presentation of the topic

350+ Presentation Topics That Will Appeal to Any Audience

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Published Date : December 4, 2020

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A presentation can be nerve-wracking, may it be for first-timers or pros, as you must turn a critical issue into a dynamic, persuasive, and informative one. Before you enhance your oratory skills and overcome your fear of public speaking , you must brainstorm excellent, fun topics for your presentation.

When doing a presentation, you cannot start a thing without coming up with a presentation topic . It is harder to find the best subject than prepare the lecture, as you need to be specific about the topic you want to present.

Besides oratory skills and PowerPoint mastery, you need to have informative and fun topics for presentations that can influence the audience. Watch this and get more ideas about informative topics:

One of the best ways to nail a presentation is to choose the best presentation topics that fit your expertise and target audience.

How to Choose a Good Topic

Choosing the best one out of informative presentation topics can be daunting and confusing if you want to create an informative speech or lecture. Here are some considerations that you must know.

• Purpose. Deciding your goal determines what your audience will bring after your talk, especially for persuasive presentation topics. Here is a video on various topics about persuasion:

• Audience. Consider your audience’s demographic profiles and common ground when choosing presentation topics and connect them with their interests, beliefs, and social and cultural backgrounds.
• Interests. Determine what presentation topic ideas you are most passionate about and what you know the most. Interesting topics for presentation give a head start upon your research phase, ensuring a well-received discussion for the audience. Get useful guides on how to keep your audience interested in this video:

• Credibility. To convince your audience about the pieces of information that you will discuss, choosing a credible and well-backed lecture is another plus.
• Conciseness . From 12 seconds in 2000, humans’ average attention span decreased to eight seconds in 2017. Thus, being concise is another essential factor in choosing presentation topics, as having a wordy title can confuse or intimidate your potential audience.

Tips on Turning a Boring Topic into an Engaging Presentation

You might have been feeling dejected as you had to prepare for a talk with no fun topics for presentation. It is hard to turn psychology discussions into engaging ones, knowing that this field has jargon and cases that can make your lecture dull.

However, instead of blaming your subject for being boring, avoid being dull instead. Here are some tips on turning a boring topic into an interactive one.

What are the Good Topics to Present in a Speech?

Now that you have skimmed through the tips and ways to choose fun topics for a presentation, making a speech on time needs a good presentation topic. Out of random presentation topics, here are some prominent ones that might give you some ideas.

Interesting Presentation Topics

• Ancient Greek Heroes Modern Interpretation
• Antidepressants and Their Effects on the Human Brain
• How Bad Nutrition Affects a Person’s Appearance
• Traces of Romanticism in Well-known English Literature
• Influences of Music on Mental Health
• How Religion and Politics Blend Within a State
• Most Famous and Nerve-wracking Novels, Books, and Plays
• How Traditional Herbs Get Approved
• Effects of Being a Polyglot
• Being Productive During Pandemic

Good Presentation Topics

• Disney Films’ Most Famous Actresses
• How Media Affects Gender Stereotypes Portrayal
• How Beauty Contests Affects Women’s Self-esteem
• Differences Between Religion and Cult
• Gambling Effects on Human’s Mental Health
• Most Authoritative Politicians and Political Parties
• Ways to Improve the Health Systems
• Preparation and Prevention Against Natural Disasters
• Ways to Alleviate Insomnia
• How to Build Good Relationships Between Children and Pets

5-Minute Presentation Topics

• Best Apps to Improve Academic Performance
• Airport First-timers: Step-by-step Instructions
• Easy-to-make Breakfast Recipes
• How to Avoid Procrastination
• Making Money During Holidays
• How Social Media Lowers Self-esteem
• Working Remotely: Pros and Cons
• Best Online Business and Professions
• Why Trust Your Intuition
• Reasons to Learn Foreign Languages

Fun Topics for Presentation

• How Rock ‘n Roll Started
• Rare and Expensive Coffee Types
• Best Self-development Books for Teens
• Choosing a Specialty in College
• Secrets of a Healthy Relationship
• Benefits of Art Therapy
• How do Journalists and Bloggers Differ From Each Other?
• The Origin of Languages
• Evolution of Artificial Intelligence
• Makeup Life Hacks and Tips

Safety Presentation Topics

• Common Mistakes in General Safety
• Dealing with Ergonomic and Workplace Stress
• Coronavirus Precautionary Measures
• How to Deal with Violence
• Fire and Electrical Safety
• Reportage, Prevention, and Liabilities in Workplace Accidents
• Safety Precautions Against Heat Exhaustion
• Common Workplace Injuries
• Communication Issues and Safety
• Emergency Response Efficiency

Easy Presentation Topics

• Adverse Effects of GMOs on Health and Life
• Effective Ways to Improve Old People’s Health System
• Most Iconic Censorship on Social Media
• Most Prominent Female Political Leaders of All Time
• How to Avoid Being Late
• Globalization and Its Effects on World Population
• Smiling Therapy Positive Effects on Mental Health
• Advancement of 3D Printing and Its Benefits
• How Music Helps in Learning New Languages
• Dealing with Child Prodigies

Controversial Speech Topics

Controversies are all around us, especially online resources. Finding a controversial topic must fit your passion and knowledge; otherwise, it might negatively impact your discussion.

Controversial Leadership Topics for Presentation

• LGBTQ Rights
• Abortion: Pro-Choice vs. Pro-Life
• Benefits of Multiculturalism in a Society
• Security and Privacy Concerns about Electronic Voting
• Gun Control Laws and Limits
• Journalism Ethics and Corruption
• Euthanasia Vs. Right to Live
• Death Penalty Pros and Cons
• How Mandatory Minimum Penalties Impact Federal Sentencing
• Torture as an Interrogation Tactic
• Electoral College Abolishment
• Is World Peace Possible?
• Same-sex union
• Lowering Criminal Liability Age
• Banning Animal Experimentation
• High Taxation Rates
• Freedom of Speech and Its Restrictions
• Embargo and Censorship: What to be Publicize
• Insanity Plea as an Excuse
• Tobacco Regulation

Controversial Topics for Teenagers

• Hookup Culture and Its Impact on Teens
• Bullying and Cyberbullying
• Banning Pornography in E-libraries
• Causes of Depression and Other Mental Illness in Teens
• Teen Suicide Liability
• Prohibition of Gambling for Teens
• How to Educate Teens About Drugs
• Dealing with Eating Disorders in Teens
• When Should Teens Start to Vote
• How Parents Should Deal with Teens’ Romantic Relationship
• Advantages and Disadvantages of Online Education
• Health Impacts of Fast Food for Teens
• How Being a Fan Impacts Teens
• Possibility of Living on Mars
• Why Media Literacy Important for Teenagers
• How Teenagers Can Fight Top Environmental Problems
• Dealing with Diversity in School
• Military Recruitment on Campus
• Pros and Cons of School Uniforms and Dress Code
• Plan B Contraception Access for Minors

What are Some Presentation Ideas for School?

For school purposes, you must find informative but fun topics for presentation as students have a lesser attention span than adults. Here are the presentation topics for academic and educational causes.

Science Topics for Presentation

Science presentation topics are among the most in-demand discussions for students and teachers in technical educational institutions. Here are some ideas to help you out.

Physics Topics for Presentation

• Is Physics Based on Theory or Practice
• Why We Need to Study Physics
• Newton’s Third Law as the Universal Formula
• Why Every Student Needs to Learn Physical Formula
• Is Physics Dependent on Math and Science or Vice Versa
• Why Physics Necessary for Knowledge Testing
• How to Deal with Difficulties in Physics Lesson
• Most Important Topics in Physics

Chemistry Topics for Presentation

• Why Alchemists Seeks Philosopher’s Stone
• Chemists Who Are Nobel Prize Awardees
• How Chemical Weapons Become Main Threat for War
• How to Choose Quality Water
• Making a Kid Interested in Chemistry
• Hair Biochemistry and Its Process
• Effects of Lack of Chemical Elements in a Human Body
• Safety Precautions for Chemical Products

Biology Topics for Presentation

• How the Future Lies in Crossroads of Biological Sciences
• How to Avoid Harmful GMO Foods
• Secrets of Centenarians
• Allergic Reactions Caused by Dust
• Can a Person Survive Without Clean Drinking Water
• How Sports and Nutrition Determine Human Health
• Vaccination and Its Effect on Genotype
• Best Houseplants for Air Purification

Geology Topics for Presentation

• Earthquakes and Volcanic Eruptions as Causes of Dynamic Geology
• Geomorphology: Intersection of Geography and Geology
• Space Geology in the Field of Cosmology and Planetology
• Geological Timeline from Solid Formation to the Holocene Era
• Geological Events Absolute and Relative Age
• Methods and Principles of Geology
• Geodynamics: The Relationship of the Earth’s Core and Crust Processes  
• Microstructural Geology: Micro-Level Rock Deformation

Astronomy Topics for Presentation

• Differences Between Astronomy and Astrology
• The Possibility of Life on Mars
• History and Discovery of the Milky Way Galaxy
• Does Astronomy Only Study Stars?
• Astronomy as a Separate Subject in School
• Reasons Why Fewer Entrants ChoAstronomynomy
• What Happens If the Sun Died?
• Why Our Future Depends on Astronomical Studies

Technological Science Topics for Presentation

• How Technology Improves Living Standards
• Technology and Its Effect on Cancer Treatment
• How Cybercriminals Use Technology
• Benefits and Threats of Artificial Intelligence
• Saving Time on Internet Technology Usage
• Technological Evolution from the Middle Ages to the Present
• Diffusion Rate of Technology in Developing Countries
• Taking a Break from the Internet

Multimedia Science Topics for Presentation

• Multimedia Features and Classification
• Creating a Multimedia Presentation
• Features of Online Multimedia
• Benefits of Multimedia in Business
• Usage of Multimedia in Computer Games
• How to Create Training Courses Using Multimedia
• Becoming a Multimedia Specialist
• Multimedia and Its Relation to Science

Cultural and Social Presentation Topic Ideas

This aspect mostly concerns psychology and sociology students. Here are some fun topics for presentations that you can check out.

• Culture and Traditions of Native Americans
• How History Connects with Culture
• How Cultural Knowledge Increases Chances of Success
• Identifying Emigrants by Cultural Characteristics
• Why Students Need to Learn About Culture
• Importance of Cultural Appreciation
• Pros and Cons of Diversified Culture
• Best Sociology Books for Starters
• Sociology and Its Express Research
• Empirical Research
• Causes of Social Phenomena
• Mathematical Methods in Sociology
• Social Trends Analysis and Development Patterns
• How to Collect Sociological Information
• Becoming a School President
• Why a President Needs Leadership Skills
• Ways to Raise a Child as a Leader
• Is Leadership an Innate Skill or a Result of Experiences?
• Responsibilities of a Leader
• How Family Relationships Affect One’s Leadership Skills
• Winning a Leadership Scholarship
• How Individual Differs from Social Ethics?
• Politics and International Relations Ethical Principles
• Ethical Communication Rules in Social Media
• Business Ethics and Relationships
• Why Learn Etiquette Knowledge
• Ethical Issues on Famous Artworks
• Knowing About Corporate Ethics

What are Some Presentation Ideas for Healthcare?

There are many physical and mental health topics for school and other conferences , but having fun topics for presentations is essential to make your lecture less complicated. Here are some of the presentation topics that might suit your interest.

Psychology Topics for Presentation

• The Need for Psychologists in Kindergarten
• Best Universities for Psychology
• Choosing a Suitable Psychologist
• Outcasts Children: Psychology Victim
• Psychological State and Its Effects on Productivity
• When Do You Need a Psychologist
• Can a Person with a Mental Disorder Become a Psychologist?

Mental Health Topics for Presentation

• Mental Fatigue: Causes of Failure
• Impacts of Social Media on Mental Health
• Recognizing and Avoiding the Onset of Depression
• Causes of Mental Health Disorders
• How Physical Affects Mental Health and Vice Versa
• Dealing With Mental Breakdowns
• How Music Improves Mental Health

Health Topics for Presentation

• Why Do Pharmacies Sell Over-the-counter Medicines?
• How Allergic Reaction Works
• Sports that Can Improve Health in a Month
• Signs of Bad Immunity System
• Legalization of Marijuana
• Centenarians’ Secret to Good Health
• Healthy Habits Before Exams

Nutrition Topics for Presentation

• The Necessity of Reading a Product’s Composition
• Nutrition Effects on Skin Condition
• Determining Necessary Ratio of Proteins, Fats, and Carbohydrates
• Tips for Restrictive Eating Disorders
• How Sports Nutrition Can Be Dangerous
• Why Being a Nutritionist a Good Career Choice
• Why Quality Nutrition Determines One’s Success

Nursing Presentations

• Nursing Career and Its Growth
• Critical Moments on Painkiller Usage
• Patient Safety During Nursing
• Patient safety during nursing
• Career Growth in Nursing
• The use of painkillers: critical moments
• Health Assessment: What to Check
• Features of caring for patients with mental disorders
• Postoperative patient care
• Features internships and practices for nurses

Dental Presentations Ideas

• Teeth Processes for Babies
• Molar Extraction Process
• Wisdom Tooth: Necessary or Not?
• How Chewing Gum Affects Tooth Enamel
• Causes and Treatment for Oral Cancer
• Diet for Braces

Medical Presentations

• How to Call an Ambulance
• Dealing With Addiction
• Highly Addictive Medical Drugs that You Don’t Realize
• Primary Stab Wound Treatment
• When Surgery Becomes Necessary
• Traditional, Alternative, and Modern Medicines
• Preventing Sport Injuries
• Insomnia Treatment With No Pills
• Anti-aging Pills: When to Avoid It
• Why Go or Reject Posthumous Donation
• Euthanasia and Its Effect on Suicide Rate
• How to Avoid Child Obesity
• Pros and Cons of GMOs
• Diverse Ways to Improve Healthcare
• The Need for Legal Framework on Plastic Surgery Regulations

What are Some Presentation Ideas for Business and Management?

Finding business presentation topics is more difficult as you must show in-depth knowledge of your chosen idea. Here are some of the presentation topics that you can check out.

How a Good Topic Helps on Public Speaking (SECS Elements)

Having the right choice of presentation topics can help meet the Sincerity, Enthusiasm, Confidence , and Simplicity (SECS) public speaking elements due to these reasons:

• A good topic can make you sincere in communicating with your audience.
• Fun topics for presentations can also increase the audience’s enthusiasm.
• Fun topics for presentations also give you confidence as it lessens awkwardness.
• The right topic makes your presentation concise, straightforward, and informative at the same time.

What does a perfect day with the family look like?

Imagine a day filled with laughter, shared meals, and playful adventures. Waking up refreshed, a family connects over breakfast, sharing dreams and creating plans. They explore together, be it a museum visit or a quiet picnic, finding joy in nature, or friendly competition. As the sun sets, reflections filled with gratitude paint the evening, solidifying the love and connection that makes the day perfect, not for its grandeur but for the simple treasures of being together.

What do you want to be when you grow up?

When asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” children explore a world of possibilities. Each child has unique dreams, from doctors to astronauts, artists to veterinarians. Their dreams may change as they grow, but nurturing their curiosity helps them find their true calling.

What’s one habit you want to eliminate and one you want to keep?

Aiming for personal growth, I’ll axe the time-sucking social media scroll and double down on the mood-boosting, energy-zinging exercise routine. Recognizing habits are key, I’ll actively fight for a more balanced and fulfilling life, one mindful step at a time.

Presentation topics are the key to a successful lecture, bringing more opportunities for your career. Choosing among tons of ideas out there can get confusing , but give it a serious thought as your topic impacts your overall presentation.

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75 Unique School Presentation Ideas and Topics Plus Templates

Are you tired of seeing the same PowerPoints repeating overused and unoriginal school presentation ideas covering repeated topics in your classes?

You know what I’m talking about; we’ve all been there, and sat through yawn-worthy demonstrations, slides, or presentation videos covering everything from the solar system, someone’s favorite pet, past presidents of a country, to why E=mC squared.

From grade school to university, first graders to college students, we are obligated to create, perform, and observe academic presentations across a plethora of curriculums and classes, and not all of these public speaking opportunities fall into the category of an ‘interesting topic’.

Yet, have no fear! Here at Piktochart, we are here to help you and your classmates. From giving examples of creative and even interactive presentation ideas, providing presentation videos , and suggesting interactive activities to give your five minutes of fame the ‘wow’ factor that it deserves, this article is your guide!

Our massive collection of unique school and college presentation ideas and templates applies if you’re:

• A teacher looking to make your class more engaging and fun with student presentations.
• A student who wants to impress your teacher and the rest of the class with a thought-provoking, interesting topic.

A Curated List of Interesting Topics for School Presentations

Did you know that when it comes to presentations , the more students involved improves retention? The more you know! Yet sometimes, you need a little help to get the wheels moving in your head for your next school presentation .

The great thing about these ideas and topics is you can present them either in face-to-face classes or virtual learning sessions.

Each school presentation idea or topic below also comes with a template that you can use. Create a free Piktochart account to try our presentation maker and get access to the high-quality version of the templates. You can also check out our Piktochart for Education plan .

Want to watch this blog post in video format? The video below is for you!

The templates are further divided into the following categories covering the most popular and best presentation topics. Click the links below to skip to a specific section.

• Unique science presentation topics to cultivate curiosity in class
• Engaging culture and history presentation ideas to draw inspiration from
• Health class presentation topics to help students make healthy lifestyle decisions
• Data visualization ideas to help students present an overwhelming amount of data and information into clear, engaging visuals
• First day of school activity ideas to foster classroom camaraderie
• Communication and media topics to teach students the importance of effective communication
• Topics to help students prepare for life after school

We hope this list will inspire you and help you nail your next school presentation activity.

Unique Science Presentation Topics to Cultivate Curiosity in Class

Science is a broad field and it’s easy to feel overwhelmed with too many topics to choose for your next presentation.

Cultivate curiosity in the science classroom with the following unique and creative presentation ideas and topics:

1. Can life survive in space?

2. Do plants scream when they’re in pain?

3. What are the traits of successful inventors?

4. How vaccines work

5. Massive destruction of the Koala’s habitat in Australia

6. Left brain versus right brain

7. What are great sources of calcium?

Get access to high-quality, unique school presentation templates by Piktochart for Education.

Create and collaborate in the classroom using Piktochart’s customizable and printable templates for your school reports, presentations, and infographics.

8. Recycling facts you need to know

9. Do you have what it takes to be a NASA astronaut?

10. The rise of robots and AI: Should we be afraid of them?

11. How far down does the sea go?

12. The stages of sleep

13. Will Mars be our home in 2028?

14. A quick look at laboratory safety rules

15. The first person in history to break the sound barrier

Engaging Culture and History Presentation Ideas to Draw Inspiration From

History is filled with equally inspiring and terrifying stories, and there are lessons that students can learn from the events of the past. Meanwhile, interactive presentations about culture help students learn and embrace diversity. 

