Here are 18 methods you can use right away to encourage audience participation when speaking in public.

Audience survey.

Easy to do to get a quick poll of the audience. “Hands up in the room for everyone who has…” or “Those people who think they’re inclined to do this, could they please stand up?” or “If you like the idea… go ahead now”

Moving through the audience.

With a roving microphone, you can occasionally move towards your audience like Jerry Springer or Opra Winfrey. Be careful though because your back will be to some people and you will lose eye contact, but it breaks the routine.

Tell stories.

These engage your audience’s imagination and sense of humor and allow them to connect your world with theirs. This is a subtle turnout

Humor.

Use humor when appropriate. Just having your audience laugh or chuckle engages them and gets those endorphins going, which injects them with motivation and energy.

Jobs for boys or girls.

Ask enthusiasts to help you with your flyers, be the timekeeper, finder and carrier with eg the roving microphone. It doesn’t involve everyone, but it does get some people moving and enjoying their role.

Ask the audience questions.

Easy to do in smaller groups, when training for example. But in a group of 50 or more, this can be tricky, as peer pressure can guarantee you get a loud silence thrown back at you. Rhetorical questions are best at first. You could also use this humorously. After a period of silence you could say… “by the way, that was a rhetorical question.”

Put people’s names in your speech.

Do some research beforehand to find out who is who in the organization. Who doesn’t mind being mentioned and using their names.

Use audience quizzes.

Ask your distribution partners to distribute a short quiz related to the topic and ask people to complete it. Keep them short and self-explanatory, at least with instructions on what to do printed on the sheet. The last thing you want is people asking questions about how to complete it.

Partner Commitment.

Quick and simple, and ensures people start taking action after they enter. Ask them to turn to a partner and make them a promise about what you are going to do when you leave today. Then you can ask one or two volunteers to tell the whole group what they are going to do.

group discussion.

An old favorite in coaching circles and has his place to talk, too. Set up a topic to be discussed that needs personal thoughts and ideas, and then ask everyone to turn to their partner to discuss the topic for, say, 5 minutes. Alternatively, ask two people sitting next to each other to join the two people in front of them, who could turn their chairs.

Audience Questions.

It’s usually taken at the end of the presentation and that’s fine as long as people know. You could answer questions periodically, for example, every 30 minutes. Or you can request them at any time and this is usually fine for smaller groups. But the worst case scenario is that no one wants to ask a question. Faced with this prospect, you could hand out index cards to everyone and have them write questions anonymously. Ask them to pass the completed cards around the audience and ask them to read them. Since the question does not belong to them, there will be many people who volunteer. A great idea that I saw the other day, with a young audience, was phone text messaging. The speaker asked everyone to text a question to her mobile number. Sure enough, within a few minutes, the speaker was able to read the questions she was receiving and answer them.

Use photos of the audience.

You need permission for this purpose to incorporate images of the audience into your PowerPoint presentation.

Forum Theater.

This is great fun and allows audience members to engage in role-play without actually role-playing. Let me give you an example of how this works and there is much more. You need some actors on stage or some very outgoing and enthusiastic audience members. Set up a situation, say a sales scenario, and secretly tell the actors to do it wrong. Run the performance for a few minutes and then ask the audience what they are doing wrong and how they could do it differently. Ask the audience to convey their ideas directly to the actors, who will then act this way or using their words, or whatever is suggested.

Flip charts around the room.

In this case, you want to get feedback from your audience in the form of ideas or suggestions related to a topic. Have flip charts posted around the room beforehand and write on each chart the topic you want ideas about or the question to be answered. Next, place audience members in teams and ask them to physically walk to a flipchart. Shout and ask them to write down their ideas. After 2 minutes, ask them to move to the next box and do the same. After about 10 minutes, you should have plenty of ideas or input to use however you like.

energizers.

Activities that energize the group. There are thousands out there, some risky and some not, but they are all meant to revitalize the audience in some way. The best ones are the ones where the actual energizer is connected to the subject in some way, otherwise some people think they are wasting their time.

Questionnaires.

Highly energetic and can be executed in countless ways. Teams, individuals, it doesn’t matter. The point is that you have prepared some questions on the topic and you are going to take a quiz of some description to teach more information or test to see what people have learned in a fun way. Easy when you have smaller groups, but large groups will work too.

Volunteers on stage.

It does what it says on the tin. Let me give you an example to get you thinking about this. A speaker asked 12 volunteers from the audience to come up on stage and impersonate a particular character. The characters were all the kinds of challenging delegates you can get in training courses: the prankster, the whiner, the dinosaur, etc. We had a lot of fun acting out scenarios that were arranged in advance by the speaker.

bistro exercises.

My final suggestion for you and the most effective. As an example, I arranged the room so that we had bistro tables that held about a dozen people each. Then I organized a series of games, activities, exercises that each table would do among themselves, facilitated by me.

For example, we asked alternate tables to act out the body language movements and the next table had to guess what the body language meant. We had puzzle-solving and riddle-solving tables to learn more about the subject. We set several syndicate exercises for each table. Each exercise had instructions on handouts or PowerPoint slides to make the instructions clear.