I went to lunch yesterday with a bunch of industry folk who are on Capitol Hill to lobby for the transportation bill, which may or may not go anywhere this year. They had a lunch speaker from a trade association who presented them with an overview of what’s in the transportation bill, its current status on the Hill, what work still needs to be done and the obstacles facing its passage.

All fine and good, but the audience wasn’t interested in three-quarters of the speech. This became obvious during the Q&A session afterwards, when attendees asked a lot of questions that the presentation didn’t cover.

This isn’t a post about legislation or lobbying. It’s a post about programming and content delivery. The lesson here is broad content only appeals to broad audiences. As soon as you start to target narrower segments of your audience, the content needs revision. From a reporter’s point of view, what this lunch presentation needed was a new lede. The overall content was valuable and interesting, but its relevance got lost in the way it was presented as a broad overview, in which every piece of information (every statistic, every policy recommendation, every obstacle) was treated as equal.

A teacher of mine used to say, “You have to have things one way before you can have them two ways.” In other words, content is always improved with prioritization. What is the most important fact or the most important takeaway? If you are planning a presentation or facilitating one, you can improve the relevancy of your speech by asking a few questions ahead of time:

1. What does this audience expect to take away from this presentation?
2. What do they already know about this topic?
3. What are the two or three things they want to know about this topic?
4. Is there anything specifically I should not talk about during this presentation?