Tip 159: Choose the best time to distribute your handout
You can distribute your handout before, during, or after your presentation, depending on what you want to achieve with your handout, and what role it plays in your presentation. You audience will probably look at your handout right when they receive it and will miss whatever you say in the next several minutes.
Handouts given before presentations
At times it can be very useful to give your audience a handout several days before your presentation. Typically, this would apply in situations such as:
If the members of you audience had levels of background knowledge and you wanted to bring all of them up to speed at a particular level before they attended your presentation. Then when you started your presentation, you may assume a basic common foundation level of knowledge and spend your precious presentation time building on that rather than spending it giving background information.
If you wanted your audience to do some essential background reading before your presentation, you could give them a handout based around a reading list. Your presentation could then be focused around that common reading.
When you wanted to give your audience some exercises or questions to do before they attend your presentation, so that you can spend some time during your presentation discussing their responses to those exercises.
If you wanted to invite audience interaction on your data, results or proposal, it helps to circulate a handout well in advance of your presentation so that your audience will come having considered your ideas and will be in a more considered position to engage in a constructive dialogue during your presentation.
There are a number of pitfalls to watch out for with this strategy, however. If you have given a comprehensive handout beforehand, then your audience may respond in the following way:
They may not read it before they attend, in which case your time, effort and energy have been wasted.
They may spend the time during the presentation reading your handout rather than focusing on you.
They may feel that they received all the information they needed, and therefore do not need to attend.
They may lose interest in your topic and therefore not attend.
Handouts given during presentations
Making your audience interact with your handout during the presentation is an incredibly powerful way to involve the audience in your presentation. When the audience has put something of themselves into a handout, they may value it more than an anonymous piece of printed paper that someone has simply given them.
There are several good ways of achieving this:
Handouts with gaps. Give out a skeleton handout at the beginning with headings and broad topic areas and lots of white space so that your audience can fill in their own notes under each heading during the presentation. This type of handout pre-structures the session and acts as an advance organiser. It helps keep your audience on track with the flow of your presentation.
If you want to show a complex table or chart of data, and feel that not everyone at the back of the room will be able to see the whole data, a handout containing the table or data is an ideal supplementary aid. It may help to involve the audience in labelling or annotating the data under your guidance as a way of engaging your audience.
Interactive handouts and worksheets. These include tasks and exercises for audience members to perform during the lecture, either individually or in pairs or in groups, with space on the handout for them to write down their ideas and responses. The answers can be a basis for further discussion.
It can be a logistical challenge to distribute handouts to a large audience without causing a disruption to the flow of the presentation, so it is worthwhile thinking about how you will distribute your handout. If you let your audience have the handout at the beginning of the presentation, it may act as a distraction.
If you have a large amount of content, consider breaking it up into a number of smaller handouts that you can distribute at appropriate times during your presentation. This prevents your audience from reading ahead and losing interest in what you’re saying.
Handouts given after presentations
If you want your audience to go away from your presentation with a summary of your presentation, you should make the handout available only after you have finished your talk.
There can be considerable difficulty in deciding what to tell your audience during the presentation about the handout that will be available afterwards. If you tell them about the handout at the start of the presentation, they may not take any notes, expecting your handout to be more comprehensive than it is.
If however you distribute a handout at the end of the presentation without announcing that you were intending to do so, this can be interpreted as a vote of no confidence in the audience’s note-taking abilities, and some of them may feel cheated because they took notes unnecessarily.
The further challenge is that if people generally know that you distribute comprehensive handouts after your presentation, they may simply ask a colleague to pick up a copy for them, rather than attending your presentation at all!
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