Speaking to Inform

Communicating to External Stakeholders

Speaking to inform is designed to helping your external stakeholders understand something, which requires that you assume the role of a teacher.  While informative speaking might appear to be easy and natural—after all, how hard can it be to share information?—truly effective informative speaking requires that you carefully attend to your audience, provide appropriate information, explain terms you might consider self-evident and treat your audience as already knowledgeable subjects.

 Key things to consider before preparing a presentation designed to inform include:

Audience knowledge of the topic.  What does your audience already know about what you are going to say and how can you connect the known with the unknown.

Goals for presenting this information to this audience.   What does the audience need to know and why?   Goals are intimately connected with audience.   For example, what details you share about organization financial status will differ, depending on whether your audience is a tax inspector, an external auditor, the community of beneficiaries or the new employees.

How much the audience needs to know to meet your goals. Again, you need to share enough information with a given audience so that they understand what you are saying, but you cannot give so much information that an audience will lose your main point and get caught up in minutia.

What types of information will best illuminate what you are trying to teach.  Illuminating ideas is primarily accomplished through the use of evidence.  Certain ideas are best illustrated with numerical data and other information is clarified through examples or narratives.  Again, audience plays a primary role in determining what evidence will be considered credible to your audience.  For example, investors generally care about the bottom line—profit.  beneficiaries want to know that you are concerned about their welfare and quality of life as well as about the costs they incur by purchasing your services.

What the key ideas are that the audience should remember at the end of your presentation.  Organize your presentation—be it oral or written—into three or four main points so that the audience will remember the most important elements of your message with greater ease.   

Make the information accurate, clear and meaningful to your audience. You make information accurate, clear and meaningful by doing careful research, by being honest with your audience, by associating evidence with a main idea and by explaining what the evidence means in relation to your topic.

Guidelines for Informative Speaking