I authored a guest post for Dumb Little Man a while back where I outlined 5 steps you can take to plan an effective presentation, but I wanted to take an opportunity to touchup that subject in some more detail here on SmartDraw's blog. Like most things, presentations require a degree of planning; however, I think a lot of people get started on the wrong foot when it comes to putting together a presentation whether they use PowerPoint or not.
Don’t Start by Designing Your Slides or Handouts
A lot of folks start planning their presentations by firing up PowerPoint and creating a few slides with some bulleted lists on it – this gets you off on the wrong foot.
PowerPoint’s base set of features is not conducive to explaining complex ideas; indeed - using set after set of bulleted lists is a perfectly good way to dumb down an otherwise great idea into yet another monotone narration, the kind that makes your audience wish they had remembered to bring along copies of the Wall Street Journal to your presentation.
When you’re just getting started planning a new presentation, stay away from the pitfall of trying to pigeonhole complex ideas using PowerPoint. In addition, don’t start by planning your visuals - that’s putting the cart before the horse.
Start by Outlining Objectives and then Planning Content
The best way to begin planning a presentation is to outline the objectives of your presentation. Is it your intention to educate your audience on a technical concept? Or is it to persuade them to try a new product? Or is it a combination of all of these things? A sales pitch and a training session are going to have very different objectives, and those objectives will impact the nature of the content as well. Objectives determine content.
After you determine your objectives then you should begin planning your content – typically I begin by using a mind map to flesh out the topics that I want to cover in a given presentation. Mind maps serve as a handy guide for taking a central idea and expanding it down to the details.
After you know what topics that you want to cover you need to determine the sequence of the topics as they appear in your presentation. Story boards are my tool of choice for this portion of the planning phase, as they are both simple and self-explanatory, and I wrote about this in an earlier post entitled “Having Trouble Putting a Presentation Together? Try Storyboarding.”
Once you have your story board together then it’s pretty easy to build your presentation – you know the topics that you want to cover and you know the order in which you’re going to present those topics. So, all you need to do now is prepare the appropriate visuals, whether they are PowerPoint slides, printed hand-outs, or flipchart and so on.
A Point worth Remembering when Preparing Content
One thing to bear in mind as you prepare and plan your content is that everything should be focused strictly around the needs of your audience – your objective is to move the audience, whether it’s to get them to buy something or to understand a new idea. Rick Altman once criticized one of our own sales presentations, saying that we absolutely should not begin by spending five minutes explaining who we are and what we do because the audience doesn’t have a sufficient reason to care yet.
Instead, as he put it, we should speak to why the audience is attending the presentation in the first place – if they’re listening to a sales pitch for SmartDraw then it’s because they either want to learn how they can make their businesses more productive using business graphics or because they want to know if SmartDraw is a better product than the alternatives.
Once you’ve addressed the needs of the audience then it’s fine to introduce yourself and explain who you are, but only after you have built sufficient reason.
We’re back at PowerPoint Live 2008 for most of this week so we’re going to be running some more content about presentations during the week, so stay tuned.