16. Women in history: A conversation through time

17. The sweet story of chocolate 

18. A history lesson with a twist 

19. The history of basketball 

20. The origin of the Halloween celebration 

21. AI History 

22. What you need to know about New Zealand 

23. 1883 volcanic eruption of Krakatoa 

24. Roman structures: 2000 years of strength

25. The most famous art heists in history 

26. Elmo: The story behind a child icon 

27. 10 things you should know before you visit South Korea 

28. 8 things you didn’t know about these 8 countries 

Health Class Presentation Topics to Help Students Make Healthy Lifestyle Decisions

Want to learn how to engage students with healthcare topic ideas? Then consider using these templates for your next interactive presentation.

According to the CDC , school-based health education contributes to the development of functional health knowledge among students. It also helps them adapt and maintain health-promoting behaviors throughout their lives. 

Not only will your presentation help with keeping students engaged, but you’ll also increase class involvement with the right slides.

The following examples of health and wellness interactive presentations include fun ideas and topics that are a good start. 

29. How to look after your mental health?

30. The eradication of Polio

31. How to have a healthy lifestyle 

32. 10 handwashing facts 

33. Myths and facts about depression

34. Hacks for making fresh food last longer 

35. Ways to avoid spreading the coronavirus

36. Mask protection in 5 simple steps 

37. Everything you need to know about the flu

38. All about stress: Prevention, tips, and how to cope 

39. The importance of sleep 

40. Is milk tea bad for you?

41. How to boost happiness in 10 minutes

42. How dirty are debit and credit cards 

43. Why do you need sunscreen protection

Data Visualization Ideas to Help Students Present Overwhelming Amounts of Data in Creative Ways

Data visualization is all about using visuals to make sense of data. Students need to pull the main points from their extensive research, and present them by story telling while being mindful of their classmates’ collective attention span.

As far as student assignments go, storytelling with data is a daunting task for students and teachers alike. To keep your audience interested, consider using a non linear presentation that presents key concepts in creative ways.

Inspire your class to be master data storytellers with the following data visualization ideas:

44. Are we slowly losing the Borneo rainforest?

45. Skateboard deck design over the years

46. Food waste during the Super Bowl

47. The weight of the tallest building in the world

48. Infographic about data and statistics

49. Stats about cyberbullying

50. How whales combat climate change

First Day of School Interactive Activity Ideas to Foster Whole-class-Camaraderie

Calling all teachers! Welcome your new students and start the school year with the following back-to-school creative presentation ideas and relevant templates for first-day-of-school activities.

These interactive presentations grab the attention of your students and are remarkably easy to execute (which is the main educator’s goal after all)!

51. Meet the teacher

52. Example: all about me

53. Self-introduction

54. Tips on how to focus on schoolwork

55. Course plan and schedule

Give our class schedule maker a try to access more templates for free. You can also access our presentation-maker , poster-maker , timeline-maker , and more by simply signing up .

56. Interpreting a student’s report card (for parents)

57. Introduction of classroom rules

58. Assignment schedule

59. Daily planner

60. Course syllabus presentation

61. How to write a class presentation

Topics to Teach Students the Importance of Effective Communication

Visual media  helps students retain more of the concepts  taught in the classroom. The following media topics and infographic templates can help you showcase complex concepts in a short amount of time. 

In addition, interactive presentation activities using these templates also encourage the development of a holistic learning process in the classroom because they help focus on the  three domains of learning:  cognitive, affective, and psychomotor. 

62. Interactive presentation do’s and don’ts 

63. How to create an infographic 

Recommended reading : How to Make an Infographic in 30 Minutes

64. How to improve your internet security and privacy

65. What is design thinking?

66. What are your favorite software tools to use in the classroom? 

Presentation Topic Ideas to Help Students Prepare for Life After School

One of the things that makes teaching a rewarding career is seeing your students take the learning and knowledge you’ve instilled in them, and become successful, productive adults.

From pitching a business idea to starting your podcast, the following topics are good starting points to prepare students for the challenges after graduation (aka adulting 101):

67. How to make a resume

68. How to start a startup

69. Credit card vs. debit card

70. Pros and cons of cryptocurrency

71. How to save on travel

72. How to do a SWOT analysis

73. How to pitch a business idea

74. Habits of successful people

75. Starting your own podcast: A checklist

Find out how a high school teacher like Jamie Barkin uses Piktochart to improve learning in the classroom for her students.

Pro tip: make your presentation as interactive as possible. Students have an attention span of two to three minutes per year of age. To keep minds from wandering off, include some interactive games or activities in the lesson. For example, if you conducted a lesson on the respiratory system, you could ask them to practice breathing techniques.

Maintain eye contact with your students, and you’ll get instant feedback on how interested they are in the interactive presentation.

Make School Presentation Visuals Without the Hassle of Making Them From Scratch

School presentations, when done right, can help teachers engage their classes and improve students’ education effectively by presenting information using the right presentation topic. 

If you’re pressed for time and resources to make your school presentation visuals , choose a template from Piktochart’s template gallery . Aside from the easy customization options, you can also print and download these templates to your preferred format. 

Piktochart also professional templates to create infographics , posters , brochures , reports , and more.

Creating school-focused, engaging, and interactive presentations can be tedious at first, but with a little bit of research and Piktochart’s handy templates, you’re going to do a great job!

The future of learning is interactivity and collaboration.

Foster interactive and collaborative learning using Piktochart for Education. Share your work, get feedback, and brainstorm on the fly. With Piktochart, everyone’s on the same page. Finally.

Kyjean Tomboc is an experienced content marketer for healthcare, design, and SaaS brands. She also manages content (like a digital librarian of sorts). She lives for mountain trips, lap swimming, books, and cats.

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150+ Presentation Topics To Make an Impact Instantly

Presentations

Picture Yourself as the Star of a Presentation.

To really shine, you need a topic that grabs everyone’s attention. It’s more than just speaking well or having cool slides; it all starts with a topic that makes your audience curious.

Imagine standing in front of a group, not just sharing facts, but telling a story that keeps everyone interested. Presentations aren’t only about work or school; they’re a chance to be creative and make things interesting.

Every day, there are 50,000 presentations happening. They’re not all serious business or school stuff; some are about fun and quirky things like a duck on a tricycle or a dog wearing glasses. It’s surprising, right?

Still, half of people get bored during presentations. That’s why it’s crucial to make them exciting. That’s where our ideas come in—over 150 of them! And here’s the cool part: these ideas aren’t just for offices or classrooms; they’re for any time you want to share something in a fun way.

So, get ready to explore 150+ presentation ideas that will help you make an impact instantly.

How to Choose the Best Presentation Topic: Step-by-Step Process

Picking the right presentation topic is like winning half the battle before you even begin. After selecting your topic, you’ll focus on content creation and presentation design. If you need help with presentation designs, consider Design Shifu , offering dedicated designers for your needs. You get unlimited designs for a flat monthly fee, which includes not only presentation designs but also services like infographics, social media designs, logo design, etc. Now, back to the topic selection. You need to strike a balance between creativity and relevance to make an impact on the right audience. Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you choose a compelling topic:

How : Conduct surveys or interviews to understand your audience’s interests, needs, and knowledge level. Example : For a group of professionals, consider topics related to their industry trends or challenges.

How : Reflect on your strengths, experiences, and knowledge areas. Example : With a digital marketing background, a topic like Effective Social Media Strategies for Business Growth might be ideal.

How : Stay updated on current events, industry trends, and popular discussions. Example : In technology, a presentation on The Future of Artificial Intelligence in Everyday Life can be timely and interesting.

How : Identify challenges your audience faces and offer solutions. Example : For entrepreneurs, Overcoming Common Startup Challenges can be highly relevant.

How : Relate your topic to the audience’s daily lives or work. Example : A presentation on Time Management Hacks for Busy Professionals can be relatable and valuable.

How : Consider using a storytelling approach, case studies, or interactive elements. Example : Instead of Benefits of Healthy Living, structure it as a personal journey with before-and-after anecdotes.

How : Clarify your presentation’s purpose (educate, persuade, entertain) and choose a topic that aligns. Example : For inspiration, Unleashing Creativity in the Workplace could be impactful.

How : Pitch your topic ideas to a small group or colleagues for feedback. Example : Present brief overviews of two potential topics and ask for input on which generates more interest.

How : Incorporate visuals to enhance your presentation or get help from presentation design experts like Design Shifu . Example : A presentation on The Power of Data Visualization can include compelling charts and graphics.

How : Choose a topic you are genuinely passionate about. Example : If passionate about environmental issues, a presentation on Sustainable Practices in Everyday Life will be engaging and authentic.

Remember to tailor these tips to your specific context, and feel free to combine multiple elements to create a unique and impactful presentation topic that resonates with your audience.

General Presentation Topic Ideas for 2024

• The Future of Virtual Reality in Education
• The Psychology of Decision-Making: Unraveling the Influences
• Sustainable Fashion: Balancing Style and Ethics
• Blockchain Beyond Cryptocurrency: Real-World Applications
• The Art of Storytelling in Marketing: Creating Lasting Impressions
• The Impact of Social Media on Mental Health
• Innovative Approaches to Urban Planning for a Sustainable Future
• Biohacking: Enhancing Human Performance through Technology
• The Rise of Remote Work: Challenges and Opportunities
• Exploring the Intersection of Art and Artificial Intelligence

Leadership Topic Ideas for Presentation

• Servant Leadership: A Paradigm Shift in Management
• Leading with Empathy in the Corporate World
• Adaptive Leadership in Times of Uncertainty
• The Role of Emotional Intelligence in Effective Leadership
• Leadership Lessons from Unlikely Sources: Animals, Nature, and Beyond
• Fostering a Culture of Innovation: Leadership Strategies
• The Power of Authentic Leadership in Building Trust
• Cross-Cultural Leadership: Navigating Global Teams
• Resilient Leadership: Bouncing Back from Setbacks
• Balancing Confidence and Humility: The Art of Humble Leadership

Business Communication Topic Ideas for Presentation

• Non-verbal Communication in the Digital Age
• Crisis Communication: Strategies for Effective Response
• Navigating Difficult Conversations in the Workplace
• The Influence of Language on Business Negotiations
• The Art of Persuasion: Building Convincing Arguments
• Digital Etiquette: Navigating Professionalism Online
• The Role of Empathy in Customer Communication
• Building a Strong Personal Brand through Communication
• Overcoming Communication Barriers in Diverse Teams
• Humor in Business Communication: When and How to Use It

Presentation Topic Ideas for Controversial Issues

• The Ethics of Genetic Engineering: Navigating the CRISPR Era
• Exploring Both Sides: The Controversy of Universal Basic Income
• The Debate on Privacy vs. National Security in the Digital Age
• The Morality of Artificial Intelligence: Can Machines Have Ethics?
• The Role of Government in Regulating Social Media: Striking the Right Balance
• Medical Marijuana: Bridging the Gap between Medicine and Recreation
• The Controversy of Fast Fashion: Environmental Impact vs. Accessibility
• The Ethics of Animal Testing: Finding Alternatives
• Free Speech in the Digital Space: Where to Draw the Line?
• The Impact of Cancel Culture: Constructive Criticism or Online Harassment?

Presentation Topics Ideas for Designing

• The Psychology of Color in Graphic Design: A Deep Dive
• User-Centered Design: Shaping Products Around People’s Needs
• Minimalism vs. Maximalism: Finding the Right Design Balance
• Designing for Accessibility: Ensuring Inclusivity in Every Interface
• The Evolution of Logo Design: From Tradition to Modern Trends
• Immersive Experiences in Web Design: Beyond the Screen
• The Art of Visual Storytelling: Engaging Audiences through Design
• Typography Trends: Balancing Readability and Aesthetics
• Environmental Design: Merging Sustainability with Aesthetics
• Augmented Reality in Design: Enhancing User Experiences

Presentation Topics Ideas for Marketing

• The Psychology of Consumer Behavior: Understanding the Purchase Decision
• Influencer Marketing: Strategies for Authentic Brand Partnerships
• The Power of Emotional Marketing: Creating Lasting Connections
• Content Marketing in the Age of Information Overload
• Ethical Marketing: Building Trust and Loyalty with Transparency
• The Future of Social Media Marketing: Emerging Platforms and Trends
• Neuromarketing: Leveraging Brain Science to Drive Engagement
• Storytelling in Branding: Crafting Compelling Narratives
• Data-Driven Marketing: Turning Analytics into Actionable Insights
• Interactive Marketing Campaigns: Engaging Audiences in the Digital Age

Presentation Topics Ideas for Entrepreneurship

• Bootstrapping vs. Funding: Choosing the Right Path for Your Startup
• The Role of Failure in Entrepreneurial Success: Embracing Setbacks
• Social Entrepreneurship: Making a Profit with a Purpose
• Innovative Business Models: Disrupting Traditional Industries
• The Art of Pitching: Capturing Investors’ Attention in 5 Minutes
• Balancing Creativity and Structure in Entrepreneurial Ventures
• Building a Sustainable Business: Environmental and Financial Considerations
• The Future of E-Commerce: Trends and Opportunities
• Cultivating a Culture of Innovation in Small Businesses
• The Gig Economy: Navigating the Rise of Freelance and Remote Work

Presentation Topic Ideas for Personal Experiences

• Turning Adversity into Strength: Lessons from Personal Challenges
• My Journey in [Specific Industry]: Lessons Learned and Insights Gained
• The Impact of Travel on Personal Growth and Perspective
• Lessons from Parenting: Applying Family Insights in Professional Life
• Overcoming Fear of Public Speaking: A Personal Triumph
• Navigating Cross-Cultural Experiences: Stories of Adaptation
• From Passion to Profession: Pursuing Your Dreams
• The Power of Vulnerability in Building Meaningful Connections
• Balancing Work and Personal Life: My Successes and Failures
• Lessons from a Hobby: How [Specific Hobby] Shaped My Outlook

Presentation Topic Ideas for Current Trends

• The Metaverse: Exploring the Next Frontier of Digital Interaction
• Decentralized Finance (DeFi): Transforming Traditional Banking Systems
• NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens): Redefining Ownership in the Digital Age
• The Evolution of Electric Vehicles: Sustainable Transportation Trends
• The Subscription Economy: Shifting from Ownership to Access
• Health and Wellness Tech: The Rise of Wearables and Digital Health
• Micro-Moments in Marketing: Capturing Attention in Seconds
• The Influence of Remote Learning on Education: Challenges and Innovations
• Circular Economy: Reducing Waste and Promoting Sustainable Consumption
• Productizing the services in 2024

Presentation Topic Ideas for Industry Insights

• Revolutionizing Healthcare: The Impact of Telemedicine and Health Tech
• Smart Cities: Integrating Technology for Urban Development
• The Future of Aerospace: Space Tourism and Beyond
• Renewable Energy Innovations: Advancements in Solar, Wind, and Beyond
• Evolving Trends in the Fashion Industry: Sustainability and Tech Integration
• The Changing Landscape of Food Industry: Plant-Based and Lab-Grown Alternatives
• Emerging Trends in the Gaming Industry: AR, VR, and Cloud Gaming
• Transforming Agriculture: AgTech Solutions for a Sustainable Future
• The Future of Transportation: Hyperloop, Autonomous Vehicles, and Drones
• Innovations in Construction: Sustainable Materials and Smart Infrastructure

Presentation Topic Ideas for Digital Marketing

• Voice Search Optimization: Adapting to Changing Search Patterns
• The Role of Chatbots in Customer Engagement: Enhancing User Experience
• Video Marketing Strategies: Creating Compelling Visual Content
• Interactive Email Campaigns: Beyond the Click-Through Rate
• The Impact of AI on Personalizing Digital Marketing Campaigns
• Podcasting as a Marketing Tool: Building Authority and Connection
• Virtual Events and Experiences: Engaging Audiences in a Digital Landscape
• Data Privacy in Digital Marketing: Navigating Regulations and Trust
• The Power of User-Generated Content: Turning Customers into Advocates
• Inclusive Marketing: Representing Diversity in Brand Campaigns

Presentation Topic Ideas for AI (Artificial Intelligence)

• Ethical Considerations in AI: Addressing Bias and Fairness
• Explainable AI: Bridging the Gap Between Complexity and Understanding
• AI in Healthcare: Diagnosing, Treating, and Preventing Diseases
• The Role of AI in Climate Change: From Prediction to Mitigation
• AI and Creativity: Exploring the Intersection of Technology and Art
• AI in Education: Personalized Learning and Classroom Integration
• Robotics and AI in Manufacturing: Transforming Production Processes
• AI-Enhanced Cybersecurity: Protecting Against Evolving Threats
• Natural Language Processing: Breaking Barriers in Human-Computer Interaction
• AI for Social Good: Solving Global Challenges with Technology

Presentation Topic Ideas for Sales Consulting

• Consultative Selling: Building Relationships and Adding Value
• Sales Psychology: Understanding Customer Motivations and Objections
• Adapting to the Digital Sales Landscape: Strategies for Online Selling
• The Art of Negotiation: Techniques for Successful Deal-Making
• Sales Automation: Streamlining Processes for Efficiency and Effectiveness
• Account-Based Selling: Tailoring Strategies for Targeted Clientele
• The Future of B2B Sales: Trends and Technologies Shaping the Industry
• Building a Personal Brand for Sales Success: Online and Offline
• Customer Retention Strategies: Going Beyond the Initial Sale
• Storyselling: Using Narratives to Persuade and Connect with Customers

Presentation Topic Ideas for Time Management

• The Pomodoro Technique: Boosting Productivity with Time Blocks
• Time Management for Remote Workers: Balancing Flexibility and Structure
• Eisenhower Matrix: Prioritizing Tasks for Maximum Impact
• Mindful Time Management: Incorporating Meditation and Reflection
• Time Blocking for Success: Structuring Your Day for Optimal Performance
• Effective Goal Setting: Aligning Tasks with Long-Term Objectives
• Technology and Time Management: Tools for Efficiency and Focus
• The 2-Minute Rule: Tackling Small Tasks for Immediate Progress
• Batch Processing: Streamlining Work by Grouping Similar Activities
• Time Management in Leadership: Balancing Responsibilities and Delegation

Presentation Topic Ideas for Technology

• The Evolution of Cybersecurity: Adapting to Emerging Threats
• Cloud Computing Trends: From Infrastructure to Platform as a Service
• Blockchain in Business: Beyond Cryptocurrency Applications
• The Future of Quantum Computing: Revolutionizing Data Processing
• 5G Technology: Implications for Connectivity and Innovation
• Edge Computing: Reducing Latency and Enhancing Performance
• The Role of DevOps in Streamlining Software Development and Operations
• Cybersecurity in the Internet of Things (IoT): Protecting Connected Devices
• Augmented Reality in IT: Enhancing User Experiences and Workflows
• Data Governance and Privacy: Navigating Legal and Ethical Considerations

Presentation Topics Ideas for Corporate Business Leaders 

• Agile Business Models: Adapting to Rapid Change and Uncertainty
• Creating a Culture of Innovation: Strategies for Fostering Creativity
• Business Ethics in the Age of Transparency: Building Trust with Stakeholders
• The Future of Work: Redefining the Employee Experience
• Strategic Partnerships: Collaborative Approaches to Business Growth
• Globalization vs. Localization: Finding the Right Balance in Business Expansion
• Intrapreneurship: Nurturing Entrepreneurial Spirit within Large Organizations
• Crisis Management in Business: Strategies for Resilience and Recovery
• The Impact of Corporate Social Responsibility on Brand Reputation
• Business Model Innovation: Rethinking Traditional Approaches for Success

Work-Life Presentation Topic Idea s

• Remote Team Building: Strategies for Fostering Collaboration and Connection
• Embracing a Growth Mindset in the Workplace: Navigating Challenges with a Positive Perspective
• Balancing Work and Parenthood: Tips for Working Parents
• Building a Culture of Inclusivity: Creating a Supportive and Diverse Work Environment
• The Future of Flexible Work: Adapting to Changing Work Structures
• Mindful Leadership: Integrating Mindfulness Practices for Effective Management
• Navigating Workplace Conflict: Strategies for Resolution and Relationship Building
• Workplace Well-being Programs: Enhancing Employee Health and Productivity
• The Importance of Continuous Learning: Staying Relevant in a Rapidly Changing Work Environment
• Resilience in the Face of Professional Setbacks: Bouncing Back from Career Challenges

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Blog Beginner Guides

How To Make a Good Presentation [A Complete Guide]

By Krystle Wong , Jul 20, 2023

A top-notch presentation possesses the power to drive action. From winning stakeholders over and conveying a powerful message to securing funding — your secret weapon lies within the realm of creating an effective presentation .  

