How to make a presentation interactive: Complete guide for 2025

Just about everyone has sat through a presentation that made them want to take a nap. The one thing all of these sleep-inducing presentations have in common? They’re one-sided: the presenter presents, the listeners listen, and everyone tunes out.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Check out the following examples of interactive presentations, so you can make sure your next presentation doesn’t turn into a snooze-fest. 

Why make presentations interactive?

Making presentations interactive makes them more effective — that’s basic knowledge. Beyond that, you can reap even more benefits, including

• Better engagement: When the audience is called to participate, they engage more with the content being presented. This also leads to better information retention, more positive sentiment about the topics being presented (and the presenter), and better feedback.
• Higher sales conversion: Delivering sales presentations with higher engagement results in more sales. Audiences who participate in the presentation are more likely to feel understood, with their needs and pain points acknowledged, which in turn fosters trust and alignment.
• Enhanced learning outcomes: Educational presentations should teach the audience something. Interactive presentations are better at helping audiences retain lessons and walk away with a better understanding of the subject.
• Less stress and improved scalability: Giving a presentation is stressful enough; giving a presentation where you do all the talking even more so. Including opportunities for interaction in your presentation can offload some of the work and make it easier to present. This is especially true for longer, more technical, or in-depth presentations.
• Better data comprehension: Data presentation can be especially challenging. Sharing a lot of numbers and charts in a row can make for a dry performance. Adding interactive elements to data presentations helps listeners remember facts and figures longer and understand why they’re important.

In short, adding interactive elements makes the presentation better for everyone involved. But the challenge is figuring out how to make presentations interactive in the first place. This guide will help you come up with interactive presentation ideas to transform the way you present for the better.

Use case: Live Q&A sessions and polling

The easiest way to make your presentation more interactive is to engage directly with your audience and invite them to ask questions or provide feedback. Typically, this comes in three forms:

1. Asking the audience a direct question
2. Running a poll of the audience
3. Opening the floor up to questions from the audience

All three have their place in a presentation, and they require some thought and best practices to execute effectively.

Asking questions

Remember the scene from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off where Ben Stein put students to sleep asking questions about tariffs? That’s the wrong way to do it. Getting your audience to engage with your questions requires asking the right kinds of questions. 

• Do ask open-ended questions that create space for discussion and participation.
• Don’t ask short questions with right and wrong answers, or ones that can be answered in a single word (like yes or no).
• Do give your audience time to think of a good answer and make space for responses.
• Don’t try to cram a complex question into a minute or two.

Real-time polling

Polling is like asking direct questions, but to the entire audience rather than to a specific listener. Unlike asking questions, though, you want the questions to be closed-ended so the audience doesn’t feel overwhelmed or confused by response choices.

• Do use a limited number of response options that are broad enough to fit everyone in the audience but narrow enough to be relevant.
• Don’t try to offer every single possible answer as an option.
• Do give your audience time to answer and discuss the results rather than just listing them.
• Don’t pause everything while waiting for responses to come in, as that can feel like a lot of pressure to audience members.

Live Q&A sessions

Finally, give your audience some time to ask you questions. And don’t just do it at the end of the presentation, as by the time you get to the end, questions become less relevant and timely.

• Do collect questions throughout the presentation and create logical breaks to address them.
• Don’t wait until the end to answer questions — by then, many in the audience will have forgotten what they wanted to ask and why.
• Do use technology to collect responses, so questions don’t interrupt the presentation.
• Don’t turn the Q&A into an unmoderated free-for-all.

In all of these cases, the secret to killer interactive presentations is using the right technology. Presentation tools for teachers and other presenters, like Kahoot, Mentimeter, and Slido, are great for collecting audience responses without having to pause or break the flow of the presentation.

Use case: Multimedia and interactive slides

Another option for boosting engagement in presentations is to include multimedia slides and interactive components. Rather than lecturing for the entire time against a background of static content, interactive slide elements can pull people in and get them interested in what’s happening while giving presenters a chance to catch their breath and reenergize. And these techniques are even more important for self-guided presentations without a physical presenter.

Audio, video, and animation

People tend to tune out quickly when faced with things that are similar and repetitive in nature, such as static presentation slides. Adding an interactive presentation element, like audio, video, or animation, gets their attention back by breaking the pattern with something different. The key is to use these elements sparingly, and at the right time — if every slide has a video, it stops being novel and unexpected. Instead, space them out to hit at key moments when audience attention starts lagging.

