Your dilemma…thinking like a template.

I was recently working with a client and asked her to write out the structure for her presentation.  This included her main message, her content and content chunks. She sent me a good initial outline as to what she wanted to say, but it’s how she organized it that was most fascinating to me. She organized it as slides, even though her presentation outline was all text in an email. The outline was what she thought should be on each slide. The title for each section started with Slide #1, Slide #2 etc. Under each slide number was a topic title and some bullet points. Dam you Microsoft! Her default… Read More

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Pros Flow – one thing common to great presentations.

One way to polish your presentation to a professional level is to work on your flow. Like a great conversation or a great movie, a great presentation has a flow. So many presentations go like this: TALK, STOP, CLICK, TALK, STOP, CLICK. The speaker talks, then stops talking, presses the slide advance button, waits for the next slide to appear and then begins speaking again. Each slide is treated almost independently from the rest of the presentation, there isn’t any flow. Maintaining a smooth pace throughout a presentation helps keep an audience engaged. When you think about it, a presentation could have dozens of these TALK STOP CLICKs. Each of… Read More

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So…what’s your point?

Think about the last presentation (or webinar) you attended; what was the presenter’s point? Designing a presentation around the most important point (a single message) greatly increases the chances that the audience will remember that message over time. Therefore, presentation design starts with crafting a clear concise message. One mistake presenters often make is to assume an audience can remember multiple “takeaways”. The old saying is true; if everything is important then nothing is important. I follow a message crafting method that I learned from Dcode Communications several years ago.  The method is based on the statement What I really want you to understand is _______ .  The you is… Read More

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