Being an excellent presenter isn’t confined to the boardroom. Whether you’re delivering a presentation at work, pursuing an academic career, involved in a non-profit organization or even a student, nailing the presentation game is a game-changer.

In this article, I’ll cover the top qualities of compelling presentations and walk you through a step-by-step guide on how to give a good presentation. Here’s a little tip to kick things off: for a headstart, check out Venngage’s collection of free presentation templates . They are fully customizable, and the best part is you don’t need professional design skills to make them shine!

These valuable presentation tips cater to individuals from diverse professional backgrounds, encompassing business professionals, sales and marketing teams, educators, trainers, students, researchers, non-profit organizations, public speakers and presenters. 

No matter your field or role, these tips for presenting will equip you with the skills to deliver effective presentations that leave a lasting impression on any audience.

Click to jump ahead:

What are the 10 qualities of a good presentation?

Step-by-step guide on how to prepare an effective presentation, 9 effective techniques to deliver a memorable presentation, faqs on making a good presentation, how to create a presentation with venngage in 5 steps.

When it comes to giving an engaging presentation that leaves a lasting impression, it’s not just about the content — it’s also about how you deliver it. Wondering what makes a good presentation? Well, the best presentations I’ve seen consistently exhibit these 10 qualities:

1. Clear structure

No one likes to get lost in a maze of information. Organize your thoughts into a logical flow, complete with an introduction, main points and a solid conclusion. A structured presentation helps your audience follow along effortlessly, leaving them with a sense of satisfaction at the end.

Regardless of your presentation style , a quality presentation starts with a clear roadmap. Browse through Venngage’s template library and select a presentation template that aligns with your content and presentation goals. Here’s a good presentation example template with a logical layout that includes sections for the introduction, main points, supporting information and a conclusion: 

2. Engaging opening

Hook your audience right from the start with an attention-grabbing statement, a fascinating question or maybe even a captivating anecdote. Set the stage for a killer presentation!

The opening moments of your presentation hold immense power – check out these 15 ways to start a presentation to set the stage and captivate your audience.

3. Relevant content

Make sure your content aligns with their interests and needs. Your audience is there for a reason, and that’s to get valuable insights. Avoid fluff and get straight to the point, your audience will be genuinely excited.

4. Effective visual aids

Picture this: a slide with walls of text and tiny charts, yawn! Visual aids should be just that—aiding your presentation. Opt for clear and visually appealing slides, engaging images and informative charts that add value and help reinforce your message.

With Venngage, visualizing data takes no effort at all. You can import data from CSV or Google Sheets seamlessly and create stunning charts, graphs and icon stories effortlessly to showcase your data in a captivating and impactful way.

5. Clear and concise communication

Keep your language simple, and avoid jargon or complicated terms. Communicate your ideas clearly, so your audience can easily grasp and retain the information being conveyed. This can prevent confusion and enhance the overall effectiveness of the message. 

6. Engaging delivery

Spice up your presentation with a sprinkle of enthusiasm! Maintain eye contact, use expressive gestures and vary your tone of voice to keep your audience glued to the edge of their seats. A touch of charisma goes a long way!

7. Interaction and audience engagement

Turn your presentation into an interactive experience — encourage questions, foster discussions and maybe even throw in a fun activity. Engaged audiences are more likely to remember and embrace your message.

Transform your slides into an interactive presentation with Venngage’s dynamic features like pop-ups, clickable icons and animated elements. Engage your audience with interactive content that lets them explore and interact with your presentation for a truly immersive experience.

8. Effective storytelling

Who doesn’t love a good story? Weaving relevant anecdotes, case studies or even a personal story into your presentation can captivate your audience and create a lasting impact. Stories build connections and make your message memorable.

A great presentation background is also essential as it sets the tone, creates visual interest and reinforces your message. Enhance the overall aesthetics of your presentation with these 15 presentation background examples and captivate your audience’s attention.

9. Well-timed pacing

Pace your presentation thoughtfully with well-designed presentation slides, neither rushing through nor dragging it out. Respect your audience’s time and ensure you cover all the essential points without losing their interest.

10. Strong conclusion

Last impressions linger! Summarize your main points and leave your audience with a clear takeaway. End your presentation with a bang , a call to action or an inspiring thought that resonates long after the conclusion.

In-person presentations aside, acing a virtual presentation is of paramount importance in today’s digital world. Check out this guide to learn how you can adapt your in-person presentations into virtual presentations . 

Preparing an effective presentation starts with laying a strong foundation that goes beyond just creating slides and notes. One of the quickest and best ways to make a presentation would be with the help of a good presentation software . 

Otherwise, let me walk you to how to prepare for a presentation step by step and unlock the secrets of crafting a professional presentation that sets you apart.

1. Understand the audience and their needs

Before you dive into preparing your masterpiece, take a moment to get to know your target audience. Tailor your presentation to meet their needs and expectations , and you’ll have them hooked from the start!

2. Conduct thorough research on the topic

Time to hit the books (or the internet)! Don’t skimp on the research with your presentation materials — dive deep into the subject matter and gather valuable insights . The more you know, the more confident you’ll feel in delivering your presentation.

3. Organize the content with a clear structure

No one wants to stumble through a chaotic mess of information. Outline your presentation with a clear and logical flow. Start with a captivating introduction, follow up with main points that build on each other and wrap it up with a powerful conclusion that leaves a lasting impression.

Delivering an effective business presentation hinges on captivating your audience, and Venngage’s professionally designed business presentation templates are tailor-made for this purpose. With thoughtfully structured layouts, these templates enhance your message’s clarity and coherence, ensuring a memorable and engaging experience for your audience members.

Don’t want to build your presentation layout from scratch? pick from these 5 foolproof presentation layout ideas that won’t go wrong. 

4. Develop visually appealing and supportive visual aids

Spice up your presentation with eye-catching visuals! Create slides that complement your message, not overshadow it. Remember, a picture is worth a thousand words, but that doesn’t mean you need to overload your slides with text.

Well-chosen designs create a cohesive and professional look, capturing your audience’s attention and enhancing the overall effectiveness of your message. Here’s a list of carefully curated PowerPoint presentation templates and great background graphics that will significantly influence the visual appeal and engagement of your presentation.

5. Practice, practice and practice

Practice makes perfect — rehearse your presentation and arrive early to your presentation to help overcome stage fright. Familiarity with your material will boost your presentation skills and help you handle curveballs with ease.

6. Seek feedback and make necessary adjustments

Don’t be afraid to ask for help and seek feedback from friends and colleagues. Constructive criticism can help you identify blind spots and fine-tune your presentation to perfection.

With Venngage’s real-time collaboration feature , receiving feedback and editing your presentation is a seamless process. Group members can access and work on the presentation simultaneously and edit content side by side in real-time. Changes will be reflected immediately to the entire team, promoting seamless teamwork.

7. Prepare for potential technical or logistical issues

Prepare for the unexpected by checking your equipment, internet connection and any other potential hiccups. If you’re worried that you’ll miss out on any important points, you could always have note cards prepared. Remember to remain focused and rehearse potential answers to anticipated questions.

8. Fine-tune and polish your presentation

As the big day approaches, give your presentation one last shine. Review your talking points, practice how to present a presentation and make any final tweaks. Deep breaths — you’re on the brink of delivering a successful presentation!

In competitive environments, persuasive presentations set individuals and organizations apart. To brush up on your presentation skills, read these guides on how to make a persuasive presentation and tips to presenting effectively . 

Whether you’re an experienced presenter or a novice, the right techniques will let your presentation skills soar to new heights!

From public speaking hacks to interactive elements and storytelling prowess, these 9 effective presentation techniques will empower you to leave a lasting impression on your audience and make your presentations unforgettable.

1. Confidence and positive body language

Positive body language instantly captivates your audience, making them believe in your message as much as you do. Strengthen your stage presence and own that stage like it’s your second home! Stand tall, shoulders back and exude confidence. 

2. Eye contact with the audience

Break down that invisible barrier and connect with your audience through their eyes. Maintaining eye contact when giving a presentation builds trust and shows that you’re present and engaged with them.

3. Effective use of hand gestures and movement

A little movement goes a long way! Emphasize key points with purposeful gestures and don’t be afraid to walk around the stage. Your energy will be contagious!

4. Utilize storytelling techniques

Weave the magic of storytelling into your presentation. Share relatable anecdotes, inspiring success stories or even personal experiences that tug at the heartstrings of your audience. Adjust your pitch, pace and volume to match the emotions and intensity of the story. Varying your speaking voice adds depth and enhances your stage presence.

5. Incorporate multimedia elements

Spice up your presentation with a dash of visual pizzazz! Use slides, images and video clips to add depth and clarity to your message. Just remember, less is more—don’t overwhelm them with information overload. 

Turn your presentations into an interactive party! Involve your audience with questions, polls or group activities. When they actively participate, they become invested in your presentation’s success. Bring your design to life with animated elements. Venngage allows you to apply animations to icons, images and text to create dynamic and engaging visual content.

6. Utilize humor strategically

Laughter is the best medicine—and a fantastic presentation enhancer! A well-placed joke or lighthearted moment can break the ice and create a warm atmosphere , making your audience more receptive to your message.

7. Practice active listening and respond to feedback

Be attentive to your audience’s reactions and feedback. If they have questions or concerns, address them with genuine interest and respect. Your responsiveness builds rapport and shows that you genuinely care about their experience.

8. Apply the 10-20-30 rule

Apply the 10-20-30 presentation rule and keep it short, sweet and impactful! Stick to ten slides, deliver your presentation within 20 minutes and use a 30-point font to ensure clarity and focus. Less is more, and your audience will thank you for it!

9. Implement the 5-5-5 rule

Simplicity is key. Limit each slide to five bullet points, with only five words per bullet point and allow each slide to remain visible for about five seconds. This rule keeps your presentation concise and prevents information overload.

Simple presentations are more engaging because they are easier to follow. Summarize your presentations and keep them simple with Venngage’s gallery of simple presentation templates and ensure that your message is delivered effectively across your audience.

1. How to start a presentation?

To kick off your presentation effectively, begin with an attention-grabbing statement or a powerful quote. Introduce yourself, establish credibility and clearly state the purpose and relevance of your presentation.

2. How to end a presentation?

For a strong conclusion, summarize your talking points and key takeaways. End with a compelling call to action or a thought-provoking question and remember to thank your audience and invite any final questions or interactions.

3. How to make a presentation interactive?

To make your presentation interactive, encourage questions and discussion throughout your talk. Utilize multimedia elements like videos or images and consider including polls, quizzes or group activities to actively involve your audience.

In need of inspiration for your next presentation? I’ve got your back! Pick from these 120+ presentation ideas, topics and examples to get started. 

Creating a stunning presentation with Venngage is a breeze with our user-friendly drag-and-drop editor and professionally designed templates for all your communication needs. 

Here’s how to make a presentation in just 5 simple steps with the help of Venngage:

Step 1: Sign up for Venngage for free using your email, Gmail or Facebook account or simply log in to access your account. 

Step 2: Pick a design from our selection of free presentation templates (they’re all created by our expert in-house designers).

Step 3: Make the template your own by customizing it to fit your content and branding. With Venngage’s intuitive drag-and-drop editor, you can easily modify text, change colors and adjust the layout to create a unique and eye-catching design.

Step 4: Elevate your presentation by incorporating captivating visuals. You can upload your images or choose from Venngage’s vast library of high-quality photos, icons and illustrations. 

Step 5: Upgrade to a premium or business account to export your presentation in PDF and print it for in-person presentations or share it digitally for free!

By following these five simple steps, you’ll have a professionally designed and visually engaging presentation ready in no time. With Venngage’s user-friendly platform, your presentation is sure to make a lasting impression. So, let your creativity flow and get ready to shine in your next presentation!

Like what you're reading?

Discover over 60 engaging 5-minute presentation topics

Get your team on prezi – watch this on demand video.

Anete Ezera August 21, 2023

Delivering impactful presentations doesn’t always require a marathon of speaking. In fact, condensing your message into a succinct 5-minute presentation can be just as powerful. In this article, we’ll explore a 5-minute presentation topics list that captivate your audience’s attention, spark their curiosity, and leave a lasting impression. Whether looking for 5-minute presentation topics for college students, topics for professionals, or simply looking for a suitable subject to share insights, these categorized topics offer a concise platform to convey your message effectively.

Exploring a variety of engaging 5-minute presentation topics

Personal growth and well-being.

• The Power of Positivity: How cultivating a positive mindset impacts your daily life.
• The Journey of Mindfulness: Navigating the benefits of mindfulness and meditation.
• Overcoming Procrastination: Techniques to boost productivity and break the habit.
• The Science of Happiness: Unraveling the psychology behind happiness.
• Cultivating Resilience: Techniques to build resilience and bounce back from setbacks.
• Mastering Mindful Breathing: Introducing the art of mindful breathing to alleviate stress.

Innovations and sustainability

• The Rise of Renewable Energy: How sustainable resources are shaping our future.
• Sustainable Fashion Choices: Shedding light on the environmental impact of clothing choices.
• Impact of Microplastics: Raising awareness about microplastics’ effects on ecosystems and health.
• Unveiling Virtual Reality: A brief overview of the transformative potential of VR technology.
• The Future of Mobility: Discussing innovations in transportation, from electric vehicles to autonomous driving.
• Introduction to Blockchain: Simplifying the concept of blockchain and its applications.

Communication and personal development

• The Art of Storytelling: Why stories resonate deeply and influence perceptions.
• Art of Active Listening: Exploring the significance of active listening in communication.
• Effective Public Speaking: Tips to enhance speaking skills in various settings.
• Understanding Body Language: Decoding nonverbal cues in effective communication.
• Cultivating a Growth Mindset: Insights into the power of a growth mindset.
• Unconventional Careers: Exploring exciting career paths that defy traditional norms.

Technology and insights

• Digital Privacy Concerns: Exploring the implications of online data security.
• The Impact of Social Media: Unveiling its effects on mental health and society.
• Cybersecurity Essentials: Safeguarding personal data in the digital age.
• Introduction to Cryptocurrency: Simplifying the complex world of cryptocurrency.
• Exploring Genetic Engineering: A concise overview of genetic engineering’s science and ethics.
• The Impact of Artificial Intelligence: Delving into AI’s transformative potential on industries and life.
• The Future of Work: Exploring how technology is reshaping the workplace.

Practical skills and techniques

• Tackling Time Management: Demonstrating efficient strategies for organizing your day.
• Language Learning Hacks: Quick strategies to accelerate language learning.
• Effective Time Blocking: Techniques for maximizing productivity through structured time management.
• The Magic of Minimalism: Exploring the benefits of decluttering and simplifying life.
• Nutrition Hacks: Quick insights into making healthier food choices.
• The Art of Negotiation: Tips for successful negotiation in personal and professional settings.
• Crisis Communication: Strategies for effective communication during challenging times.

Creativity and exploration

• Unlocking Innovative Solutions: Techniques to foster creative thinking and problem-solving.
• Exploring Astronomy: A brief journey through the universe’s wonders and celestial bodies.
• The Art of Photography: Unveiling the secrets to capturing captivating and meaningful images.
• Music Therapy: How music impacts emotions and well-being, and its potential for healing.
• The World of Origami: Discovering the ancient art of paper folding and its therapeutic benefits.
• Inspiring Travel Destinations: Showcasing unique places that offer enriching travel experiences.
• Exploring Local Cuisine: A tantalizing exploration of regional dishes and their cultural significance.
• The Beauty of Calligraphy: A glimpse into the world of elegant and expressive handwriting.

Environmental awareness and conservation

• The Importance of Biodiversity: Exploring the significance of diverse ecosystems and their role in sustaining life.
• Climate Change Solutions: Highlighting actionable steps individuals and communities can take to combat climate change.
• Ocean Conservation: Shedding light on the challenges facing marine ecosystems and the need for preservation.
• Green Initiatives in Cities: Showcasing innovative urban projects that prioritize sustainability and green spaces.
• Wildlife Protection Efforts: Discussing the importance of safeguarding endangered species and their habitats.
• Upcycling and Repurposing: Creative ways to reduce waste and repurpose materials for a more sustainable lifestyle.
• Eco-Friendly Gardening: Tips for cultivating gardens that support local biodiversity and minimize environmental impact.
• Food Waste Reduction: Strategies to minimize food waste and contribute to a more sustainable food system.

Cultural insights and diversity

• Cultural Traditions Around the World: Exploring unique customs, festivals, and rituals from different cultures.
• Language Diversity: Showcasing the richness of languages spoken globally and their importance in preserving heritage.
• Cross-Cultural Communication: Insights into effective communication across diverse cultural backgrounds.
• Global Cuisines: A culinary journey through the flavors and dishes that define different regions.
• Traditional Arts and Crafts: Celebrating the craftsmanship and artistic expressions of various cultures.
• Celebrating Diversity: Embracing the value of inclusivity and the benefits of diverse perspectives.
• Traveling Responsibly: Tips for respectful and culturally sensitive travel experiences.
• International Etiquette: Navigating cultural norms and customs when interacting with people from different backgrounds.

Health and wellness

• The Benefits of Regular Exercise: Exploring the positive impacts of physical activity on overall well-being.
• Mind-Body Connection: Unveiling the link between mental health and physical well-being.
• Balanced Nutrition for Optimal Health: Tips for making nutritious food choices that support wellness.
• Stress Management Techniques: Strategies to cope with stress and maintain mental and emotional balance.
• Importance of Hydration: Highlighting the role of proper hydration in maintaining good health.
• Quality Sleep Habits: Discussing the significance of quality sleep and tips for improving sleep patterns.
• Mental Health Awareness: Shedding light on the importance of understanding and supporting mental health.
• Holistic Approaches to Wellness: Exploring holistic practices that address mind, body, and spirit.

