Storytelling: one solution for audience engagement and presenter anxiety, your two biggest event stressors

People who enjoy eating spicy food are willingly accepting a risk – if you overegg it this time, you’ll end up in a world of fiery pain, but boy is it worth it if you find that sweet spot of a pleasantly tingling tongue. For corporate event organisers, the feeling is familiar: before you start the project, you know it’ll likely be intense and stressful, but when the big day rolls around and your attendees are buzzing with excitement, there’s no better feeling.

Ironically though, the biggest source of that stress comes from this interesting conundrum: the success of the thing you poured your life and soul into for the last few months does not depend on you. It all comes down to your presenters conveying your messages in the right way, with the right amount of energy, and the audience – that you have absolutely no control over – engaging with those messages.

Good news. There is a solution: and it’s just one solution to address both challenges. Keep reading to learn about the science of audience engagement and presenter anxiety, and how the content you present can help both.

How to use this article

Start at the amusing ice-breaker anecdote at the beginning, or use the navigation to jump to the standing ovation at the end:

• The science of audience engagement
• The science of public speaking anxiety
• The solution: Creating the audience experience through visual storytelling
• Discover your story resource pack: Craft your memorable message
• Visual: The power of dual-coding
• Conclusion: The standing ovation

The science of audience engagement

Corporate events are a fantastic way to create engagement with your company and your brand – whether that’s to an internal audience at a sales kick off, or externally for a customer-facing event. And it’s this engagement that supercharges revenue and growth for your company; it’s what keeps your sales teams aligned, or keeps your brand top-of-mind when a prospect goes to market.

But how do you get it? And can you be confident of that outcome? After all, that’s where a lot of the pressure comes from – how can you be sure that the things you’re doing will actually yield tangible results?

Before we look at how, we need to understand the what: what engages audiences? And for that we can take our lead from neuroscience:

How memory works

Our brains use emotions to decide what’s worth remembering. If something feels important or meaningful, it’s more likely to stick. Two key parts of the brain help with this:

• Your hippocampus acts like a memory recorder, capturing everything you see, hear, and feel as one complete experience.
• Your amygdala adds emotional weight. If the moment feels relevant or powerful, it helps the hippocampus lock it in. If not, it might block it from being remembered.

For example, think of your best ever birthday party. You probably remember some details really vividly: the taste of the cake, the music playing, the people who were there – that’s your hippocampus at work, taking all those details and packaging them into one memory. And because it was a special, emotional moment, your amygdala helped lock it in.

So the most effective way to commit your event to your audience’s memory is to provide them not just with a series of presentations, but an experience. Something that awakens their emotions, and that – crucially –  they perceive as relevant to them.

Storytelling and memory

When you hear about someone climbing a mountain, your motor areas light up as if you were moving; when you hear about heartbreak, your emotional circuits resonate. In effect, stories let us ‘simulate’ experiences without directly living them.

This makes the hippocampus more likely to encode the material deeply because it feels personal and embodied. It’s also why stories are so memorable and why learners connect more strongly with case studies and narratives than with dry facts.

And this is great news for all you event organisers. Because it means you can cancel the order for the ‘try it yourself’ mobile lab experience – you can achieve very similar experiential results by telling compelling and well-imagined stories.

What does all of this mean? If you can create your content based on these core principles (relevant, emotive content, that relies on stories over lists of facts and figures), the science proves that your audience will find it much easier to remember.

The science of public speaking anxiety

Now let’s talk about public speaking. You’ll consistently see public speaking listed as a top fear in the general population, and it’s the most prevalent social fear by a long shot [1]. Studies show that nearly 60% of people feel high levels of anxiety when they take the podium, where only 1 in 5 feel relaxed about it [2].

So why is it so nerve-wracking? A big part of it comes down to feeling judged – or as Absi et al. put it “social evaluation”[3]. When you’re presenting, all eyes are on you: that social pressure is intense, and an unresponsive audience (blank faces, phones out, no reaction) ramps those anxiety levels up even more [4].

