RNIB

Communication Concern

Presentations and media interviews are part and parcel of the work of the communications team at the Royal National Institute of Blind People and Caroline Woodward, Communications Officer, and her colleagues realised they needed some help to make their public speaking forays more effective. “We needed to be able to interact with the audience more naturally and to make our presentations livelier” explains Caroline.

Solution

After talking everything through with Neil at Partners With You, a bespoke workshop was created covering body language, posture, projecting the voice, breathing, portraying enthusiasm and sounding more confident.

Simon Nock, one of the actor workshop leaders at Partners With You, comments “The interactive workshop gave the opportunity for the RNIB delegates to present and then receive hands on diagnostic feedback. As actors we use our voices and bodies as our communication tools and can pass on the techniques and skills we use professionally to help delegates to communicate more successfully in a variety of situations including media interviews. We helped the group focus on new ways of presenting and shared a wealth of tips and techniques focusing on effective body language, vocal control and managing thoughts, so that at the end, everyone looked and felt more confident and communicated more successfully when presenting”.

Result

Caroline Woodward concludes, “The training really made us all think and definitely took us out of our comfort zones… but not too drastically: enough to help us make a marked difference within the day but also plenty too for us to work on and start building in to our techniques from here on. We all went back to work smiling and motivated to get out there and keep it going”.