Clickable, interactive elements

These may not be the best ways to make a presentation interactive if you’re presenting, but they’re great for self-guided presentations. Adding manual navigation elements, quizzes, and clickable components forces people to take an active role in the presentation in a way few other elements do. Including them creates a positive feedback cycle in audiences — as they’re forced to interact and engage more, they begin looking forward to interaction opportunities.

Branching scenarios and decision trees

One of the most advanced and effective ways to add interactive elements for presentations is by using audience decisions to shape the narrative, which can transform presentations from just OK to absolute winners. The trade-off is that this requires a lot more planning and work upfront to ensure that audience decisions are meaningful and that different choices are adequately fleshed out.

Gamification

The most effective way to boost audience engagement is by incorporating game elements that foster competition and one-upmanship among the audience. People are highly motivated by winning, so using points to reward participation can really kick engagement into overdrive. Interactive real-time leaderboards help people stay motivated, and opportunities to catch up keep even listeners who are significantly behind focused and in the game.

Use case: Audience participation techniques

Knowing how to make a presentation interactive doesn’t begin and end with figuring out how to add interactive elements to the presentation itself. A big part of being a good presenter is showmanship and understanding how to work with an audience to get them to interact and engage with your material. If you’re not a natural presenter, don’t worry: a lot of these techniques can be learned and will work for anyone.

Group activities and breakout sessions

An easy way to get audiences participating and engaged is to create group activities and breakout sessions. In these, rather than being passive consumers of a presentation, audience members get together in small groups and discuss the topic or engage in fun activities. These can range from figuring out how to solve a problem to using blocks to build something, or having an open discussion to explore the concepts you’ve been presenting. Because participants are engaging with each other in small groups, the dynamic becomes more interactive.

Live demonstrations and hands-on exercises

Incorporating group activities, live demos, and hands-on components into your presentation really draws audience members in. These interactive presentation components are more interesting and engaging, and are likely to get a better response than traditional approaches like collecting feedback or a Q&A session. 

Storytelling and case study discussions

Another way to encourage audience participation is to use narratives and stories to bring information to life and make it relevant. Introducing case studies or other storytelling techniques provides a context for what you’re presenting, turning abstract concepts into real lessons that audience members can relate to and feel a tangible connection with. 

Role-playing scenarios and simulations

Role-playing and simulation put your audience right in the middle of the action, giving them a chance to put your presentation into practice. This is the ultimate interactive component for presentations. But it can also be difficult to pull off: audience members can act in unpredictable ways or take the scenarios into places you never prepared for, so you must be able to think on your feet to react and maintain control.

Use case: Traditional interactive presentation tools

Creating interactive presentations used to require Microsoft PowerPoint. Today, there are countless options, each with its own features and strengths. These tools include

1. Prezi: Besides being easy to use, Prezi is interactive and visual, with features like Zooming User Interface for non-linear navigation, as well as real-time collaboration and easily embedded multimedia.
2. Genially: Genially offers a lot of options for quizzes, clickable hotspots, embedded games, and other similar interactive features, making it ideal for self-guided interactive presentations.
3. Mentimeter: Mentimeter is a solid choice for presenting, featuring tools like live polling, word clouds, quizzes, and Q&A sessions.
4. Nearpod: Primarily designed for educators, Nearpod offers features such as virtual field trips, collaborative boards, and embedded assessments.
5. PowerPoint: A classic yet powerful tool, especially with add-ons and plugins, PowerPoint offers a vast array of features, but can be intimidating, and these features may be difficult to find or locked behind paywalls.

The problem with traditional tools is they’re… well, outdated. They were designed and built long before modern tools and techniques became available, and they come with a host of challenges because of it. These include

• Scheduling constraints: While some tools are suitable for self-guided situations, most were designed for live sessions with a presenter and an attentive audience, which requires everyone to have availability at the same time.
• Presenter dependency: These traditional tools were designed to be entirely dependent on the presenter and their skill. A strong presenter will have no trouble engaging an audience, but someone who isn’t as skilled might struggle and find little support from their presentation tools.
• Preparation time: Building a presentation takes a lot of time. Building an excellent presentation with interactive elements requires even more effort. The more interactive elements are added, and the more engaging and powerful they are, the longer it takes to build.
• Scalability challenges: On one hand, traditional tools make it difficult to scale audience size from a handful of people to a large crowd. On the other hand, they make it difficult to scale the number of interactive presentations that can be handled simultaneously, as they’re dependent on the presenter and their time. They also struggle to scale to different types of audiences, as this typically requires manual rework of the presentation materials.