Historical perspectives

• Influential Women in History: Celebrating the accomplishments and contributions of remarkable women.
• Turning Points in History: Exploring pivotal moments that shaped the course of human history.
• Ancient Civilizations: A glimpse into the achievements and legacies of civilizations from the past.
• Revolutionary Inventions: Unveiling inventions that revolutionized industries and daily life.
• World-Changing Events: Discussing events that had a profound impact on societies and cultures.
• Great Leaders Throughout Time: Highlighting the leadership styles and achievements of notable figures.
• Cultural Renaissance Periods: Exploring periods of cultural revival and artistic innovation.
• Lessons from History: Extracting valuable lessons and insights from historical events and figures.

With these categories and their respective examples, you have a comprehensive palette of engaging 5-minute presentation topics catering to various interests and purposes. Whether you’re sparking conversations, sharing insights, or simply enhancing your presentation skills, these topics offer a platform for concise and impactful communication.

For further inspiration on crafting compelling topics, explore Prezi’s comprehensive guide on good presentation topics and presentation night ideas .

Elevating your short-form presentation skills

Creating and delivering a compelling 5-minute presentation requires a strategic approach to ensure your message is concise, engaging, and impactful. Here are some best practices to keep in mind:

Define a clear message

Start by defining the core message or main takeaway you want your audience to remember. Keep it focused and concise to ensure your presentation remains on track.

Structure with purpose

Organize your presentation with a clear structure: introduction, main points, and conclusion. Each section should flow logically and contribute to the overall message.

Learn more about how to effectively structure your presentation by watching the following video:

Engaging opening

Begin with an attention-grabbing opening that hooks your audience and sets the tone for the rest of your presentation. This could be a surprising fact, a thought-provoking question, or a captivating anecdote.

Concise content

Keep your content concise and to the point. Avoid information overload and focus on the most relevant and impactful details that support your main message.

Visual aids

Use visuals sparingly to complement your spoken words. Visual aids should be simple, relevant, and easy to understand. They should enhance your message, not distract from it.

Rehearse your presentation multiple times to become comfortable with the content and timing. Practice helps you refine your delivery and identify areas for improvement.

Time management

Keep a close eye on your time during practice and the actual presentation. Aim to stay within the 5-minute limit to ensure your message is delivered effectively.

Engaging delivery

Maintain good eye contact, use appropriate gestures, and vary your vocal tone to keep your audience engaged. A confident and enthusiastic delivery enhances your message’s impact.

Discover more about engaging delivery by mastering the art of storytelling :

Relevance and depth

Prioritize quality over quantity. Instead of covering numerous points superficially, delve deeper into a few key ideas to provide valuable insights.

Transitions

Use smooth transitions between sections to guide your audience through your presentation. These transitions create a seamless flow that keeps listeners engaged.

Call to action

Conclude your presentation with a clear call to action that aligns with your main message. Encourage your audience to take a specific action or reflect on what they’ve learned.

Choose a relevant topic

Perhaps most importantly, select a topic that is relevant to your audience’s interests, needs, and preferences. Make sure it aligns with the purpose of your presentation and resonates with your listeners. For example, if you’re preparing for an interview, be sure to research 5-minute interview presentation topics. Here are a few examples; 

• My Professional Journey: Share your career path, highlighting key experiences, and accomplishments, and how they align with the role you’re interviewing for. 
• Strategic Problem-Solving: Present a real-world challenge you’ve encountered and walk through the steps you took to analyze, strategize, and find a solution. 
• Innovative Ideas for Company Growth: Propose innovative strategies or initiatives that could drive growth, improve efficiency, or enhance the company’s offerings. 
• Market Trends and Insights: Present your analysis of current market trends, including opportunities and challenges, and discuss how your insights could benefit the company. 
• Effective Team Leadership: Describe a situation where you successfully led a team to achieve a common goal, emphasizing your leadership style, communication, and conflict-resolution skills.

Discover more presentation ideas that’ll help you craft a compelling presentation:

Using these topics for 5 minute presentations and delivering them effectively 

Crafting and delivering a 5 minute presentation requires finesse in both content creation and delivery. By selecting a focused topic, structuring your presentation effectively, and practicing your delivery, you can make the most of these brief but effective moments in the spotlight. The diverse array of the best 5 minute presentation topics showcased here offers a launchpad for your creative expression, sparking engaging conversations and leaving a lasting impression on your audience. Remember, it’s not about the duration—it’s about the quality and resonance of your message. To create an attention-grabbing presentation that moves your audience, try Prezi today.

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10-Minute Presentation Topics | 50 Unique Ideas in 2024

Lawrence Haywood • 05 Apr 2024 • 10 min read

For 10 minutes, what can you really do? A shower? A power nap? An entire presentation?

You might already be sweating at the idea of that last one. Cramming an entire presentation into 10 minutes is tough, but doing it without even knowing what to talk about is even tougher. So let’s check out 10-minute presentation topics

No matter where you’ve been challenged to give a 10-minute presentation, we’ve got your back. Check out the ideal presentation structure below and over fifty 10-minute presentation topics, you can use for your big (actually, pretty small) speech. So, let’s check out the best 50 10-minute presentation topics!

Table of Contents

• The 10-Minute Presentation Structure
• Topics for College Students
• Topics for Interviews
• Relatable Topics
• Interesting Topics
• Controversial Topics

Frequently Asked Questions

Start in seconds.

Get free 10-minute presentation topics and templates. Sign up for free and take what you want from the template library!

Tips from AhaSlides – 10-minute presentation topics

• Types of Presentation
• Product presentation
• Business presentation

The 10-Minute Presentation Topics Structure

As you might imagine, the hardest part of a 10-minute presentation is actually sticking to 10 minutes. None of your audience, organisers or fellow speakers will be pleased if your speech starts running over, but it’s hard to know how not to.

You might be tempted to cram as much information as possible, but doing so is just going to make for an overbearing presentation. Especially for this type of presentation , knowing what to leave out is as much of a skill as knowing what to put in, so try and follow the sample below for a perfectly structured presentation.

• Introduction (1 slide) – Start your presentation with a quick question, fact or story relayed in a maximum of 2 minutes.
• Body (3 slides) – Get into the nitty gritty of your talk with 3 slides. Audiences struggle to take home more than three ideas, so spacing all three out over the course of 6 or 7 minutes can be very effective.
• Conclusion (1 slide) – End it all with a quick sum up of your 3 main points. You should be able to do this in 1 minute.

This 10-minute presentation example format contains a fairly conservative 5 slides, based on the famous 10-20-30 rule of presentations. In that rule, an ideal presentation is 10 slides in 20 minutes, meaning a 10-minute presentation would only require 5 slides.

Use interactive features with AhaSlides to gain better engagement in any type of presentation! You can spin the fun to the presentation, by gathering crowd ideas by idea board , live word clouds , or surveying them by top free survey tool , online polling , and also test their knowledge with an online quiz creator !

10 Ideas for College Students – 10-Minute Presentation Topics

A 10-minute presentation is all you need as a college student to show your knowledge and forward-thinking values. So let’s check out few 10-minute presentation topics!

They’re also great practice for presentations you might be making in the future. If you feel comfortable within 10 minutes, chances are that you’ll be alright in the future, too.

• How to work alongside AI – Artificial intelligence is making huge steps forward daily. We’ll soon be in a different world, so how are you, the worker of the future, going to deal with it? This is a super interesting topic and one that’s very relevant for your classmates.
• Fighting the climate catastrophe – The issue of our age. What is it doing to us and how do we solve it?
• Portable homes – The portable home movement is on the way to revolutionising the way we live. What’s good and bad about having a house you can move around and what does your ideal one look like?
• The thrift life – How to save money on clothes, along with the pros and cons of throwaway fashion for youngsters.
• The future of streaming platforms – Why is TV on demand so great and why is it not universal? Or is it stealing too much of our free time?
• What happened to newspapers? – Newspapers are probably ancient technology to college students like you. A deep dive into history will reveal what they were and why they’re on their way out of print.
• The evolution of the mobile phone – Has any device in history advanced as quickly as mobile phones have? There’s so much to talk about in this 10-minute presentation topic.
• The life and times of your hero – A great chance to show your love for someone who inspires you the most. This can be within or outside of your college subject.
• My permaculture future – If you’re looking for a greener existence in your future, try explaining to your classmates about the advantages and logistics of having a permaculture garden.
• E-waste – We dump out so much electrical waste these days. Where does it all go and what happens to it?

10 Interview Presentation Ideas – 10-Minute Presentation Topics

More and more nowadays, recruiters are turning to quick-fire presentation as a means of testing a candidate’s skill and confidence in presenting something.

But, it’s more than that. Recruiters also want to learn about you as a person. They want to know what interests you, what makes you tick and what has changed your life in a profound way.

If you can nail any of these presentation topics in your interview, you’ll be starting next Monday!

• Someone who inspires you – Pick a hero and talk about their background, their achievements, what you’ve learned from them and how it’s shaped you as a person.
• The most eye-opening place you’ve ever been – A travelling experience or holiday that blew your mind. This might not necessarily be your favourite ever abroad experience, but it was one that made you realise something you had not thought about before.
• An imagined problem – Set out a hypothetical problem at the company you’re applying for. Show the recruiters the steps you would take to eradicate that problem for good.
• Something you’re proud of – We’ve all got achievements we’re proud of, and they do not necessarily work achievements. A quick 10-minute presentation on something you’ve done or made that has made you proud can reveal a lot of good stuff about you as a person.
• The future of your field – Make some interesting, bold predictions about where you think the industry is heading in the upcoming years. Do research, get stats to back up your claims, and avoid being condescending.
• A workflow you’ve fixed – Untidy workflows are rampant in many workplaces. If you’ve had a hand in turning something inefficient into a well-oiled machine, make a presentation about it!
• A book you’d love to write – Assuming you were a top-class wordsmith, what’s the one topic you’d love to write a book about? Would it be fiction or non-fiction? What would the plot be? Who are the characters?
• Your favourite work culture – Choose the job with the best work culture in terms of office atmosphere, rules, after-work activities and trips away. Explain what was so great about it; it might give your potential new boss a few ideas!
• Pet peeves in the workplace – If you fancy yourself as a bit of a comedian, listing out the things that grind your gears in the office could be a good laugh and a nice bit of observational comedy for your recruiters. Make sure it’s actually funny though, as listening to a candidate moan for 10 minutes is not normally something that leads to recruitment.
• The good and bad of remote working – Surely every office worker in the world has experience of remote working. Pry open your own experiences and discuss whether or not they’ve been for the better or for, the worse.

10 Relatable 10-Minute Presentation Topics

People love stuffs they can relate to their own experiences. It’s the reason why your presentation on the problems of the post office was a hit, but your one on the use of thermoplongeurs and suspension compression on modern fatigue carousels was an absolute travesty.

Keeping topics nicely open and accessible for everyone is a great way to get a good reaction. Do you need some topics for presentation that participants can get involved in quickly? Check out these fun presentation topics ideas as below…

• The best Disney princess – The best interesting presentation topics! Everyone’s got their favourite; who’s the one that gives you the most hope for generations of strong, independent girls?
• The greatest language ever – Maybe it’s the language that sounds the sexiest, looks the sexiest or the one that just works the best.
• Coffee vs tea – Most people have a preference, but very few have the numbers to back it up. Do some scientific research into what’s better between coffee and tea and why.
• Stand-up – You may not initially think it, but a stand-up comedy performance is definitely a presentation of sorts. 10 minutes is a great time window for some witty observations that make everyone laugh.
• Reasons for procrastination – List out all the things that keep you from doing what you’re supposed to be doing. Remember to tell some stories in this – chances are that almost all of your audience will be able to relate.
• Is social distancing for life? Introverts, assemble. Or actually, don’t. Should we keep social distancing an opt-in, opt-out kind of thing?
• Paper books vs ebooks – This one is all about physical touch and nostalgia against modern convenience. It’s a fight for our age.
• Identity of the decades – We all know the distinction between the 70s, 80s and 90s, but what were the unique cultural points of the 2000s and 2010s? Will we see later or will they just never get their own identities?
• Pluto’s a planet – Believe it or not, there are a surprising number of Pluto aficionados out there. Talking about how Pluto’s a planet could really get them on your side, and they’re a powerful bunch.
• Observational comedy – A dive into the most relatable of relatable short presentation topics. What makes observational comedy so relatable?

10 Interesting 10-Minute Presentation Topics

This one is the exact opposite of ‘relatable topics’. These short presentation topics are all about super interesting scientific phenomena that a lot of people don’t know about.

You don’t have to be relatable when you can be fascinating!

• Crown shyness – A presentation that explores the phenomenon of the crowns of trees that grow in such a way as not to touch each other.
• Sailing stones – There are rocks that can sail across the floor of Death Valley, but what causes it?
• Bioluminescence – Dive into what makes certain animals and plants light up the night using just their bodies. Include heaps of pictures in this one, it’s a glorious sight!
• What happened to Venus? – Venus and Earth came into existence at the same time, made of the same stuff. Yet, Venus is a real hellscape of a planet – so what happened?
• Music therapy in Alzheimer’s treatment – Music is so effective in treating Alzheimer’s disease. Take a dive into the interesting reason why that is.
• What the hell is slime mould? – An exploration of the mould made up of single cells that can solve mazes when those cells combine forces.
• All about Havana Syndrome – The mysterious illness that struck the US embassy in Cuba – where did it come from and what did it do?
• The origins of Stonehenge – How did people 5000 years ago drag boulders from the Welsh highlands to lowland England? Also, why did they even decide to build Stonehenge?
• Intuition – Gut feeling, sixth sense; whatever you want to call it, scientists don’t really know what it is.
• Deja vu – We all know the feeling, but how does it work? Why do we feel deja vu?

10 Controversial 10-Minute Presentation Topics

Check out some controversial 10-minute presentation topics. Not only are social topics for presentation, but these are also ideal topics for presentation for students in class as they can make positive debates in the learning environment.

• Cryptocurrency: good or bad? – It resurfaces in the news every few months, so everyone’s got an opinion, but we often only hear one side of the cryptocoin and not the other. In this 10-minute presentation, you can introduce the good and bad of crypto.
• Should we ban Black Friday? – Mass consumerism and mass tramplings at store entrances – has Black Friday gone too far? Some will say it’s not gone far enough.
• Minimalism – A new way to live that’s the opposite of everything Black Friday represents. How does it work and why should you try it?
• The best stuff for your health – Another one about which everyone’s got something to say. Do the research and give the facts.
• Disney whitewashing – This one’s definitely a controversial topic. It could be a quick exploration of how Disney seemingly chooses and alters skin tones depending on the story being told.
• Time to eat some bugs – As the world will soon have to move away from meat, what are we going to replace it with? Hope your audience likes cricket sundaes!
• Free speech – Is free speech something we still have? Are you having it right now while you give this presentation? That’s a pretty easy one to answer.
• Gun laws around the world – See how the world’s most gunned-up country compares to other countries in terms of weapons available and its ramifications.
• 1 million vs 1 billion – The difference between $1,000,000 and $1,000,000,000 is much bigger than you think. There are so many ways to highlight the enormous wealth gap in a 10-minute presentation.
• Military spending – We could solve all world issues in a flash if every country dissolved its military and used its funds for good. Is it feasible?

Bonus Topics: Vox

Looking for unique topics for presentation? Being your great idea source, Vox is an American online magazine with a real knack for making insightful video essays on interesting topics you may never have thought about. They were the guys behind the ‘ Explained ‘ series on Netflix, and they’ve also got their own YouTube channel full of topics.

The videos vary in length, but you can choose any of these to present if you feel like it’s interesting enough for your crowd. They are not only the best topics for presentation in college but also unique topics for presentation in office. Contract or expand the information in the video to 10 minutes and make sure you can present it comfortably.

Some of Vox’s videos include trendy topics for presentation…

• How music on TikTok goes viral.
• London’s super basements.
• The AI behind creating art on demand.
• The end of oil.
• The rise of K-pop.
• Why diets fail.
• Many, many more…

Wrapping Up

10 minutes is, categorically, not a long time , so yes, 10-minute presentation topics can be difficult! Okay, it’s a long time to spend on your turn on the karaoke machine, but it’s not a long time for a presentation. But those also can be the best ideas for video presentations!

Above is your choice of 10-minute presentation topics!

Nailing yours starts with the right topic. Any of the 50 unique ones above would be a great way to kick off a 10-minute presentation (or even a 5-minute presentation ).

Once you have your topic, you’ll want to craft the structure of your 10-minute talk and the content. Check out our presentation tips to keep your presentation fun and watertight.

3 magic ingredients of Amazing Presentations?

The Audience, Speaker and Transformation in-between.

How do you present for 15 minutes?

20-25 slides are perfect, as 1-2 slides should be spoken in 1 minute.

Is a 10-minute presentation long?

a 20-minute presentation should be 9 – 10 pages long, while a 15-minute presentation should be 7-8 pages long. Therefore, the 10-minute presentation should be around 3-4 pages long

Lawrence Haywood

Former ESL teacher and quiz master converted to the wild slide. Now a content creator, traveller, musician and big time slider preaching the good word of interactivity.

More from AhaSlides

Put a stop to deadline pressure, and have your homework done by an expert.

Interesting 5 Minute Presentation Topics That Work

If you have a presentation assignment to prepare, it is crucial to start by selecting a good topic. While it is true that there are numerous topics to select from, most students find it challenging to narrow down to the best ones for their projects. So, if you find yourself in this situation, check out the following winning presentation topics to impress your audience.

How to Pick Good Oral Presentation Topics

When looking for unique topics for presentation, the most important thing is to answer the question, “How do you select the best?” Here are some useful tips:

Pick the Topic Depending on the Purpose of the Presentation Is the presentation about addressing conservation issues, human rights, or economic-related problems? In most cases, lecturers specify the area of focus. However, there are instances when it might be left open for you. The Targeted Audience Here, you need to factor how knowledgeable the audience is, the level of education, and its needs. Other things to consider about the audience include gender, age and race. Think about the Topics to Avoid The best topics to talk about in a presentation should not be offensive to the targeted audience. Even if you decide to write a presentation on a controversial topic, such commercial whaling in the Atlantic, it is advisable to stay objective and professional. Go for the Oral Presentation Topics that You are Passionate About If you select a topic that you do not like, there is a risk of getting bored midway and losing connection when making the presentation. For example, if you fancy issues about conservation, picking a topic in a different area can make writing the presentation challenging.

Good Presentation Topics Related to Education

• Use of internet as a teaching aid.
• Punishment use in school: Does it meet the anticipated effects?
• Online learning versus the traditional teaching methods.
• Helping students with learning disabilities to achieve better grades.
• Methods of assessing knowledge in school children.
• Effects of different strategies used to teach children with disabilities.
• Learning disabilities in children,
• Common misconceptions about hypnosis.
• Pros and cons of graduate studies.
• The role of technology in education.

PowerPoint Presentation Topics for College Students

• Whale conservation: Why everyone should be involved.
• The secret to success in social media marketing.
• The history of cosmetic makeup.
• Are kindles better than paper books for students?
• Montessori education: What does it mean?
• College degree: What are the advantages?
• Safety of students in school campuses.
• The most effective way to stop terrorism.