Interesting, but it’s not hugely surprising is it? You can probably know this is true from your own public speaking experiences. Getting up on stage and talking in front of a lot of people is scary – what will they think of you if you get it wrong? And if you then see those people scrolling Instagram instead of listening to you, you’ll feel worse about it.

Well, there’s one more interesting insight from these studies over the years: speakers who feel hopeless or out of control struggle more [5],[6]. They find it harder to adapt, manage stress, or even remember what they’re supposed to say. Of course, on the flip side, when presenters feel like they’re in control – of their content and the audience – they perform better.

What does control look like?

• Control over the content means knowing exactly what’s coming next, how long you need to explain it, and familiarity with other cues like video, lights, sound effects, music.
• Control over the audience means grabbing their attention, keeping them engaged, and having a clear idea of how they’ll respond.

When presenters feel confident in both areas, their anxiety drops, and their performance improves. That’s where storytelling comes in.

The solution: Creating the audience experience through visual storytelling

Like we just read, an actively engaged audience is key to reducing public speaking anxiety, and an actively engaged audience is one that is emotionally connected to the content through impactful and relevant stories. We also learned that a speaker who feels like they’re in control is a speaker who is more confident. So, how do you achieve that across every audience, in every presenter, and at every session at your event?

Through your presentations. Through engaging and compelling presentations.

It’s so common to hear reference to Steve Jobs’s keynotes as being the gold standard for presentation storytelling, but while he was indeed a very competent speaker, in reality his content did all the work for him. Audiences flocked to iPhone presentations already excited about what he had to say, and the features he was announcing were always groundbreaking. So unless you’re the CTO of OpenAI primed to give a talk on the latest world-beating GenAI innovation, your talk will be harder to execute than Steve’s, and if you happen to be the CTO of OpenAI, please click here.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t create a world-class engaging presentation. What we’re actually doing is crafting an audience experience, and the vehicle for that is your presentation.

Let’s unpack that with a visual:

So for an engaged audience and confident presenters who feel in control, the answer lies in storytelling, which is made from three components:

• Memorable message
• Relevant visuals
• Meaningful extras

Together these elements create an audience experience – not just a presentation.

We’re going to spend our time focusing on the first two. For the third, where things like music, props, and how much you interact with the audience is really important, it depends massively on your content, your venue, your audience size, so there really is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach. The main thing to remember is that the extras should enhance your story – think about underlining a point, rather than making a new one.

Tip: the meaningful extras is a great place to collaborate with your AV team – they’ll have all kinds of ideas about how to use the event space to enhance your story.

Memorable Message

When most people build presentations, they start with the slides. They create a PowerPoint PowerDump of content with all the relevant slides they can muster, or use slides as story beats for the key things they want to cover.

This approach can work. But not very well. When you start with existing content you start with something that will inevitably need fixing or changing. You’ll have pieces of story that aren’t designed to be relevant for the audience in the room, and your content will skip around rather than flowing from idea to idea. At BrightCarbon we call these bad boys ‘Frankendecks’.

If you want to learn what best practice looks like, download our ‘Discover your story’ resource pack.

Visual: The power of dual coding

Now you have a beautifully crafted story. What happens next? *Navigates to AI tool and enters the prompt ‘use this information to create me a beautiful presentation’. Waits 3 minutes, makes coffee, checks Instagram, comes back to find 20 slides with images and a list of bullet points summarising each section.*

Tempting isn’t it.

But without impactful visuals – to use our analogy from earlier – the wheels will fall off your deck. Literally. Your visuals are what keep your content moving forward. They engage and inspire, they keep people tracking with what your presenters are talking about.

Defining impactful visuals

Let’s first think about what isn’t an impactful visual.

We know bullet points are the enemy. But did you know that bullet points can sneak into your content without you realising? Even if you don’t use a point, any list – even if it has a nicely formatted icon to go with it – is still doing the job of a bullet point. It’s just a list of things that don’t connect. Your audience will read it, most likely ignore it, and then wait for the presenter to catch up while planning which free coffee station to visit next.