Traditional presentation tools are fine for displaying static information in real-time to small groups. However, they often struggle to create meaningful, exciting, and interactive presentations for large groups or to tailor a presentation to multiple groups simultaneously.

The future of interactive presentations: Jotform Presentation Agents

This is where Jotform Presentation Agents come in. Jotform Presentation Agents use advanced AI to take the load off the presenter. What are AI agents? The short answer is that they’re artificial intelligence programs that can perform tasks and assignments independently of a human directing their every decision. Think of them as helpful assistants.

For Jotform Presentations, agents can separate the work of building a presentation from the work of presenting it, and take over for a presenter on the fly to create rich, engaging, interactive presentations with minimal work from you.

How do Jotform Presentation Agents work?

It’s simple: you upload a presentation (in formats like PDF, PPTX, or Google Slides), and then let the agent present for you. AI-powered voice narration leads viewers through the slides in a variety of languages and with customizable voices and personalities.

But it’s not just a slide reader. The agent is smart enough to accept questions from the audience and provide answers based on the presentation materials. It can even let users interrupt and ask questions as they come up. The agent will also navigate the slides dynamically, picking and choosing what comes next based on viewer feedback and interest.

And AI agents are simple to use. Just follow our helpful guide on how to use AI agents, and you’ll be up and running in no time.

Taking the work out of building interactive presentations

Building a dynamic presentation that responds to viewer questions and changes based on what happens is a lot of work, requiring presenters to create numerous slides. AI presentation agents allow you to build engaging slides with plenty of interactive content quickly, just by entering a prompt. 

For presenters struggling to produce enough interactive content for their diverse audiences, this tool gives them back their time while making their presentations better and more interactive than ever.

Strengths of AI presentation agents

AI presentation agents enable you to create interactive presentations that are custom-tailored to every viewer. The agents are

• Available 24/7: Viewers can access fully interactive presentations whenever is convenient for them, and never miss a presentation because of scheduling conflicts.
• Integrated with Jotform’s services: Feedback forms, lead capture, and follow-ups are fully integrated, so you never have to worry about missing a response.
• Transparent and accountable: Analytics and insights on viewer engagement are built in, so you always know how well your presentations are being received and can adjust as needed.
• Multilingual: Present in languages you don’t even speak. Agents enable your presentations to reach audiences you couldn’t have reached without them.

Measuring interactive presentation success

How can you tell if your interactive presentations are working? By measuring key performance indicators. For interactive presentations, the big ones you’ll want to look at are

• Engagement time: How long do participants spend actively engaged with your material? This could involve measuring aspects such as slide navigation, poll participation, or Q&A time.
• Completion rates: How many viewers made it all the way to the end? For in-person presentations, this is high since most people regard walking out on a presentation as rude. Still, for digital presentations, it’s a critical metric to keep an eye on.
• Question frequency: How often do viewers ask questions? For additional qualitative insight, you can also look at what questions viewers tend to ask and what kinds of questions they’re asking — are viewers confused and looking for clarification, or are they engaged and seeking more information?
• Interaction patterns: How do viewers navigate your presentation? Are they clicking through as quickly as possible, or are they taking their time?
• Feedback analysis: What do viewers say about your presentation? Do they end up converting? Do they provide positive responses after viewing it?

This data is invaluable for understanding the effectiveness of your presentations and for identifying areas for improvement. By following the data, you’ll be able to fine-tune your interactive presentation and see the clear ROI of going from static slides to interactive content.

Transforming your presentations through AI 

Some people are natural presenters: they love attention, enjoy engaging people in discussions, and can spend hours putting together detailed slide decks. Most people aren’t like that, though — a lot of us dread presenting anything. Even fewer have time to put together a presentation, let alone to do the work an in-depth interactive presentation requires. 

Jotform’s AI Presentation Agents are the secret weapon for all of us who fall into that second group of people. They can help us educate, entertain, and tell stories in a way that lets audiences connect with our message, and in a way that we either can’t or don’t have time to do in person. Even if we really, really want to. Try Jotform Presentation Agents for free, and tell the engaging, entertaining, and interactive stories you’ve always wanted to — anytime, anywhere, to anyone.