5 Minute Presentation Topics on Health

• Anxiety disorders: Why are they so common in adults?
• COVID-19: Why did the development of its vaccine take so long?
• Post COVID-19 period: Is the globe prepared well to counter another pandemic?
• What are the main causes of insomnia among adults?
• Complications during pregnancy and how to avoid them.
• Chromosomal abnormalities.
• What are the main signs of stress in adolescents?
• Malnutrition in Syria.
• How effective was WHO in responding to COVID-19 pandemic?

Top Business Presentation Topics

• Should people start businesses when in school?
• Capital marketing reforms.
• Mutual fund: How does it work?
• What is the significance of saving money?
• Cash management system in international organizations.
• Monitoring stock market trends.
• Is betting a good source of income?

5 Minute Presentation Ideas about Society

• What is the impact of human behaviour in the society?
• The main disadvantages of stereotypes in the society.
• The main things you should know about feminism.
• Is it a good thing to judge people with their appearance?
• Fixing gender roles in the society.
• Is it impossible to halt global warming?

Easy Presentations Topics

• Is military a good career choice for women?
• Public toilets: Why they should be clean all the time.
• Retirement homes: Explaining why they are so significant today.
• The effects of bullying others in school.
• Are generic products good?
• Gay marriage: Is it good or bad?
• Top three strategies for improving your credit score.

Finance Topics for Presentation in College

• What is the best time to expand your business offshore?
• The standards for international financial reporting.
• The impact the US dollar the global financial market.
• What is the procedure for purchasing a house in the UK?
• Analysing the process of buying a house in Ireland.
• Comparing the US and Chinese economies.

5 minute Presentation Ideas for School

• What are the best ways to assist refugees?
• Is the United Nations effective in preventing a global war?
• The impacts of drone technology development.
• Living in China or the United States: Which is better?
• Why is Africa still underdeveloped?
• Are the global institutions doing enough to curb child labour?
• Is global warming real?

Why You Should Seek Professional Help with Your Presentation

Once you have impressed listeners with a good topic for presentation, they also look forward to carefully researched points. Therefore, you should consider selecting the best topics for group presentations as the first step, and then move to writing your work professionally. To do this, you need to know how to craft a good presentation and have the right skills. However, many students lack them and end up getting stuck or preparing low-quality presentation.

In other cases, students lack ample time or have competing assignments that make completing the tasks difficult. No matter the reason making it difficult for you to prepare the assignment, the good thing is that professional help is only a click away.

The help is offered by expert writers with experience in preparing quality PowerPoint presentations. Besides they are also cheap and a lot of students use their services to get better grades. So, this is a good opportunity to use their service and make your presentation to stand out. Do not keep wondering how other students managed to get top grades in their presentations; you too can stand out with the help of writing experts.

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October 12, 2023

250 unique presentation ideas

Need some inspiration for presentation topics that are not boring? Here's 250 of them.

Co-founder, Head of Product

Capturing people’s attention has become more difficult than ever. So what’s the key to creating a memorable presentation that engages your audience?

It starts by picking a presentation topic that stands out. Whether you’re a student, hobbyist, or professional, here are more than 250 unique presentation ideas — and best practices — to jumpstart your creative process.

How to choose a great presentation topic

There’s no such thing as a bad presentation idea in general. A good presentation topic is one that is well suited for your goals, audience, and setting. A great presentation topic is one that is appropriate for its context and where you can bring unique or novel perspective.

Ask yourself these questions when choosing a presentation topic.

• Articulate your goals: Why are you presenting? Is it to inform, persuade, entertain, or inspire? You should be able to articulate the three takeaways your audience should leave the presentation with. Write these down.
• Understand your audience : Who will be watching or listening? Consider their demographics, interests, and level of knowledge. How in depth should you go in your presentation? What content formats will resonate with them?
• Define your constraints: What medium will your presentation use? Are you presenting on stage to hundreds of people in a lecture hall or over video conference to a small team? How long do you have? How many slides do you need?
• Make it your own: Do you have a unique angle or perspective on this topic? That is the biggest difference between a boring presentation and a captivating one. How passionate are you about it? If you’re disinterested, your audience will be able to tell.
• Narrow your focus : There’s nothing more boring than a generic presentation. The broader your topic, the more you run the risk of not being able to say anything new. Narrow your topic down to something specific and manageable. Instead of "The Benefits of a Healthy Diet,” try "10 Superfoods and Their Impact on Brain Health."

How to build a great presentation quickly

Just as an existing list of presentation topic ideas can help inspire you during the brainstorming phase, it can be helpful to get a jumpstart when you’re ready to make the presentation itself. One tool that can help you get over the daunting blank-page problem is an AI presentation maker, like Plus .

Plus AI can suggest presentation outlines to help you structure your content, design slides to save you time on formatting, and generate many variants to inspire you if you get stuck. You can try Plus for free by installing the Google Slides add-on below.

Whether or not you get started with an AI slide maker , you will also want to give some consideration to the visual appeal of your presentation. Understanding the basics of layout, information hierarchy, color, and type will help you craft a more beautiful presentation that connects with your viewers.

Personal presentation topics

Presentation topics based on your personal experience.

• Navigating my first year abroad: Lessons and insights from living in Japan
• The road to recovery: My personal journey after a major surgery
• Finding my roots: What I discovered tracing my ancestry and DNA
• From novice to marathoner: My running journey
• Mastering a new language: 10 tips from one year of learning Italian
• Fostering Fido: My experience as a first-time dog foster parent
• Adventures in veganism: My month-long challenge of going plant-based
• Off the beaten path: Backpacking through Southeast Asia's lesser-known gems
• My experiment with digital detox: My month without social media
• Becoming a minimalist: How decluttering transformed my life and mindset
• Couchsurfing chronicles: The good, the bad, the ugly
• Chasing the Northern Lights: My trip to Iceland
• Reconnecting with nature: My experience of a solo wilderness retreat
• Overcoming my fear of public speaking: 10 actionable techniques that worked for me
• Brewing passion: My journey into home brewing and craft beers
• Binge-watching for good: I watched 100 documentaries in a year. This is what I learned.
• The art of silence: My 10-day Vipassana meditation retreat
• Flavors of the world: Culinary discoveries from my global food tour
• Between two worlds: My life as a first-generation immigrant
• Celebrations across borders: How I celebrate traditional holidays with a twist
• From skeptic to believer: My transformative journey into holistic wellness

Presentation topics for job interviews or school applications

• 10 lessons I’ve learned from my successes and failures
• My leadership journey navigating a project with a remote team in three time zones
• How joining a college improv group enhanced my public speaking and spontaneity skills
• Coding for a cause: Developing a mobile app to connect local farmers with urban consumers
• How I used my fluency in Mandarin and Arabic when working in Dubai
• Innovating under pressure: Prototyping during a 48-hour hackathon
• My deep dive into ancient Mayan culture during a summer research fellowship in Guatemala
• Charting digital skies: Leveraging drone technology to improve urban infrastructure surveys
• From concept to canvas: Curating an exhibition on emerging artists in Southeast Asia
• How I spearheaded a campus-wide sustainability initiative that reduced plastic waste by 60%
• Pivoting with purpose: transitioning from a career in finance to championing mental health awareness
• How I created an AI chatbot to suggest recipes based on dietary preferences and restrictions
• Managing via metrics: How I led a junior team to exceed sales targets by 150%
• Blending tradition with tech: Digitizing ancient tribal patterns into modern fashion designs
• How I launched a startup focused on upcycled products in a circular economy
• How I built a peer-tutoring program for student athletes
• Integrating AI-driven solutions in a traditional manufacturing organization
• Scaling success: How I led a cross functional team to a 200% increase in quarterly sales
• Navigating change: Managing culture and process change through a company merger
• How I championed the adoption of cloud technologies in a decade-old enterprise
• Mentorship matters: How we accelerated junior staff promotions by 40%
• From chaos to clarity: My experience streamlining complex internal processes
• Elevating the brand: How we found a niche in a crowded market
• Driving corporate sustainability to reduce costs and boosted brand image
• Crisis to comeback: My strategies for business continuity during unexpected disruptions
• Innovating from within: How our "skunkworks" project became a top revenue earner
• How I revamping our customer service approach, leading to a 50% drop in complaints
• Managing and integrating diverse teams across the globe

Educational presentation topics

Presentation topics on history that aren’t boring.

• What’s the deal with the Roman Empire and why are people obsessed with it?
• When cosmetics were deadly: The intriguing tale of makeup in the Elizabethan era
• Pirate queens and seafaring heroines: Untold stories of women who ruled the seas
• Lunar legends: Tracing mankind's fascination with the moon across ancient civilizations
• Dining through the ages: Bizarre and extravagant eating habits of medieval monarchs
• The fashion revolutionaries: How the flappers of the 1920s challenged societal norms
• Civilizations beneath the waves: Exploring sunken cities and their mysteries
• Espionage and intrigue: Notorious spies that changed the course of history
• From gladiators to samurais: The evolution of warriors' armor and weaponry
• Lost and found: Forgotten ancient texts and their impact on modern thought
• Beyond the pyramids: Lesser-known architectural wonders of ancient Egypt
• Dance of death: The cultural and historical significance of Europe's plague doctor masks
• High stakes and high heels: Tracing the controversial history of the stiletto
• Elixirs and potions: A deep dive into the bizarre world of medieval medicine
• The Underground Railroad's secret codes
• The fall of ancient metropolises
• From the vellum to the pixel: Evolution of manuscript illumination in the digital age
• In Caesar's footsteps: Decoding the linguistic evolution of Latin across the Roman Empire
• The astrolabe and its pivotal role in medieval astronomy and navigation
• Conundrums in cartography: Analyzing historical map inaccuracies and their implications
• Papyrus puzzles: The art and science of reconstructing ancient fragmented texts
• Alchemical ambitions: The quest for the philosopher's stone
• Secrets of the scriptorium: The intricate world of medieval book production
• Deciphering the neumes and notations of early Gregorian chants
• Byzantine bureaucracy in Constantinople
• Numismatic narratives: What ancient coin hoards reveal about trade, treachery, and treasure
• Siege warfare science: Deconstructing the trebuchet
• Guilds and their grip: The economics and politics of medieval craft associations

Presentation topics on science that are real mind-benders

• Quantum entanglement: The eerie phenomenon of "spooky action at a distance"
• Black holes and information paradox: Understanding Hawking radiation and its implications
• Time dilation: How moving faster can slow down time according to Einstein's relativity
• The holographic principle: Is our universe merely a 2D projection on a cosmic horizon?
• Multiverse theories: Exploring the possibility of parallel universes and alternate realities
• Quantum computing: How qubits might revolutionize our computational landscape
• Wormholes and interstellar travel: Shortcuts through spacetime?
• Dark matter and dark energy: The enigmatic forces driving our universe's expansion
• The Planck scale: A realm where gravity and quantum mechanics collide
• Quantum field theory: Understanding the vibrational essence of particles and forces
• Neutrino oscillations: The shape-shifting nature of these elusive subatomic particles
• Cosmic speed limits: Why nothing can go faster than light
• Quantum gravity: The quest to reconcile general relativity with the quantum world
• The simulation hypothesis: Are we living in a complex computational construct?
• Schrödinger's cat explained: How a thought experiment baffles our understanding of reality
• Time crystals: The strange materials where time keeps ticking, but never moves forward
• Antimatter mysteries: The mirror world of particles and why we're made of "normal" stuff
• Quantum teleportation is real, but not as sci-fi as you think
• Twisted light beams: Carrying more data with light's angular momentum
• How the butterfly effect shapes our world and the patterns we miss
• Eerie "songs" emitted by celestial objects
• A deep dive into quarks, gluons, and the dance of the subatomic
• How colliding black holes "ring" space-time like a bell
• The universe's fate: Exploring the Big Crunch, Big Freeze, and Big Rip scenarios

Presentation topics that are explainers

• The circular economy: Moving beyond recycling to a sustainable future
• Mutual funds and ETFs: Diversifying investments and how they differ
• Bonds vs. Stocks: Breaking down the basics and the risks involved
• How crypto tokens work: The basics of the blockchain
• Gene editing and CRISPR, explained.
• The psychology of misinformation: How and why fake news spreads
• Decoding the stock market: From bull markets to short selling, what it all actually means
• Net neutrality simplified: The battle for the internet's future, broken down
• The global supply chain: Why a delay in one country can mean empty shelves in another
• AI, explained: beyond the buzzwords, how they're shaping our world
• Derivatives and their dangers: From simple contracts to the 2008 financial crash
• The enigma of black boxes in airplanes: What they capture and why they're crucial
• Inflation and deflation: How prices move and what it means for your wallet
• How platforms like Instagram and TikTok decide what you see
• Hedge funds vs. private equity: The big players in finance and their strategies
• Modern vaccine development: mRNA, vector vaccines, and the race against time
• Exploring the gut-brain connection: Why your stomach might influence your mood
• Universal Basic Income (UBI): 10 experiments around the world
• The Electoral College, explained
• Understanding credit scores: What they are, why they matter, and how to improve them
• Back to basics: The three branches of the US government
• The filibuster explained: Its history, function, and the debates surrounding it
• How a bill becomes a law: The journey from an idea to legislation
• The Supreme Court demystified: How justices are chosen and the impact of their decisions
• Gerrymandering and redistricting: How district lines can shape election outcomes
• The role of lobbyists: Influence, advocacy, and the concerns about "dark money”
• The census and its significance: Population counts, representation, and funding at stake
• The U.S. budget process: How we allocate trillions and why it matters
• Compound interest: The magic behind how your money grows over time
• The role of central banks: Interest rates, money printing, and economic stabilization

Presentation topics that teach people how to do something

• 10 ways  to transform into a morning person
• How to build an authentic personal brand on social media
• Work-life balance: Strategies for time management and boundary setting
• How to forage in urban cities
• How to start aquascaping
• 10 steps to build a capsule wardrobe
• Fermentation 101: Making kombucha, kefir, and sauerkraut from scratch
• Skygazing: How to track satellites, space stations, and iridium flares
• How to marble paper: Crafting swirl patterns for artistic projects and bookbinding
• How to stay informed without feeling overwhelmed
• Optimizing productivity with the Pomodoro Technique
• Stressed at work? Try these coping strategies and mindfulness practices
• How to cultivate a Growth Mindset
• How to make an earthen oven in your backyard
• 5 easy steps to reduce screen time and reconnect with the offline world
• How to make prehistoric-style tools and art from flint.
• Learn how to whittle
• How to build a bee hotel
• How to homebrew mead
• Personal finance 101
• How to network effectively in a virtual world
• How to start a side hustle
• 25 new strategies for even the most seasoned remote worker
• How to have a difficult conversation

Professional presentation topics

Presentation topics to improve workplace dynamics.

• Cultivating Emotional Intelligence: Why EQ matters as much as IQ in the workplace
• Addressing and preventing workplace burnout: Strategies for holistic well-being
• Feedback is a gift: How to create a feedback-oriented culture
• Building inclusive teams: Celebrating diversity and ensuring equal opportunity
• 10 strategies to build trust and foster open communication
• The art of active listening: Strengthening connections and improving understanding
• How Radical Candor can transform your workplace culture
• Tackling unconscious bias: Raising awareness and promoting fairness
• Fostering psychological safety — what it really means
• Strategies for effective onboarding
• How to use MBTI in one-on-one feedback
• Navigating cross-generational dynamics
• Decoding Gen Z communications in the workplace
• The agile methodology and how it can apply to our team
• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: Patrick Lencioni’s model

Interactive presentation topics for team-building

• Escape room challenges for team building
• Design thinking workshop introduction
• Mystery product feedback session
• Reverse brainstorming: Tackling problems backward
• Story cubes for corporate storytelling
• Interactive polls and live surveys: Real-time feedback
• Role-reversal scenarios: A day in another's shoes
• Blindfolded trust exercises
• Personalized SWOT analysis for teams
• Interactive timeline creations: Charting company history
• Mock "Shark Tank" pitching event
• Building virtual worlds: An introduction to collaborative VR
• Innovation auction: Bidding on the future
• Interactive quiz challenges: Test your knowledge
• Persona crafting workshop for marketing teams

Presentation topics on digital marketing

• Conversational AI: Revolutionizing customer interactions in 2024
• The rise of ephemeral content: How disappearing media is capturing lasting attention
• Omnichannel marketing: Crafting seamless user experiences across all touchpoints
• The next wave of influencer marketing: Micro-communities and niche leaders
• Visual search optimization: The future of product discovery in e-commerce
• Augmented reality (AR) in advertising: Bridging virtual experiences with real-world sales
• Predictive analytics: Anticipating customer behavior in a post-cookie era
• Hyper-personalization in 2024: Beyond demographics to individualized content delivery
• Interactive email campaigns: Innovations in inbox engagement
• The resurgence of podcasts: Audio content strategies for brands
• Sustainable marketing: Embracing eco-conscious campaigns and strategies
• Neuromarketing insights: Leveraging brain science for more effective ads
• Video content evolution: From TikTok to virtual reality storytelling
• Blockchain in digital marketing: Still relevant?

Presentation ideas for sales teams

• Mastering remote sales pitches in 2024
• Leveraging platforms beyond LinkedIn
• Aligning with modern consumer values and ethics
• The role of AI in sales forecasting: Predictive models and real-time adjustments
• Account-based sales strategies: Hyper-targeted approaches for B2B success
• 10 sales strategies from the latest behavioral neuroscience research
• Never Split the Difference: Mastering negotiations
• Win clients with AI-generated personalized video pitches
• The future of sales automation, 10 new tools for 2024
• Ghosted: Addressing the silent rejections in the sales journey
• 3 infamous stories about the biggest sales blunders
• 10 unconventional channels for leads and conversions

Presentation ideas on productivity

• 10 new AI tools that can speed up how we work
• Pro tips for getting control over your Google Calendar
• Why multi-tasking doesn’t work and what you can do about it
• How to become better at email
• Why declaring email bankrupcy might be the right move
• Debunking the myth of the 4 hour work week
• Maximizing productivity with power naps
• What historical civilizations teach about modern-day productivity
• Strategic procrastination with project trackers
• Making the perfect playlist to get in the flow
• Setting and tracking future goals with all-in-one workspace tool like Notion or Coda
• Maximize tools in Slack to stay focused and minimize distractions
• Using voice memos to stay in the flow
• Setting up a knowledge management system for your team that actually works
• Habit-tracking apps to reinforce productive behaviors
• The benefits of keeping a daily journal

Just-for-fun presentation topics

Presentations in novel formats.

Try some of these alternative presentation formats to make your presentations more engaging or interactive.

• Pecha Kucha (or Ignite Talk): A presentation format originally from Japan, where you present 20 slides, each of which automatically advances after 20 seconds (15 seconds). It’s fast paced, super engaging, and can be hilarious to watch the presenter try to keep up with the slides.
• Lightning talk : A very short presentation of only a few minutes that gets straight to the point. It's popular in tech conferences, especially for introducing new ideas or concepts without going into depth.
• TED-style talk : These are short presentations focusing on one clear message, often accompanied by compelling narratives or personal stories. The presentation slides are usually very minimal, to keep the focus on the presenter.
• PowerPoint Karaoke : Presenters are given a set of slides they've never seen before and must improvise a talk on the spot. It’s a fun exercise in adaptability.
• Demo Slam : A fast-paced event where presenters get a limited time (often 3 minutes or less) to demonstrate a tech tool, technique, or tip. It's competitive, with the audience voting for their favorite demo.
• Speed Geeking : Similar to speed dating, presenters set up at multiple stations, and attendees rotate around, spending a few minutes at each station. It's a rapid-fire way to get exposed to multiple topics in a short time.
• PowerPoint Night : Take turns presenting funny and interactive topics. Great for remote socializing.

