Public Speaking Tips: A Really Useful Speaker Evaluation Form

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I recently sat down to interview myself on the subject of speaker evaluation forms. Here’s the transcript of the interview.

What’s the use of a speaker evaluation form? First of all, I prefer the term assessment to evaluation. It sounds to me less clinical–less distant.

Sorry. What’s the purpose of a speaker assessment form? To help speakers get better. However, let’s distinguish between the uses of a speaker assessment form at a training course, and one passed out at the end of a live presentation.

What are the differences? A training course assessment form will be more detailed and analytical–more process oriented, more focused on the mechanics of speaking. A form meant to be filled out by audience members after a talk should be short and sweet, focused on what audience members took away from the experience and any suggestions they might have for improvement.

In what areas do speakers need to get better? In messaging, use of PowerPoint, and personal impact.

How should messaging be evaluated? The message of a good presentation should:

• be audience-centric
• define a business problem from the perspective of the audience
• pose a valid question about that problem
• answer that question satisfactorily in a clear and vivid manner
• compare the speaker’s answer to alternative answers
• argue why the presenter’s answer is better
• end by reminding the audience of the problem and asserting the need to think, feel, or do as the speaker suggests.

How should PowerPoints be evaluated? They should follow the principles of cognitive guidance, which are:

1. The Multimedia Principle; we learn better from spoken words and pictures than from spoken words alone.

2. The Coherence Principle; we learn better when extraneous material is excluded rather than included.

3. The Contiguity Principle; we learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented at the same time or next to each other on the screen.

4. The Modality Principle; we learn better from pictures with spoken text than pictures with printed text.

5. The Signaling Principle; we learn better when the material is organized with clear outlines and headings.

6. The Personalization Principle; we learn more from a conversational style than a formal style.

This adds up a few simple rules.

• Headlines of slides should be short, assertive sentences that summarize the information on the slide.
• The body of the slide should be a visual–a photo, drawing, graph, scheme, etc.
• Bullet points should be kept to an absolute minimum.
• Put the details, or the speaker’s points, in the Notes section of the PowerPoint and hand the document out after the event.
• The speaker should introduce the next slide while the old one is still on the screen.

And finally, how should a presenter’s personal impact be evaluated? That’s a harder question. The simplest answer is she should be evaluated based on what she causes her audience to feel, know, or do. She should be judged by outcomes, not process.

How can presenters take control of the way they make listeners feel? By making a serious, sustained effort to understand how they are coming across and what they can do to improve. For instance, evidence suggests that tone of voice, image, body language, and clothing and grooming play a significant role in our impact on others.

But what role does intention play? You said earlier that messages should be listener-centric. Our intentions are important. We should align them with the interests of our audience. But we often have goals for a talk that are both overt and covert. For instance, ever since President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law, the Republicans have been successful in winning the votes of working class white southerners. Since then, the overt goals of Republican speakers has been to convince those voters that the Republican platform is in their economic self-interest. The covert goal has been to play on their historical racial bias.

So what should A Really Useful Speaker Evaluation Form look like? It should be:

• On one page
• As simple as possible
• Be designed for a specific purpose
• Address messaging, PowerPoint, and personal impact
• Use a few specific criteria for each of those categories
• Leave room for subjective comments and suggestions
• Attempt to measure outcomes

Can you give us an example? Yes, here are two that I find useful. Neither is perfect. One is clearly for training purposes, the other is meant to be completed by audience members after a talk.

Training Assessment Form

And here’s a Speaker Assessment form meant to be filled out by an audience member after a talk. It was created by Cliff Atkinson of Sociable Media.

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