Tip 6: Ask for a smaller room
If you have a choice, ask the organiser of your event to give you the smallest room possible for your presentation. A packed room is a more emotional room. It makes for better acoustics and eye contact.
If you have a small number of people in a large room, the tendency is often for some people to sit at the back and disengage with the speaker or the rest of the audience. This makes your task a lot harder - you will have to shout louder and it is more difficult to pick up on their non-verbal cues. In the worst case, they may start talking amongst themselves and you will struggle to regain control of the environment.
It is better to have 210 people crammed into a 200-person room than to have the same 200 people spread out in a 500-person room. You want people to say about your presentation, "it was standing room only."
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