Presenting

Your team will be awarded points for your understanding of monetary policy and the economy, and how you present this information so that your reasoning is clear and supports your decision.

These tips will help your team to fine-tune your presentation and ensure your slides are of a high standard.

Presentation tips

Eye Contact: Using eye contact allows good speakers to engage with the audience. For online presentations this is more challenging – try to look in the direction of the camera from time to time.

Speaking: Clear, concise speech is a hallmark of an effective confident speaker. Choose words that are easy for you to say and practise your speech in front of an audience.

Pausing: Deliberate silence is an effective tool to engage listeners. It can be used to stress a point or to add impact. Avoid rushing your presentation and try not to fill silences with the word ‘um'.

Gesturing: Gesturing can help to emphasise important points in your message.

Cue cards: You may choose to use cue cards or notes to remind yourself of the key points in your presentation.

PowerPoint: PowerPoint slides should support your message and emphasise your main points. Try not to read directly from your presentation, instead, position yourself so you are mainly talking to the audience and not to the slides. Other handy tips include:

• be highly selective in what you choose to show
• use visuals that complement your commentary
• don't pile lots of text onto your slides - only put up key points (the fewer words per slide the better)
• do not add too many visual or sound effects – this can be distracting for the audience
• make the text big enough for everyone in the room to see and give text good colour contrast from the background. This makes it easy for the audience to quickly take in the points you are trying to make.

Be familiar with the content of your presentation: Make sure you know, and understand, what you want to convey to the audience. Practise your presentation, but do not try and learn it off by heart.

Presenting visuals (charts or diagrams)

Make sure that you:

1. Describe to the judges what a slide is showing. For example, "What you see here is a chart showing inflation over the last two years".
2. Interpret the visual for the audience. For example you might say, "As this chart clearly illustrates, inflation is projected to be in the one to three percent range".

Line charts: are best for showing relative values, changes over time, and comparing two or three items. Graphs that plot more than three variables, however, can overwhelm viewers to the point of confusion.

Bar charts: are best for comparing specific statistics or illustrating easily-comparable data.

Pie charts: are best for comparing segments to one another and to the whole. All sections must measure the same variable (eg, dollars or percentages). Any section that contains less than five percent should be grouped with others like it into a category marked ‘others'.

And remember...

On the day try and relax and enjoy your presentation – the better you feel about your presentation the better you will come across to the audience!