Your responsibility as a communicator

Sustainable living and re-building green spaces to allow our wildlife to flourish ought to be an exciting proposition, one that provokes enthusiasm and passion, so you can imagine how disappointed I was to sit through four presentations on the theme of sustainability, climate change, and energy reduction and witness the growing boredom of the audience around me.

It is hard enough to motivate people, simplify the science and make it all relevant without being boring, incoherent and inconsistent.

A plea to anyone who is speaking to an audience on these subjects:

Only present on a subject you are passionate about. Audiences sense when you don't really mean it.

Tell a story. Have a beginning, middle and end. A stream of thoughts in random order doesn't work, no matter how good the quality of the material itself.

If you use slides make them interesting. Use pictures rather than text and don't ever put anything on the screen that can't be read. Saying 'you don't need to read this' is a waste of a slide and begs the question 'why put it up there?'

Spellcheck your slides - get someone else to spellcheck for you.

Format your slides - different fonts, sizes and colours do not make bullet points more interesting, just annoying.

If there is more than one person presenting and you are supposed to be talking about a theme then check what they are saying. Yesterday I watched as one person completely undermined the following presentation by dismissing the subject of her talk within his.

Try and do more than just present data. Set challenges, tasks, talk about consequences, opportunities and create a vision of what can be.

Finally, if you're not very confident at speaking then get some coaching, it really can help.

Many people are still getting to grips with the concept of sustainable living and working. Many don't understand biodiversity at all. Climate change, greenhouse gases and carbon emissions can seem too complicated to even bother trying to understand. So if you are asked to present then you have a responsibility to do a good job and get it right for all the other people like you who are trying to make a difference.

It isn't easy but an audience will make a link between you, your presentation style and the subject matter.

So just be great at it, you know you can be.