Communication plays a key role in life. Through communication we interact with our friends, family and people around us, thus directly affecting our relations with them since it’s through communication we convey our messages and feelings.

When it comes to communicating effectively, the involvement of the audience is very important. Every person you talk, write or signal to, in other words every person you communicate with is your audience. And to make your communication effective, you need to understand how to get your audience involved in your speech or piece of writing.

These are few points to be kept in mind to achieve an active and successful audience involvement in your oral communication, particularly with a large audience.

Be audible

To make your communication effective and gather the audiences’ interest, you should be fairly audible to those you’re addressing — not too low-pitched to be barely audible or too high-pitched to sound unpleasant. A distance of two to three feet without mike when addressing individuals, and of three to four inches of the mike if using one, is helpful in finding a balanced voice volume.

Vocal clarity

Apart from being fairly audible, your voice must also be clear enough to be understood by the listeners. Even slight distractions such as nasal noise or an uneven tone may cause the listeners to strain their nerves more to grab what you’re saying, something which they may not like at all. And even when you’re fully audible, if such distractions occur during your speech, your effect upon the audience will be weakened and the message which you’re trying to convey will be conveyed but very ineffectively.

Eye contact

This is an old tip, I admit, nevertheless, the most important one too when it comes to making an impact upon your audience. You can cover all that’s not good enough in your speech by maintaining a confident eye contact and aligning the expressions of your eyes with your speech. This way, even when there is some ambiguity at the audience’s end, they may grasp the sense of what you’re saying, or at least a part of it, through your gaze and your communication will be in much less trouble. If, however, your eye contact depicts nervousness like when avoiding any eye contact with your audience, even when you’re talking excellently, it’ll have a very negative impact on your audience who would clearly perceive your nervous state.

Body language

Even though you may not realise it, your gestures and body movement when talking to others play an important role in how your message is conveyed. If your body gestures are swift, firm and moderately involved in your speech, it helps in getting your audiences involved with what you’re saying.

Be interactive

Adding an interactive touch to your speech is very useful in directly involving your audience. This can be done by basing your speech upon effective group-activity methods, such as brain-storming or similar techniques where you may ask them to voluntarily cite their idea of some concept that is part of your speech. Not only will this keep them attentive and active, but it will also have a pleasant effect on them, making them feel being an active and constructive part of a group activity.

Dressing

While the way you dress or your appearance may not seem like a very important part of effective communication, nevertheless, it can ruin your impact if it goes against the decorum of your environment.

For instance, if you go speaking on a formal forum but are dressed casually, it will leave an unpleasant impression. Similarly, being too formally dressed on an informal occasion is not a good idea. People will be paying attention to your appearance rather than what you are saying, consequentially leading to an ineffective audience involvement.

Feedback

Last, but certainly not the least, feedback forms a very important part of your speech. Feedback has two advantages — you not only get your audience involved in letting you know how well your communication was, you may also gather authentic data about how good you are and what you need to improve.