In the other camp, there are some who decide to forgo text entirely, and just put a picture on the slide – maybe some stock images, or let’s be honest, something AI-generated – ooh very ‘Apple’. At best, your image isn’t helping you articulate your message, and at worst it’s distracting the audience.

Instead impactful visuals show what you’re talking about. And what are you talking about? Stories. Things interacting. Relationships. Are you describing a transition – some thing that has a ‘before’ and an ‘after’; are you comparing two things; are you walking your audience through a sequence of chronological events? You can show all these relationships on your slides with meaningful visuals.

Take a look at the two examples below? What feels most engaging and impactful?

Further reading: How to show relationships on your slides

Why are impactful visuals so… impactful?

First of all let me throw another neuroscience term at you: dual-coding. Dual-coding is where you hear one message via two channels. When you hear a narrative it’s processed in a part of the brain called the phonological loop. This is the same part that also processes written information. That’s why it’s basically impossible to read and listen at the same time. But, visuals are processed in a different part of the brain – (VSS) – and perceiving the same message via two channels deepens engagement with, and retention of, a message.

Additionally, studies have proved that this kind of visual slide is much more impactful with audiences. Research from Wecker in 2012 [7] took two audiences: to one they presented without slides, and to the other they presented with a set of text-heavy slides. Surprisingly, the audience retained more information from the presenter without any slides. ​It was noted that audiences were subconsciously assuming that things written on the slide were more significant than those the presenter was saying, and so tuned them out.

The study then found that you could ​overcome this phenomenon by removing the text from the slide, instead replacing it with fewer key words that don’t wholly make sense by themselves. The audience needs the presenter to explain what’s going on, and the presenter needs the visuals to do some of the heavy-lifting when it comes to explaining how these different things relate to each other.

This is the basis of one of our core beliefs at BrightCarbon: your slides should work with your presenter, not against them.

Conclusion: The standing ovation

Storytelling is the key to a memorable audience experience. It keeps your audience engaged, and helps your speaker feel more in control – which means less anxiety and better delivery. And when both of these things go well, your event is more likely to be a success.

At BrightCarbon, we love that tingly spicy pressure that working on an event brings – the excitement and thrill when we capture an audience’s imagination, and the gratification from catching up with a speaker that’s just aced their talk. Have a read of how we helped a big tech company communicate complex messages through some elaborate metaphors.

And if you’ve got an event coming up, why not rope in the experts? Take a look at our events offering, and get in touch today.

References

¹ Garcia-Leal, C., Parente, A. C., Del-Ben, C. M., Guimarães, F. S., Moreira, A. C., Elias, L. L. K., & Graeff, F. G. (2005). Anxiety and salivary cortisol in symptomatic and nonsymptomatic panic patients and healthy volunteers performing simulated public speaking. Psychiatry Research, 133(2-3), 239-252.

² Gallego, A., McHugh, L., Penttonen, M., Lappalainen, R. (2021). Measuring Public Speaking Anxiety: Self-report, behavioral, and physiological.

³ Al’Absi, M., Bongard, S., Buchanan, T., Pincomb, G. A., Licinio, J., & Lovallo, W. R. (1997). Cardiovascular and neuroendocrine adjustment to public speaking and mental arithmetic stressors. Psychophysiology, 34(3), 266- 275.

⁴ Bassett, R., Behnke, R. R., Carlile, L. W., & Rogers, J. (1973). The Effects of Positive and Negative Audience Responses on the Autonomic Arousal of Student Speakers. Southern Speech Communication Journal, 38 (3), 255–261. 10.1080/10417947309372195.

⁵ Eschman, M. N., Rouse, M. N. (2024). A Review of Cortisol Stress Reactivity to Public Speaking Stressors.

⁶ Gabrys, R. L., Howell, J. W., Cebulski, S. F., Anisman, H., & Matheson, K. (2019). Acute stressor effects on cognitive flexibility: Mediating role of stressor appraisals and cortisol. Stress, 22(2), 182-189.

⁷ Wecker, C. (2012). Slide presentations as speech suppressors: When and why learners miss oral information.