Presentation topics for weddings

• The groom's misadventures as a kid
• The bride's college escapades: Stories we will never let her forget
• High school days: Tales of the groom's awkward phase
• When paths crossed: Recounting the couple's unexpected first meeting
• Love letters: Reading old letters or messages exchanged between the couple
• A sibling's roast: A light-hearted, funny take on growing up with the bride or groom
• Adventures abroad: Slideshow of the couple’s nomadic year
• The proposal blooper: Narrating the behind-the-scenes mishaps of the proposal day
• Pets and the couple: Amusing stories of the couple's adventures with their furry friends
• Dance floor memories: Slideshow of the couple's most memorable dance-offs or moves
• Childhood dreams vs. reality, with cute photos
• Bucket list adventures: List of silly goals the couple hopes to achieve together

Presentation topics for birthday parties

• A journey through the birthday person's fashion choices over the years
• The great cake disasters
• Notes from my childhood diary
• Letters from the past
• A montage of dance moves from over the years at various birthdays
• Growing up in the 90s: Throwback to childhood trends we forgot about
• My pet chronicles
• Musical journey: Embarrassing playlist of old favorites
• Sports and spills
• The dating diaries: Remember this ex?
• Guess the year: Guests have to guess when a photo of the birthday person was taken

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How to Start a Presentation [+ Examples]

Published: September 13, 2023

The first step in mastering the art of delivering powerful presentations is understanding how to start a presentation properly.

In this post, you'll discover strategies for crafting a solid presentation opening, designing an impactful opening slide, and delivering a memorable presentation.

Table of Contents

Why Your Presentation Opening Matters

How to start a presentation, opening slide examples, best practices for starting a presentation.

The opening of your presentation sets the tone for your entire session.

Within the first few minutes, most of your audience will decide whether they find your expertise, experience, and topic compelling enough to warrant their attention.

Think of it this way: Your opening is a preview of your presentation like a trailer is a preview of a movie. If the five-minute trailer isn’t engaging or impactful, why should the audience bother sitting through the half-hour movie?

Your opening shapes the expectations of your audience and entices them to stay engaged throughout the session.

And although you’ll still need to work to maintain their attention, getting it right from the start will spare you the challenge of re-engaging a disinterested audience right from the beginning of your presentation.

This opening statement is powerful because rather than lead with his “credentials” or “accolades,” as the audience most likely expects, he defies that expectation.

He creates a sense of intrigue that instantly piques the audience's curiosity and compels them to pay closer attention.

Infuse humor.

In Tom Thum's TedTalk titled Beatbox Brilliance , he sets a lighthearted tone by stepping on stage wearing oversized sunglasses and declaring, “My name is Tom, and I've come here today to come clean about what I do for money.”

As you might expect, this humorous approach not only elicits laughter but also surprises the audience, who are intrigued and pleasantly surprised at the tone he sets for the presentation.

Ask a question.

Graham Shaw's presentation titled “ Why people believe they can’t draw - and how to prove they can ” begins with, “Hi, I've got a question for you - how many people here would say they can draw?”

Seeing as this is a relatively lighthearted question that’s simple to answer, the audience responds immediately.

Now, what makes this a powerful opening technique is that Graham then goes on to say:

“When people say they can’t draw, I think it's more to do with beliefs rather than talent and ability. When you say you can’t draw, that’s just an illusion, and today I’d like to prove that to you.”

By immediately challenging a widely held belief among the audience and promising to debunk it during the presentation, he employs a powerful technique that keeps the audience fully engaged.

This approach makes the audience feel “invested” in the outcome of the presentation and curious as to whether he can back up his claim.

2. Tell your audience why they should be listening to you.

Getting your audience’s attention is just one part of the equation. Once you have it, you must also explain why they should “keep” listening to you. Here are some ways to do this:

Highlight relevant personal experience.

In Phil Waknell’s opening section, he talks about how he’s spent the last ten years helping conference speakers, business leaders, and entrepreneurs prepare and deliver powerful presentations .

This immediately signals to the audience that he’s someone worth listening to and positions him as a credible source of insights based on the wealth of experience he has gathered.

Highlight your expertise.

During the opening section of Dr. Lara Boyd’s presentation titled “ After watching this, your brain will not be the same ,” she says, “I’m Dr. Lara Boyd, and I’m a brain researcher here at the University of British Columbia.”

Sharing her credentials as a brain researcher is crucial to gaining her audience's trust — especially considering the technicality of her topic.

But even while creating presentations outside fields like brain research, sharing qualifications and credentials in your opening section can be a powerful technique.

This helps you position yourself as a credible authority and reinforcing your audience's confidence in your ability to deliver valuable information.

Tell your audience what’s in it for them.

In Mel Robbins’ opening section for her presentation titled “ How to stop screwing yourself over ,” she ends her introduction by saying:

“I’m here for you. I’m going to tell you everything I know in less than 18 minutes about how to get what you want.”

Although she started the section by highlighting her experiences and expertise, she went further by explicitly stating the benefits her audience can expect from her presentation.

Doing this is a great way to create a compelling reason for your audience to invest their time and attention and emphasize the value of the presentation you’re about to deliver.

3. Introduce your topic.

If your topic is relatively simple to grasp or your audience is particularly knowledgeable, introducing your topic can be as easy as “Today, I’m going to be talking to you about how we’ve built a six-figure software company in 6 months.”

However, if your topic is more complex or unfamiliar to the audience, you must do a bit more heavy lifting in your opening section.

For example, Sam Bern’s “ My philosophy for a happy life ” presentation discusses how he lives a happy life despite having Progeria disease.

However, because this condition might be unfamiliar to some audience members, he takes some time in his opening section to talk about the illness before delving into the meat of his presentation.

Similarly, if you’re presenting on a complex topic or to an audience that isn’t knowledgeable, it’s essential to consider this when crafting your opening section.

4. Leverage storytelling.

Stories can create immersive experiences that captivate the audience and convey a core message.

For example, in the opening section of Sam Bern's presentation, he tells a story about his struggles while trying to achieve his goal of becoming a drummer in his school marching band, despite living with Progeria disease.

This sets the tone for his entire presentation by conveying an inspiring message of fighting against and succeeding despite the odds.

Another great example is the opening section of Josh Kaufman’s presentation, titled “ The First 20 Hours — how to learn anything ,” where he tells a story about his experience as a time-strapped first-time parent.

This story enhances the presentation as Josh eventually shares that this experience triggered his interest in studying how to become an efficient learner.

Finally, Amy Morins’s presentation “ The Secret of Becoming Mentally Strong ” is another excellent example of leveraging storytelling.

Amy starts her presentation with a thought-provoking story about observing a Facebook friend's seemingly perfect life.

She then highlights how such comparisons can lead to negative thought patterns and emphasizes the importance of cultivating mental resilience.

This relatable story not only resonates with her audience but also sets the stage for her message on building inner strength.

All these presentations are great examples that highlight how incorporating story-telling in your openings can be a powerful tool for creating memorable and impactful presentations.

Your presentation slides play a crucial role in determining the impact and effectiveness of your presentation.

In this section, you’ll find examples of 8 powerful opening slides across various use cases that not just support but enhance the presentation openings:

1. “ Blackboard is Getting an Upgrade ”

Although these are very different methods of injecting humor at the start of a presentation, they show how infusing humor can be a powerful tool for adding a touch of personality and creating a more enjoyable presentation for the audience.

4. Keep it short and sweet.

While it's important not to rush through the start of your presentation, keeping your opening concise is equally important. But remember, concise does not mean sacrificing substance; it simply means delivering information efficiently.

Essentially, you want an opening section that allows you to create a solid initial impression without losing the audience's interest.

So, how long should this opening secretion be?

Most successful presentation openings are under three minutes, and many are shorter, often clocking in at under one minute.

5. Embrace authenticity.

Contrary to popular belief, there isn't a specific personality that makes someone a better presenter. In fact, the most impactful presentations have been delivered by individuals with diverse characters.

Take, for instance, the contrasting styles of Tom Thum’s irreverent humor and animated mannerisms and Sam Bern, who adopts a relaxed and conversational approach. Despite their differences, both speakers have garnered millions of views for their talks.

So, rather than emulating or mimicking their presentations, the key takeaway is to embrace authenticity.

Allow your personality to shine through, lean on your strengths, and be human in your delivery.

Mastering the Art of Captivating Presentations

Starting a presentation is a skill that is as much an art as it is a science. Thankfully, it is also a skill that can be learned and honed.

By implementing the strategies in this guide and refining them through experience, you’ll become a master at delivering impactful presentations that command attention and leave a lasting impression.

All from the moment you step onto the stage.

Don't forget to share this post!

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How to Make a “Good” Presentation “Great”

• Guy Kawasaki

Remember: Less is more.

A strong presentation is so much more than information pasted onto a series of slides with fancy backgrounds. Whether you’re pitching an idea, reporting market research, or sharing something else, a great presentation can give you a competitive advantage, and be a powerful tool when aiming to persuade, educate, or inspire others. Here are some unique elements that make a presentation stand out.

• Fonts: Sans Serif fonts such as Helvetica or Arial are preferred for their clean lines, which make them easy to digest at various sizes and distances. Limit the number of font styles to two: one for headings and another for body text, to avoid visual confusion or distractions.
• Colors: Colors can evoke emotions and highlight critical points, but their overuse can lead to a cluttered and confusing presentation. A limited palette of two to three main colors, complemented by a simple background, can help you draw attention to key elements without overwhelming the audience.
• Pictures: Pictures can communicate complex ideas quickly and memorably but choosing the right images is key. Images or pictures should be big (perhaps 20-25% of the page), bold, and have a clear purpose that complements the slide’s text.
• Layout: Don’t overcrowd your slides with too much information. When in doubt, adhere to the principle of simplicity, and aim for a clean and uncluttered layout with plenty of white space around text and images. Think phrases and bullets, not sentences.

As an intern or early career professional, chances are that you’ll be tasked with making or giving a presentation in the near future. Whether you’re pitching an idea, reporting market research, or sharing something else, a great presentation can give you a competitive advantage, and be a powerful tool when aiming to persuade, educate, or inspire others.

• Guy Kawasaki is the chief evangelist at Canva and was the former chief evangelist at Apple. Guy is the author of 16 books including Think Remarkable : 9 Paths to Transform Your Life and Make a Difference.

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How to Structure your Presentation, with Examples

August 3, 2018 - Dom Barnard

For many people the thought of delivering a presentation is a daunting task and brings about a  great deal of nerves . However, if you take some time to understand how effective presentations are structured and then apply this structure to your own presentation, you’ll appear much more confident and relaxed.

Here is our complete guide for structuring your presentation, with examples at the end of the article to demonstrate these points.

Why is structuring a presentation so important?

If you’ve ever sat through a great presentation, you’ll have left feeling either inspired or informed on a given topic. This isn’t because the speaker was the most knowledgeable or motivating person in the world. Instead, it’s because they know how to structure presentations – they have crafted their message in a logical and simple way that has allowed the audience can keep up with them and take away key messages.

Research has supported this, with studies showing that audiences retain structured information  40% more accurately  than unstructured information.

In fact, not only is structuring a presentation important for the benefit of the audience’s understanding, it’s also important for you as the speaker. A good structure helps you remain calm, stay on topic, and avoid any awkward silences.

What will affect your presentation structure?

Generally speaking, there is a natural flow that any decent presentation will follow which we will go into shortly. However, you should be aware that all presentation structures will be different in their own unique way and this will be due to a number of factors, including:

• Whether you need to deliver any demonstrations
• How  knowledgeable the audience  already is on the given subject
• How much interaction you want from the audience
• Any time constraints there are for your talk
• What setting you are in
• Your ability to use any kinds of visual assistance

Before choosing the presentation’s structure answer these questions first:

• What is your presentation’s aim?
• Who are the audience?
• What are the main points your audience should remember afterwards?

When reading the points below, think critically about what things may cause your presentation structure to be slightly different. You can add in certain elements and add more focus to certain moments if that works better for your speech.

What is the typical presentation structure?

This is the usual flow of a presentation, which covers all the vital sections and is a good starting point for yours. It allows your audience to easily follow along and sets out a solid structure you can add your content to.

1. Greet the audience and introduce yourself

Before you start delivering your talk, introduce yourself to the audience and clarify who you are and your relevant expertise. This does not need to be long or incredibly detailed, but will help build an immediate relationship between you and the audience. It gives you the chance to briefly clarify your expertise and why you are worth listening to. This will help establish your ethos so the audience will trust you more and think you’re credible.

Read our tips on  How to Start a Presentation Effectively

2. Introduction

In the introduction you need to explain the subject and purpose of your presentation whilst gaining the audience’s interest and confidence. It’s sometimes helpful to think of your introduction as funnel-shaped to help filter down your topic:

• Introduce your general topic
• Explain your topic area
• State the issues/challenges in this area you will be exploring
• State your presentation’s purpose – this is the basis of your presentation so ensure that you provide a statement explaining how the topic will be treated, for example, “I will argue that…” or maybe you will “compare”, “analyse”, “evaluate”, “describe” etc.
• Provide a statement of what you’re hoping the outcome of the presentation will be, for example, “I’m hoping this will be provide you with…”
• Show a preview of the organisation of your presentation

In this section also explain:

• The length of the talk.
• Signal whether you want audience interaction – some presenters prefer the audience to ask questions throughout whereas others allocate a specific section for this.
• If it applies, inform the audience whether to take notes or whether you will be providing handouts.

The way you structure your introduction can depend on the amount of time you have been given to present: a  sales pitch  may consist of a quick presentation so you may begin with your conclusion and then provide the evidence. Conversely, a speaker presenting their idea for change in the world would be better suited to start with the evidence and then conclude what this means for the audience.

Keep in mind that the main aim of the introduction is to grab the audience’s attention and connect with them.

3. The main body of your talk

The main body of your talk needs to meet the promises you made in the introduction. Depending on the nature of your presentation, clearly segment the different topics you will be discussing, and then work your way through them one at a time – it’s important for everything to be organised logically for the audience to fully understand. There are many different ways to organise your main points, such as, by priority, theme, chronologically etc.

• Main points should be addressed one by one with supporting evidence and examples.
• Before moving on to the next point you should provide a mini-summary.
• Links should be clearly stated between ideas and you must make it clear when you’re moving onto the next point.
• Allow time for people to take relevant notes and stick to the topics you have prepared beforehand rather than straying too far off topic.

When planning your presentation write a list of main points you want to make and ask yourself “What I am telling the audience? What should they understand from this?” refining your answers this way will help you produce clear messages.

4. Conclusion

In presentations the conclusion is frequently underdeveloped and lacks purpose which is a shame as it’s the best place to reinforce your messages. Typically, your presentation has a specific goal – that could be to convert a number of the audience members into customers, lead to a certain number of enquiries to make people knowledgeable on specific key points, or to motivate them towards a shared goal.

Regardless of what that goal is, be sure to summarise your main points and their implications. This clarifies the overall purpose of your talk and reinforces your reason for being there.

Follow these steps:

• Signal that it’s nearly the end of your presentation, for example, “As we wrap up/as we wind down the talk…”
• Restate the topic and purpose of your presentation – “In this speech I wanted to compare…”
• Summarise the main points, including their implications and conclusions
• Indicate what is next/a call to action/a thought-provoking takeaway
• Move on to the last section

5. Thank the audience and invite questions

Conclude your talk by thanking the audience for their time and invite them to  ask any questions  they may have. As mentioned earlier, personal circumstances will affect the structure of your presentation.

Many presenters prefer to make the Q&A session the key part of their talk and try to speed through the main body of the presentation. This is totally fine, but it is still best to focus on delivering some sort of initial presentation to set the tone and topics for discussion in the Q&A.

Other common presentation structures

The above was a description of a basic presentation, here are some more specific presentation layouts:

Demonstration

Use the demonstration structure when you have something useful to show. This is usually used when you want to show how a product works. Steve Jobs frequently used this technique in his presentations.

• Explain why the product is valuable.
• Describe why the product is necessary.
• Explain what problems it can solve for the audience.
• Demonstrate the product  to support what you’ve been saying.
• Make suggestions of other things it can do to make the audience curious.

Problem-solution

This structure is particularly useful in persuading the audience.

• Briefly frame the issue.
• Go into the issue in detail showing why it ‘s such a problem. Use logos and pathos for this – the logical and emotional appeals.
• Provide the solution and explain why this would also help the audience.
• Call to action – something you want the audience to do which is straightforward and pertinent to the solution.

Storytelling

As well as incorporating  stories in your presentation , you can organise your whole presentation as a story. There are lots of different type of story structures you can use – a popular choice is the monomyth – the hero’s journey. In a monomyth, a hero goes on a difficult journey or takes on a challenge – they move from the familiar into the unknown. After facing obstacles and ultimately succeeding the hero returns home, transformed and with newfound wisdom.

Storytelling for Business Success  webinar , where well-know storyteller Javier Bernad shares strategies for crafting compelling narratives.

Another popular choice for using a story to structure your presentation is in media ras (in the middle of thing). In this type of story you launch right into the action by providing a snippet/teaser of what’s happening and then you start explaining the events that led to that event. This is engaging because you’re starting your story at the most exciting part which will make the audience curious – they’ll want to know how you got there.

• Great storytelling: Examples from Alibaba Founder, Jack Ma

Remaining method

The remaining method structure is good for situations where you’re presenting your perspective on a controversial topic which has split people’s opinions.

• Go into the issue in detail showing why it’s such a problem – use logos and pathos.
• Rebut your opponents’ solutions  – explain why their solutions could be useful because the audience will see this as fair and will therefore think you’re trustworthy, and then explain why you think these solutions are not valid.
• After you’ve presented all the alternatives provide your solution, the remaining solution. This is very persuasive because it looks like the winning idea, especially with the audience believing that you’re fair and trustworthy.

Transitions

When delivering presentations it’s important for your words and ideas to flow so your audience can understand how everything links together and why it’s all relevant. This can be done  using speech transitions  which are words and phrases that allow you to smoothly move from one point to another so that your speech flows and your presentation is unified.

Transitions can be one word, a phrase or a full sentence – there are many different forms, here are some examples:

Moving from the introduction to the first point

Signify to the audience that you will now begin discussing the first main point:

• Now that you’re aware of the overview, let’s begin with…
• First, let’s begin with…
• I will first cover…
• My first point covers…
• To get started, let’s look at…

Shifting between similar points

Move from one point to a similar one:

• In the same way…
• Likewise…
• Equally…
• This is similar to…
• Similarly…

Internal summaries

Internal summarising consists of summarising before moving on to the next point. You must inform the audience:

• What part of the presentation you covered – “In the first part of this speech we’ve covered…”
• What the key points were – “Precisely how…”
• How this links in with the overall presentation – “So that’s the context…”
• What you’re moving on to – “Now I’d like to move on to the second part of presentation which looks at…”

Physical movement

You can move your body and your standing location when you transition to another point. The audience find it easier to follow your presentation and movement will increase their interest.

