There’s so much great advice out there on this subject, I wondered if it was really worth doing anything on this. If I were you, I’d look at Russell’s bits here and here if you haven’t already.
So yes, there’s lots of brilliant stuff about how to go about making a presentation GREAT – but there are not many basic guidelines on how to get started. And the more you put into working hard upfront, the easier it gets.
That’s what I want to talk about. Don’t expect any pearls about how to work with video, or wow the room (I wish I knew). Do expect some commonsensical starts. I think that’ll be helpful for two reasons:
1. When you you start doing them you need to know where the hell to start. There are some easy ways to get you into flow of creating them.
2.I’m selfish. I’ve slowly died in too many bad, boring presentations to not do this. And some of these are made by very confident people who have reveled in their own magnificence and not taken to time to write, and say, a whole lot less.
First off, we’ll have a look at how to go about creating one. Another time we’ll look at some pointers on how to physically present – and how to put your slides together to help this.
So you know you have to do one. It’s your first, you’re a bit nervous and you don’t know where to start. What you don’t want to do is make the mistake I made first time. I’d seen enough to have a good idea that it’s best to be succinct and not have tons of slides. So I thought it wouldn’t take too long to do and left it until the last minute. Very stupid. I presented an ill thought out mess.
You really need to give yourself time. But that doesn’t mean start off willy nilly either. It’s not like a creative brief where it’s maybe best to start and then improve as you go along. You need to be really sure of what you’re going to say before you say it. The more effort you put into PLANNING what you’ll write before you write it, the better.
I’ll explain in a sec, but before I do, a word on design. I’ll assume you’ll be using powerpoint. If so, don’t spend ages working on the style of the deck, finding the best pictures and generally making it look amazing…..at least not until you’ve decided what you want to say. You’ll end up a Baywatch presentation – something lovely looking that has no interesting content whatsoever.
And don’t start just bashing out lots of slides either – you’ll end up with something far too complicated to have any hope of reducing it down again. It will be a mess, to quote Morecambe and Wise, "Singing all the right notes, not necessarily in the right order".
I do it another way. No presentation is merely a report. You want something out of it…the people you’re presenting to do come out thinking something, and then doing something as a result. There will be some specific things you want to communicate to get this done. IN OTHER WORDS YOU WILL HAVE SOME OBJECTIVES.
There will be some key things about these people that mean you’ll have to deliver in a certain way. Maybe they have some in built prejudices, a strong opinion, a way of thinking – there will be something. But they are a the barrier to you getting what you want out of your meeting.
Write down what you’re objectives are. Write down what specific barriers the audience represent. It’s turning into a creative brief isn’t it? In fact, there is even a tone and manner. Of course you must be yourself, but the more you know about the kind of people you’re talking to, the more you can tailor to them.
Then start putting down what you think you’ll need to say to remove those barriers and achieve your objective. Suddenly you have an agenda to you’re presentation, and the beginnings of a mind map.
Start looking at what links the chunks on the agenda together, what subject logically flows from one chunk to another. Magically you’re running order starts to emerge. You nearly have a plan for writing your presentation.
But hold on. There are other things to consider. You need to start well and ending better.
For the end……Psychologists have shown that people remember the end more than any other bit of an experience.
So write the end first – the ultimate point you want them to leave with.
Now think about attention spans. It’s really important to manipulate them, since they usually go like this:
Everyone’s up for it at the start, they’re listening, interested -primed. Then they slowly fade away.
So you need to get that vital info in the start, when you know they’ll take it in. Make it engaging, start really well – with that big point, the interesting bit that will grab them by the balls.
Take them up a notch while you’ve got them- they’ll take longer to come down. This is why I’m sometimes nervous about spending ages going over thinking before clients see the work – show the work when they’re really up for it!
And look at you’re agenda…..how you can throw in things that will keep their attention pricking back up? Hopefully people in your presentation will feel like the dotted line, rather than standard behavior:
Tell them what you’re going to tell them
Tell them (interestingly)
Tell them what you’ve told them
Does that make sense?
Now, when you go about writing it, you’ll have a specific blue-print to follow. It will make putting it together easy, and trust me, by holding off bashing out slides, you’ll save loads of time and effort.
Which gives you more time make it look as good as possible, and know it inside out. And the more you know, the less slides you need, and the more spontaneous you’;; look.
As we’ll see next time, the trick of confidence isn’t being a born orator, it’s doing the work.
As far as the actual content goes, if you can write less do so. When you have a first draft it will be too long, condense, edit, precis. And if you can say it with a picture rather than words, do it. But we’ll be tripping over into how to actually present if we go much further, so I’ll leave it there for now.
Hope it’s helpful.
NORTHERN PLANNER 