Harvard Business Review Guides Ultimate Boxed Set (16 Books)

Build an Effective Call to Action

Presentations move people to act—but only if you explicitly state what actions you want them to take, and when. Are you asking them to be doers, suppliers, influencers, or innovators (see table 2-3)?

To get to this list of four things an audience can do for you, I read hundreds of speeches and classified their calls to action. Whether your audience is corporate, political, scientific, or academic, the people you’re addressing should fall into one of these categories.

Make it clear what you need to accomplish together and break that down into discrete tasks and deadlines that feel manageable to the audience. Let’s consider an example where the call to action is to “innovate”—since that can be tough to pull off. ...