A common technique for incorporating movement into your presentation is to:

• Start your introduction by standing in the centre of the stage.
• For your first point you stand on the left side of the stage.
• You discuss your second point from the centre again.
• You stand on the right side of the stage for your third point.
• The conclusion occurs in the centre.

Key slides for your presentation

Slides are a useful tool for most presentations: they can greatly assist in the delivery of your message and help the audience follow along with what you are saying. Key slides include:

• An intro slide outlining your ideas
• A  summary slide  with core points to remember
• High quality image slides to supplement what you are saying

There are some presenters who choose not to use slides at all, though this is more of a rarity. Slides can be a powerful tool if used properly, but the problem is that many fail to do just that. Here are some golden rules to follow when using slides in a presentation:

• Don’t over fill them  – your slides are there to assist your speech, rather than be the focal point. They should have as little information as possible, to avoid distracting people from your talk.
• A picture says a thousand words  – instead of filling a slide with text, instead, focus on one or two images or diagrams to help support and explain the point you are discussing at that time.
• Make them readable  – depending on the size of your audience, some may not be able to see small text or images, so make everything large enough to fill the space.
• Don’t rush through slides  – give the audience enough time to digest each slide.

Guy Kawasaki, an entrepreneur and author, suggests that slideshows should follow a  10-20-30 rule :

• There should be a maximum of 10 slides – people rarely remember more than one concept afterwards so there’s no point overwhelming them with unnecessary information.
• The presentation should last no longer than 20 minutes as this will leave time for questions and discussion.
• The font size should be a minimum of 30pt because the audience reads faster than you talk so less information on the slides means that there is less chance of the audience being distracted.

Here are some additional resources for slide design:

• 7 design tips for effective, beautiful PowerPoint presentations
• 11 design tips for beautiful presentations
• 10 tips on how to make slides that communicate your idea

Group Presentations

Group presentations are structured in the same way as presentations with one speaker but usually require more rehearsal and practices.  Clean transitioning between speakers  is very important in producing a presentation that flows well. One way of doing this consists of:

• Briefly recap on what you covered in your section: “So that was a brief introduction on what health anxiety is and how it can affect somebody”
• Introduce the next speaker in the team and explain what they will discuss: “Now Elnaz will talk about the prevalence of health anxiety.”
• Then end by looking at the next speaker, gesturing towards them and saying their name: “Elnaz”.
• The next speaker should acknowledge this with a quick: “Thank you Joe.”

From this example you can see how the different sections of the presentations link which makes it easier for the audience to follow and remain engaged.

Example of great presentation structure and delivery

Having examples of great presentations will help inspire your own structures, here are a few such examples, each unique and inspiring in their own way.

How Google Works – by Eric Schmidt

This presentation by ex-Google CEO  Eric Schmidt  demonstrates some of the most important lessons he and his team have learnt with regards to working with some of the most talented individuals they hired. The simplistic yet cohesive style of all of the slides is something to be appreciated. They are relatively straightforward, yet add power and clarity to the narrative of the presentation.

Start with why – by Simon Sinek

Since being released in 2009, this presentation has been viewed almost four million times all around the world. The message itself is very powerful, however, it’s not an idea that hasn’t been heard before. What makes this presentation so powerful is the simple message he is getting across, and the straightforward and understandable manner in which he delivers it. Also note that he doesn’t use any slides, just a whiteboard where he creates a simple diagram of his opinion.

The Wisdom of a Third Grade Dropout – by Rick Rigsby

Here’s an example of a presentation given by a relatively unknown individual looking to inspire the next generation of graduates. Rick’s presentation is unique in many ways compared to the two above. Notably, he uses no visual prompts and includes a great deal of humour.

However, what is similar is the structure he uses. He first introduces his message that the wisest man he knew was a third-grade dropout. He then proceeds to deliver his main body of argument, and in the end, concludes with his message. This powerful speech keeps the viewer engaged throughout, through a mixture of heart-warming sentiment, powerful life advice and engaging humour.

As you can see from the examples above, and as it has been expressed throughout, a great presentation structure means analysing the core message of your presentation. Decide on a key message you want to impart the audience with, and then craft an engaging way of delivering it.

By preparing a solid structure, and  practising your talk  beforehand, you can walk into the presentation with confidence and deliver a meaningful message to an interested audience.

It’s important for a presentation to be well-structured so it can have the most impact on your audience. An unstructured presentation can be difficult to follow and even frustrating to listen to. The heart of your speech are your main points supported by evidence and your transitions should assist the movement between points and clarify how everything is linked.

Research suggests that the audience remember the first and last things you say so your introduction and conclusion are vital for reinforcing your points. Essentially, ensure you spend the time structuring your presentation and addressing all of the sections.

Home Blog Presentation Ideas How to Start a Presentation: 5 Strong Opening Slides and 12 Tricks To Test

How to Start a Presentation: 5 Strong Opening Slides and 12 Tricks To Test

Knowing how to start a presentation is crucial: if you fail to capture the audience’s attention right off the bat, your entire presentation will flop. Few listeners will stick with you to the end and retain what you have told.

That is mildly unpleasant when you are doing an in-house presentation in front of your colleagues. But it can become utterly embarrassing when you present in front of larger audiences (e.g., at a conference) or worse – delivering a sales presentation to prospective customers.

Here is how most of us begin a presentation: give an awkward greeting, thank everyone for coming, clear our throats, tap the mic, and humbly start to mumble about our subject. The problem with such an opening performance? It effectively kills and buries even the best messages.

Table of Contents

• The Classic Trick: Open a Presentation with an Introduction
• Open a Presentation with a Hook
• Begin with a Captivating Visual
• Ask a “What if…” Question
• Use the Word “Imagine”
• Leverage The Curiosity Gap
• The Power of Silence
• Facts as Weapons of Communication
• Fact vs. Myths
• The Power of Music
• Physical Activity
• Acknowledging a Person

How to Start a PowerPoint Presentation The Right Way

Let’s say you have all of your presentation slides polished up (in case you don’t, check our quick & effective PowerPoint presentation design tips first). Your presentation has a clear storyline and agenda. Main ideas are broken into bite-sized statements for your slides and complemented with visuals. All you have left is to figure out how you begin presenting.

The best way is to appeal to and invoke certain emotions in your audience – curiosity, surprise, fear, or good old amusements. Also, it is recommended to present your main idea in the first 30 seconds of the presentation. And here’s how it’s done.

1. The Classic Trick: Open a Presentation with an Introduction

When you don’t feel like reinventing the wheel, use a classic trick from the book – start with a quick personal introduction. Don’t want to sound as boring as everyone else with your humble “Hi, I’m John, the head of the Customer Support Department”? Great, because we are all about promoting effective presentation techniques (hint: using a dull welcome slide isn’t one of them).

Here’s how to introduce yourself in a presentation the right way.

a. Use a link-back memory formula

To ace a presentation, you need to connect with your audience. The best way to do so is by throwing in a simple story showing who you are, where you came from, and why your words matter.

The human brain loves a good story, and we are more inclined to listen and retain the information told this way. Besides, when we can relate to the narrator (or story hero), we create an emotional bond with them, and, again – become more receptive, and less skeptical of the information that is about to be delivered.

So here are your presentation introduction lines:

My name is Joanne, and I’m the Head of Marketing at company XYZ. Five years ago I was working as a waitress, earning $10/hour and collecting rejection letters from editors. About ten letters every week landed to my mailbox. You see, I love words, but decent publisher thought mine were good enough. Except for the restaurant owner. I was very good at up-selling and recommending dishes to the customers. My boss even bumped my salary to $15/hour as a token of appreciation for my skill. And this made me realize: I should ditch creative writing and focus on copywriting instead. After loads of trial and error back in the day, I learned how to write persuasive copy. I was no longer getting rejection letters. I was receiving thousands of emails saying that someone just bought another product from our company. My sales copy pages generated over $1,500,000 in revenue over last year. And I want to teach you how to do the same”

b. Test the Stereotype Formula

This one’s simple and effective as well. Introduce yourself by sharing an obvious stereotype about your profession. This cue will help you connect with your audience better, make them chuckle a bit, and set a lighter mood for the speech to follow.

Here’s how you can frame your intro:

“My name is ___, and I am a lead software engineer at our platform [Your Job Title]. And yes, I’m that nerdy type who never liked presenting in front of large groups of people. I would rather stay in my den and write code all day long. [Stereotype]. But hey, since I have mustered enough courage…let’s talk today about the new product features my team is about to release….”

After sharing a quick, self-deprecating line, you transition back to your topic, reinforcing the audience’s attention . Both of these formulas help you set the “mood” for your further presentation, so try using them interchangeably on different occasions.

2. Open a Presentation with a Hook

Wow your audience straight off the bat by sharing something they would not expect to hear. This may be one of the popular first-time presentation tips but don’t rush to discard it.

Because here’s the thing: psychologically , we are more inclined to pay attention whenever presented with an unexpected cue. When we know what will happen next – someone flips the switch, and lights turn on – we don’t really pay much attention to that action.

But when we don’t know what to expect next – e.g., someone flips the switch and a bell starts ringing – we are likely to pay more attention to what will happen next. The same goes for words: everyone loves stories with unpredictable twists. So begin your presentation with a PowerPoint introduction slide or a line that no one expects to hear.

Here are a few hook examples you can swipe:

a. Open with a provocative statement

It creates an instant jolt and makes the audience intrigued to hear what you are about to say next – pedal back, continue with the provocation, or do something else that they will not expect.

“You will live seven and a half minutes longer than you would have otherwise, just because you watched this talk.”

That’s how Jane McGonigal opens one of her TED talks . Shocking and intriguing, right?

b. Ask a rhetorical, thought-provoking question

Seasoned presenters know that one good practice is to ask a question at the beginning of a presentation to increase audience engagement. Rhetorical questions have a great persuasive effect – instead of answering aloud, your audience will silently start musing over it during your presentation. They aroused curiosity and motivated the audience to remain attentive, as they did want to learn your answer to this question.

To reinforce your message throughout the presentation, you can further use the Rhetorical Triangle Concept – a rhetorical approach to building a persuasive argument based on Aristotle’s teachings.

c. Use a bold number, factor stat

A clean slide with some mind-boggling stat makes an undeniably strong impact. Here are a few opening statement examples you can use along with your slide:

• Shock them: “We are effectively wasting over $1.2 billion per year on producing clothes no one will ever purchase”
• Create empathy: “Are you among the 20% of people with undiagnosed ADHD?”
• Call to arms: “58% of marketing budgets are wasted due to poor landing page design. Let’s change this!”
• Spark curiosity: “Did you know that companies who invested in speech recognition have seen a 13% increase in ROI within just 3 years?”

3. Begin with a Captivating Visual

Compelling visuals are the ABC of presentation design – use them strategically to make an interesting statement at the beginning and throughout your presentation. Your first presentation slide can be text-free. Communicate your idea with a visual instead – a photo, a chart, an infographic, or another graphics asset.

Visuals are a powerful medium for communication as our brain needs just 13 milliseconds to render what our eyes see, whereas text comprehension requires more cognitive effort.

Relevant images add additional aesthetic appeal to your deck, bolster the audience’s imagination, and make your key message instantly more memorable.

Here’s an intro slide example. You want to make a strong presentation introduction to global pollution.  Use the following slide to reinforce the statement you share:

“Seven of nine snow samples taken on land in Antarctica found chemicals known as PFAs, which are used in industrial products and can harm wildlife”

Source: Reuters

4. Ask a “What if…” Question

The “what if” combo carries massive power. It gives your audience a sense of what will happen if they choose to listen to you and follow your advice.  Here are a few presentations with starting sentences + slides to illustrate this option:

Alternatively, you can work your way to this point using different questions:

• Ask the audience about their “Why.” Why are they attending this event, or why do they find this topic relevant?
• Use “How” as your question hook if you plan to introduce a potential solution to a problem.
• If your presentation has a persuasion factor associated, use “When” as a question to trigger the interest of the audience on, for example, when they are planning to take action regarding the topic being presented (if we talk about an inspirational presentation).

5. Use the Word “Imagine”

“Imagine,” “Picture This,” and “Think of” are better word choices for when you plan to begin your presentation with a quick story.

Our brain loves interacting with stories. In fact, a captivating story makes us more collaborative. Scientists have discovered that stories with tension during narrative make us:

• Pay more attention,
• Share emotions with the characters and even mimic the feelings and behaviors of those characters afterward.

That’s why good action movies often feel empowering and make us want to change the world too. By incorporating a good, persuasive story with a relatable hero, you can also create that “bond” with your audience and make them more perceptive to your pitch – donate money to support the cause; explore the solution you are offering, and so on.

6. Leverage The Curiosity Gap

The curiosity gap is another psychological trick frequently used by marketers to solicit more clicks, reads, and other interactions from the audience. In essence, it’s the trick you see behind all those clickbait, Buzzfeed-style headlines:

Not everyone is a fan of such titles. But the truth is – they do the trick and instantly capture attention. The curiosity gap sparks our desire to dig deeper into the matter. We are explicitly told that we don’t know something important, and now we crave to change that. Curiosity is an incredibly strong driving force for action – think Eve, think Pandora’s Box.

So consider incorporating these attention grabbers for your presentation speech to shock the audience. You can open with one, or strategically weave them in the middle of your presentation when you feel like your audience is getting tired and may lose their focus.

Here’s how you can use the curiosity gap during your presentation:

• Start telling a story, pause in the middle, and delay the conclusion of it.
• Withhold the key information (e.g., the best solution to the problem you have described) for a bit – but not for too long, as this can reduce the initial curiosity.
• Introduce an idea or concept and link it with an unexpected outcome or subject – this is the best opening for a presentation tip.

7. The Power of Silence

What would you do if you attended a presentation in which the speaker remains silent for 30 seconds after the presentation starts? Just the presenter, standing in front of the audience, in absolute silence.

Most likely, your mind starts racing with thoughts, expecting something of vital importance to be disclosed. The surprise factor with this effect is for us to acknowledge things we tend to take for granted.

It is a powerful resource to introduce a product or to start an inspirational presentation if followed by a fact.

8. Facts as Weapons of Communication

In some niches, using statistics as the icebreaker is the best method to retain the audience’s interest.

Say your presentation is about climate change. Why not introduce a not-so-common fact, such as the amount of wool that can be produced out of oceanic plastic waste per month? And since you have to base your introduction on facts, research manufacturers that work with Oceanic fabrics from recycled plastic bottles .

Using facts helps to build a better narrative, and also gives leverage to your presentation as you are speaking not just from emotional elements but from actually recorded data backed up by research.

9. Fact vs. Myths

Related to our previous point, we make quite an interesting speech if we contrast a fact vs. a myth in a non-conventional way: using a myth to question a well-accepted fact, then introducing a new point of view or theory, backed on sufficient research, that proves the fact wrong. This technique, when used in niches related to academia, can significantly increase the audience’s interest, and it will highlight your presentation as innovative.

Another approach is to debunk a myth using a fact. This contrast immediately piques interest because it promises to overturn commonly held beliefs, and people naturally find it compelling when their existing knowledge is put to the test. An example of this is when a nutritionist wishes to speak about how to lose weight via diet, and debunks the myth that all carbohydrates are “bad”.

10. The Power of Music

Think about a presentation that discusses the benefits of using alternative therapies to treat anxiety, reducing the need to rely on benzodiazepines. Rather than going technical and introducing facts, the presenter can play a soothing tune and invite the audience to follow an exercise that teaches how to practice breathing meditation . Perhaps, in less than 2 minutes, the presenter can accomplish the goal of exposing the advantages of this practice with a live case study fueled by the proper ambiance (due to the music played in the beginning).

11. Physical Activity

Let’s picture ourselves in an in-company presentation about workspace wellness. For this company, the sedentary lifestyle their employees engage in is a worrying factor, so they brought a personal trainer to coach the employees on a basic flexibility routine they can practice in 5 minutes after a couple of hours of desk time.

“Before we dive in, let’s all stand up for a moment.” This simple instruction breaks the ice and creates a moment of shared experience among the attendees. You could then lead them through a brief stretching routine, saying something like, “Let’s reach up high, and stretch out those muscles that get so tight sitting at our desks all day.” With this action, you’re not just talking about workplace wellness, you’re giving them a direct, personal experience of it.

This approach has several advantages. Firstly, it infuses energy into the room and increases the oxygen flow to the brain, potentially boosting the audience’s concentration and retention. Secondly, it sets a precedent that your presentation is not going to be a standard lecture, but rather an interactive experience. This can raise the level of anticipation for what’s to come, and make the presentation a topic for future conversation between coworkers.

12. Acknowledging a Person

How many times have you heard the phrase: “Before we begin, I’d like to dedicate a few words to …” . The speaker could be referring to a mentor figure, a prominent person in the local community, or a group of people who performed charity work or obtained a prize for their hard work and dedication. Whichever is the reason behind this, acknowledgment is a powerful force to use as a method of starting a presentation. It builds a connection with the audience, it speaks about your values and who you admire, and it can transmit what the conversation is going to be about based on who the acknowledged person is.

Closing Thoughts

Now you know how to start your presentation – you have the opening lines, you have the slides to use, and you can browse even more attractive PowerPoint presentation slides and templates on our website. Also, we recommend you visit our article on how to make a PowerPoint Presentation to get familiarized with the best tactics for professional presentation design and delivery, or if you need to save time preparing your presentation, we highly recommend you check our AI Presentation Maker to pair these concepts with cutting-edge slide design powered by AI.

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QS World University Rankings has placed MIT in the No. 1 spot in 11 subject areas for 2024, the organization announced today.

The Institute received a No. 1 ranking in the following QS subject areas: Chemical Engineering; Civil and Structural Engineering; Computer Science and Information Systems; Data Science and Artificial Intelligence; Electrical and Electronic Engineering; Linguistics; Materials Science; Mechanical, Aeronautical, and Manufacturing Engineering; Mathematics; Physics and Astronomy; and Statistics and Operational Research.

MIT also placed second in five subject areas: Accounting and Finance; Architecture/Built Environment; Biological Sciences; Chemistry; and Economics and Econometrics.

For 2024, universities were evaluated in 55 specific subjects and five broader subject areas. MIT was ranked No. 1 in the broader subject area of Engineering and Technology and No. 2 in Natural Sciences.

Quacquarelli Symonds Limited subject rankings, published annually, are designed to help prospective students find the leading schools in their field of interest. Rankings are based on research quality and accomplishments, academic reputation, and graduate employment.

MIT has been ranked as the No. 1 university in the world by QS World University Rankings for 12 straight years.

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Speech by Prime Minister Rutte at presentation International Four Freedoms Award

Speech | 11-04-2024

Prime Minister Mark Rutte of the Netherlands held this speech in Middelburg at the presentation of the International Four Freedoms Award to Save Ukraine.

Ladies and gentlemen,

One of the best-known people in Dutch history is Anne Frank. Just an ordinary Jewish girl. No doubt you’re familiar with her.

