and what you found, you will keep the details here to a minimum. Avoid including details about things that confused you along the way. Then, in your conclusion, remind your audience of your conclusions and provide them with the most important message they should take away from your presentation.

78.0.4 General Presentation Example

To discuss giving presentations to a general audience using a specific example, we’re going to walk through a presentation that was given to a general audience. The audience for this presentation was college students with a year of calculus but no particular background in statistics. This means that any statistical concepts would have to be explained, but it could be assumed that the audience was fairly analytical. The slides for this talk can be viewed here. The title of this talk was “Upcycling genomics data: From publicly-available ‘junk’ to priceless ‘treasure’.”

The outline of this presentation was as follows:

Introduction
Part 1: recount
Part 2: phenopredict
Part 3: application
Conclusion

Click on this link and scroll through the slides to get an idea of what the presentation looked like (Additionally, a quiz question for this lesson will require you to open this link, so it’s best to just take a look now!). The content of the talk is not what we’ll be focusing on, so it doesn’t actually matter if you look at these slides and understand what they’re talking about. Rather, in this lesson, we’re going to walk through how this presentation was organized and designed to focus on a general audience.

In the next lesson, we’ll walk through the slides for a talk on the exact same topic, that that was designed and presented to a technical audience.

To walk through how this talk was organized, we’re going to use the following figure:

Talk breakdown

Each slide in the presentation was assigned to one of 7 categories. Each category is a different color on the figure:

Question - the motivating question used to tie the story together
Outline - to remind the audience what we’ve already discussed and what we’re about to discuss
Background - Information the audience is required to know in order to understand the project/analyses
Approach - How the data were analyzed
Teaching - A quick lesson about a specific topic to ensure the results make sense to the audience
Conclusion - The end of the slides, wrapping up the presentation

Categories

The bar in the middle shows how the categories break down throughout the presentation. At the left we have the title slide. All the way at the right we have the conclusion slides. In between, the width of each section is proportional to the number of slides included in the presentation. The wider the box, the more slides. The thinner the box (or line), the fewer slides in the presentation were dedicated to that category at that point in the talk.

How to interpret the graphic

The last bit about how to read this image is that above the colored boxes, you can see the percentage of the slides dedicated to each part of the talk. For example, most of the slides (51%) were used in Part 2 of the talk. This makes sense, as the focus of the talk was on “phenopredict.”

Percentage of slides for each part of the talk

Now that we know how to read this figure, let’s discuss a bit of what we see. First of all, there is a heavy focus in the first part of the talk on discussing necessary background information. As this is a general audience, that makes sense!

The first part of the talk is background-heavy

In the middle of the talk, a lot of time is dedicated to teaching the audience the necessary concepts and information and explaining (at a high level) what approaches were used in the analyses.

There is a focus on teaching and approach in the middle

Note that while results are presented, it’s not in great detail. The audience is taught what they need to know before results are presented. This ensures that nobody gets lost.

Results are presented, but nitty-gritty details are omitted

Additionally, in this talk, a motivating question was presented to the audience to fully explain why this work was necessary. By motivating the presentation with this question, coming back to it throughout the presentation, and then using the data and analysis presented in this talk to answer the motivating question at the end, the presentation becomes a story.

A motivating question can help tie your presentation into a full story

Lastly, an outline was used throughout the presentation to remind the audience what has been discussed and what was yet to come.

Outlines can help the audience

When all was said and done, if we were to calculate the percent of slides dedicated to each of the categories, we would see that the category with the largest percent of time spent is background information, with 30% of the total slides being spend on it.

Categorical breakdown

However, if we consider background, teaching, and explaining the approach, we see that about 65% of the time was spent providing information to the audience that had nothing to do with the specific new information being presented about this analysis.

Considering background, teaching, and approach together

This makes sense, because, as you’ll remember, the goal of a general audience presentation is to teach your audience what you did. It’s not about the nitty gritty details. Instead, you want to present information at a high level.

Here, we’ve presented an example of one presentation. This is to describe how presenting to a general audience can be done. This does not mean that every time you present to a general audience, exactly 30% of your time should be spent on background. Rather, this is to give you an idea of how to approach a general audience presentation.

78.0.5 Summary

In this lesson we discussed the approach to and specifics of presenting to a general audience. We walked through an example of a presentation used to present to a general audience and broke down what parts of that example presentation were spent on what aspect of presentation. We highlighted the need to present background information and the need to teach the audience necessary concepts (at a high level!) so that the results you present will be understood.