Or rather: you’re familiar with her diary, in which she described her life in hiding with her family during the Second World War. Many millions of copies have been sold worldwide. And the reason is that Anne’s story is not simply about the horrors of war. Above all, it’s a story of hope. It’s about seeing light in the darkness. Or, as Anne herself put it: “Look at how a single candle can both defy and define the darkness.”

Those words have lost none of their wisdom in the years since they were written. Because today, in our time, there is still darkness in many places around the world. The reason I’m here today, is to shine a light on 1 of the places it is needed most: Ukraine.

Since Russia’s brutal invasion, over 2 years ago now, thousands of Ukrainian children have been abducted and taken to Russia, or to areas occupied by Russia. Thousands of children, ripped away not only from their parents, but from everything that made them who they are. Their language. Their country. Their identity.

With their abduction, their identities have been erased. Or made invisible. After all, the victims are still alive. Physically, at least.

It’s 1 of the worst war crimes we can imagine. Targeting the most vulnerable people: children and their parents. And in this dark reality, Save Ukraine is a candle defying the darkness.

In 2014, when Russia began its aggression against Ukraine, Mykola Kuleba decided that he would not stand idly by. He would not just wait and see what happened. He would do all he could, to fight back. He would give everything he had. With anyone who would join him.

And as so often happens with people who stand up to evil, he was soon joined by others willing to help. To bring kidnapped children back home. To evacuate vulnerable people from the most dangerous areas.

And so, that one flickering candle grew into what it is now: A blazing beacon of hope for Ukrainian parents. A rescuer of vulnerable people on the frontlines of the war.

Already, over 100,000 vulnerable people have been evacuated from combat zones. Thanks to Save Ukraine, 282 children have been safely returned to their homeland. And together with their parents, they can find respite in 1 of the organisation’s 7 Hope and Healing Centers. There, they can heal from their psychological wounds. Or at least, they can start to heal.

But we can all draw hope from these acts of resistance, big and small

Of course, more needs to be done. Unfortunately, the end of this terrible war is not yet in sight. But we can all draw hope from these acts of resistance, big and small. Every child saved, is living proof of Putin’s war crimes. And he knows that.

Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “Where do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home.” Save Ukraine demonstrates the truth of those words. By taking a stand when human rights are violated. By turning despair into hope. But above all, by showing in practice that everyone can be human rights defenders. Everyone. Even when peace and justice seem a long way away. Especially then.

Mykola and James: the importance of defending human rights is a strong thread running through your lives and your families. So let me now ask you both to come to the stage, so that James can present Mykola with the International Four Freedoms Award for Save Ukraine.

Stratechery by Ben Thompson

On the business, strategy, and impact of technology.

Gemini 1.5 and Google’s Nature

It was impossible to miss the leading message at yesterday’s Google Cloud Next keynote : Google has the best infrastructure for AI. This was CEO Sundar Pichai in his video greeting:

I want to highlight just a few reasons Google Cloud is showing so much progress. One is our deep investments in AI. We’ve known for a while that AI would transform every industry and company, including our own. That’s why we’ve been building AI infrastructure for over a decade, including TPUs, now in their 5th generation. These advancements have helped customer train and serve cutting-edge language models. These investments put us in the forefront of the AI platform shift.

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian made the priority clear as well:

Today we’re going to focus on how Google is helping leading companies transform their operations and become digital and AI leaders, which is the new way to cloud. We have many important advances, starting with our infrastructure.

What was most interesting about the keynote, though, is what that infrastructure makes possible, and, by extension, what that says about Google’s ability to compete.

One of the most surprising things about large language models (LLMs) is how much they know; from the very beginning, though, hallucinations have been a concern. Hallucinations are, of course, part of what makes LLMs so impressive: a computer is actually being creative! It’s also a feature that isn’t particularly impressive to the enterprise customers that this keynote was directed at.

To that end, Kurian, shortly after going over Google’s infrastructure advantages, talked about “grounding”, both in terms of the company’s Gemini model broadly, and for enterprise use cases specifically in the context of Google’s Vertex AI model management service:

To augment models, Vertex AI provides managed tooling to connect your model to enterprise applications and databases, using extensions and function-calling. Vertex also provides retrieval augmented generation (RAG) combining the strengths of retrieval and generative models to provide high quality personalized answers and recommendations. Vertex can augment models with up-to-date knowledge from the web and from your organization, combining generative AI with your enterprise truth. Today we have a really important announcement: you can now ground with Google Search, perhaps the world’s most trusted source of factual information, with a deep understanding of the world’s knowledge. Grounding Gemini’s responses with Google Search improves response quality and significantly reduces hallucinations. Second, we’re also making it easy to ground your models with data from your enterprise databases and applications, and any database anywhere. Once you’ve chosen the right model, tuned it, and connected it with your enterprise truth, Vertex’s MLOps can help you manage and monitor models.

A RAG implementation using Google Search is an obvious win, and mirrors ChatGPT’s integration with Bing (or Microsoft Copilot in Bing): the LLM provides answers when it can, and searches the web for things it doesn’t know, a particularly useful feature if you are looking for more recent information.

A more impressive demonstration of grounding, though, was in the context of integrating Gemini with Google’s BigQuery data warehouse and Looker business intelligence platform :

In this demo, the worker gets an alert that a particular product is selling out; using generative AI the worker can see sales trends, find similar models, and create a plan of action for dealing with declining inventory for delivery to her team.

What is notable is not the demo specifics (which is unapologetically made-up for Cymbal, Google’s demo brand ); rather, note the role of the LLM: it is not providing information or taking specific actions, but rather serving as a much more accessible natural language interface to surface and collect data that would otherwise take considerably more expertise and time. In other words, it is trustworthy because it is grounded through integration Google is promising with its other enterprise data services.

At the same time, that last section didn’t really follow on from the introduction: yes, those LLMs leveraging Google or BigQuery are running on Google’s infrastructure, but other companies or startups can build something similar. This is where the rest of Pichai’s introduction comes in:

We also continue to build capable AI models to make products like search, Maps, and Android radically more helpful. In December, we took our next big step with Gemini, our largest and most capable model yet. We’ve been bringing it to our products and to enterprises and developers through our APIs. We’ve already introduced our next generation Gemini 1.5 Pro. It’s been in private preview in Vertex AI. 1.5 Pro shows dramatically enhanced performance and includes a breakthrough in long context understanding. That means it can run 1 million tokens of information consistently, opening up new possibilities for enterprises to create, discover, and build using AI. There’s also Gemini’s multi-modal capabilities, which can process audio, video, text, code and more. With these two advances, enterprises can do things today that just weren’t possible with AI before.

Google hasn’t said how Gemini 1.5 was made, but clearly the company has overcome the key limitation of traditional transformers: memory requirements increase quadratically with context length. One promising approach is Ring Attention with Blockwise Transformers , which breaks long contexts into pieces to be computed individually even as the various devices computing those pieces simultaneously communicate to make sense of the context as a whole; in this case memory requirements scale linearly with context length, and can be extended by simply adding more devices to the ring topology.

This is where Google’s infrastructure comes in: the company not only has a massive fleet of TPUs, but has also been developing those TPUs to run in parallel at every level of the stack, from chip to cluster to even data centers (this latter requirement is more pertinent for training than inference); if there is a solution that calls for scale, Google is the best placed to provide it, and it seems the company has done just that with Gemini 1.5.

To that end, and per Pichai’s closing line, almost all of the other demos in the keynote were implicitly leveraging Gemini 1.5’s context window.

In a Gemini for Workspaces demo, the worker evaluated two statements of work against each other, and against the company’s compliance document:

Here are the key quotes:

Google Drive is ready without any additional AI pre-work… Each of these documents is over 70 pages. It would have taken me hours to review these docs, but instead Gemini is going to help me find a clean answer to save me a ton of time… Before I proceed with this vendor, I need to ensure that no compliance issues exist, and I’m going to be honest, I have not memorized every rule in our compliance rulebook because it is over 100 pages. I would have to need to scour the 80 pages of this proposal and compare it manually with the 100 pages of the rulebook. So instead, in the side panel I ask, “Does this offer comply with the following” and I’m going to just @-mention our compliance rulebook, hit Enter, and see what Gemini has to say. So interesting: Gemini has found an issue, because the supplier has not listed their security certifications. Because Gemini is grounded in my company’s data, with source citations to specific files, I can trust this response and start to troubleshoot before selecting a vendor.

The key distinction between this demo and the last one is that quote at the beginning: a large context window just works in a far greater number of use cases, without any fiddly RAG implementations or special connections to external data stores; just upload the files you need to analyze, and you’re off.

In a Creative Agent with Imagen demo, the worker was seeking to create marketing images and storyboards for an outdoor product:

Here is the key quote:

The creative agent can analyze our previous campaigns to understand our unique brand style and apply it to new ideas. In this case, the creative agent has analyzed over 3,000 brand images, descriptions, videos, and documents of other products that we have in our catalog, contained within Google Drive, to create this summary…The creative agent was able to use Gemini Pro’s 1 million token context window and it’s ability to reason across text, images, and video to generate this summary.

This was, to be fair, one of the weaker demos: the brand summary and marketing campaign weren’t that impressive, and the idea of creating a podcast with synthetic voices is technically impressive and also something that will never be listened to. That, though, is impressive in its own right: as I noted in an Update when Gemini 1.5 was first announced , “a massively larger context window makes it possible to do silly stuff”, and silly stuff often turns into serious capabilities.

In a Gemini Code Assistant Demo (formerly Duet AI for Developers), a developer new to a job (and the codebase) was tasked with making a change to a site’s homepage:

For the developers out there, you know that this means we’re going to need to add padding in the homepage, modify some views, make sure the configs are changed for our microservices, and typically, it would take me a week or two to even just get familiarized with our company’s code base which has over 100,000 lines of code over 11 services. But now, with Gemini Code Assist, as a new engineer on the team, I can be more productive than ever and can accomplish all of this work in just a matter of minutes. This is because Gemini’s code transformations with full codebase awareness allows us to easily reason through our entire codebase, and in comparison, other models out there can’t handle anything beyond 12,000 to 15,000 lines of code. Gemini with Code Assist is so intelligent that we can just give it our business requirements, including the visual design…Gemini Code Assist doesn’t just suggest code edits; it provides clear recommendations, and makes sure that all of these recommendations align with [the company’s] security and compliance requirements…

And the conclusion:

Let’s recap: behind the scenes Gemini has analyzed my entire codebase in GitLab; it has implemented a new feature; and has ensured that all of the code generated is compatible with my company’s standards and requirements.

Again, leave aside the implausibility of this demo: the key takeaway is the capabilities unlocked when the model is able to have all of the context around a problem while working; this is only possible with — and here the name is appropriate — a long context window, and that is ultimately enabled by Google’s infrastructure.

Google’s Nature

In case it isn’t clear, I think that this keynote was by far the most impressive presentation Google has made in the AI era, not least because the company knows exactly what its advantages are. Several years ago I wrote an Article called Microsoft’s Monopoly Hangover that discussed the company’s then-ongoing transition away from Windows as the center of its strategy; the central conceit was a comparison to Lou Gerstner’s 1990’s transformation of IBM.

The great thing about a monopoly is that a company can do anything, because there is no competition; the bad thing is that when the monopoly is finished the company is still capable of doing anything at a mediocre level, but nothing at a high one because it has become fat and lazy. To put it another way, for a former monopoly “big” is the only truly differentiated asset.

My argument was that business models could be changed: IBM did it, and Microsoft was in the process of doing so when I wrote that. Moreover, Gerstner had shown that culture could be changed as well, and Nadella did just that at Microsoft . What couldn’t be changed was nature: IBM was a company predicated on breadth, not specialization; that’s why Gerstner was right to not break apart the company but to instead deliver Internet solutions to enterprises. Similarly, Microsoft was a company predicated on integration around Windows; the company’s shift to services centered on Teams as Microsoft’s operating system in the cloud was also true to the company’s nature.

Google is facing many of the same challenges after its decades long dominance of the open web: all of the products shown yesterday rely on a different business model than advertising, and to properly execute and deliver on them will require a cultural shift to supporting customers instead of tolerating them. What hasn’t changed — because it is the company’s nature, and thus cannot — is the reliance on scale and an overwhelming infrastructure advantage. That, more than anything, is what defines Google, and it was encouraging to see that so explicitly put forward as an advantage.

Subscriber’s Daily Update

An interview with google cloud ceo thomas kurian about google’s enterprise ai strategy, personal day, the status of just walk out, tsmc gets chips act grant, an interview with benedict evans about regulation and ai.

‘Influencing the Influencers’: How TikTok Can Promote Positive Mental Health 

Leveraging Data to Make a Difference

Sph snapshot: spring 2024 ..

SPH Snapshot: Spring 2024

Scenes from the arrival of spring, including the solar eclipse, Giving Day, Shine Lecture, and more.

Solar eclipse.

Talbot Green was a prime viewing spot for the solar eclipse, luring hundreds outside to view the celestial spectacle. Students, faculty, and staff clustered on the lawn to watch the progression of the moon across the sun, the last time the US will experience a total solar eclipse until a brief 3-minute passage over Alaska in 2033.

Giving Day 2024

Giving Day offered a chance for the SPH community to support the School during the BU-wide fundraising challenge. Nearly 12,000 donors raised just under $4M to accelerate the mission of BUSPH and help shape the future of public health. While Giving Day has passed, there are still opportunities to help support SPH’s strategic priorities .

Cupples Award Presentation

Nandita Mitra, professor of biostatistics at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, was the recipient of the 2024 L. Adrienne Cupples Award for Excellence in Teaching, Research, and Service in Biostatistics. The  L. Adrienne Cupples Award  is presented each year by the Department of Biostatistics at Boston University School of Public Health to recognize a biostatistician whose academic achievements reflect the contributions to biostatistics exemplified by  the late L. Adrienne Cupples , an emeritus professor of biostatistics and epidemiology and the award’s first recipient. Mitra was selected for her substantial achievements in each of these areas; she is currently vice chair of education and co-director of the Center for Causal Inference in the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Informatics at Penn.

Cathy Shine Lecture

The  Center for Health Law, Ethics & Human Rights  presented the annual Cathy Shine lecture to honor the memory of Cathy Shine and her dedication to the rights of all those in need of care.  This year’s event featured Cheryl Clark, MD, ScD, who serves as the inaugural executive director and senior vice president of the Institute for Health Equity Research, Evaluation & Policy at the Massachusetts League of Community Health Centers. The lecture was moderated by George Annas, William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor and director of the Center for Health Law, Ethics & Human Rights.

Internship & Practicum Expo

Hundreds of students connected with potential employers to explore opportunities for internships and their practicum experience , the required graduate-level internship that allows MPH students to apply the knowledge gained in the classroom in a real-world public health setting.

Arrival of spring

Just a few days after winter’s last blast of wind-driven sleet and rain, the campus came alive with the sights and sounds of spring. New plantings brightened walkways, students gathered to study and relax on Talbot Green, and robins patrolled the grass looking for a meal.

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EMPACT-MI: Empagliflozin Post MI Does Not Lower Risk of First HF Hospitalization, Death

Apr 06, 2024

ACC News Story

The SGLT2 inhibitor empagliflozin did not lower the risk of a first hospitalization for heart failure (HF) or death from any cause among patients with an increased risk for HF following acute myocardial infarction (MI), according to the results of the EMPACT-MI study, presented during a Late-Breaking Clinical Trial session at ACC.24 and published simultaneously in the New England Journal of Medicine .

The event-driven, double-blind trial, conducted from December 2020 to March 2023 at 451 sites in 22 countries, randomly assigned 6,522 patients (median age 63 years, 24.9% women, 83.6% White, 1.4% Black, 12.8% Asian) who had been hospitalized for acute MI and were at risk for HF with newly reduced left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) or congestion or both to either 10 mg daily of empagliflozin or a placebo in addition to standard care within 14 days of admission. At baseline, 78.4% of patients had an LVEF ≤45%, and 57.0% had signs or symptoms of congestion that resulted in treatment during the index hospitalization.

Results showed that first hospitalization for HF or death from any cause, the composite primary endpoint, occurred in 267 patients (8.2%) in the empagliflozin group and 298 patients (9.1%) in the placebo group during the median follow-up of 17.9 months. The two groups had incidence rates of 5.9 and 6.6 events, respectively, per 100 patient-years (hazard ratio [HR], 0.90; 95% CI, 0.76-1.06; p=0.21).

For the separate components of the primary endpoint, first hospitalization for HF alone occurred in 118 patients (3.6%) in the empagliflozin group and 153 patients (4.7%) in the placebo group (HR, 0.77; 95% CI, 0.60-0.98) and death from any cause occurred in 169 (5.2%) in the empagliflozin group and 178 (5.5%) in the placebo group (HR, 0.96; 95% CI, 0.78-1.19). Results were similar across all sensitivity analyses for the primary endpoint.

In terms of key secondary endpoints, total number of hospitalizations for HF or death from any cause occurred in 317 cases in the empagliflozin group and 385 in the placebo group (rate ratio [RR], 0.87; 95% CI, 0.68-1.10). Total number of nonelective cardiovascular hospitalizations or death from any cause were 666 and 730, respectively (RR, 0.92; 95% CI, 0.78-1.07). Total number of nonelective hospitalizations for any cause or death from any cause were 998 and 1,138 (RR, 0.87; 95% CI, 0.77-1.0), and total number of hospitalizations for MI or death from any cause were 276 and 274 (RR, 1.06; 95% CI, 0.83-1.35).

The authors noted that an exploratory analysis showed that cardiovascular death occurred in 132 patients (4.0%) in the empagliflozin group and 131 (4.0%) in the placebo group (HR, 1.03; 95% CI, 0.81-1.31). The time to death from cardiovascular causes and time to a first HF hospitalization or cardiovascular death were similar in both groups. Adverse events were similar in the two groups and consistent with the known safety profile of empagliflozin.

Among study limitations the authors noted the lack of central adjudication of endpoint events, which were assessed by site investigators using prespecified definitions, and lack of analysis of outpatient HF events, as well as unsuccessful efforts to improve representation within the trial.

"We found that empagliflozin did not reduce mortality after a heart attack but did reduce the risk of [HF] after heart attack," said Javed Butler, MD, FACC , the study's lead author. "To have a 25% to 30% reduction in [HF] hospitalizations is pretty clinically meaningful, but if you put it together with all-cause mortality, it was not a positive study for our primary endpoint."

In an accompanying editorial comment , Jean Rouleau, MD, FACC , wrote that, "The good news is that the prognosis of patients with left ventricular dysfunction, congestion, or both after an acute [MI] have improved markedly. The challenge is that the identification of additional therapies is increasingly difficult, especially because a large percentage … promptly undergo reperfusion." Moreover, the results of this trial do not support the routine use of SGLT2 inhibitors in this population, but in patients with indications for the drug, such as type 2 diabetes or chronic kidney disease, a recent MI may provide an opportunity to start this treatment and decrease the risk of HF.

Clinical Topics: Heart Failure and Cardiomyopathies, Acute Heart Failure

Keywords: ACC Annual Scientific Session, ACC24, Myocardial Infarction, Heart Failure, Novel Agents, Sodium-Glucose Transporter 2 Inhibitors

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