I work as a marketer for SmartDraw.com, and throughout the course of my work I often have to present proposals for new projects and initiatives to my supervisors, training sessions for new hires, and the occasional performance summary. In all of these situations I am either explicitly or implicitly expected to prepare a PowerPoint presentation, a task that I among many others find to be generally loathsome and tedious.
So, being the efficiency-minded organization that we are, members of our management team started presenting their plans and initiatives using only a single PowerPoint slide. The “single slide technique,” which is what we’ve called it since, requires using a simple mind map to outline all of your major points and sequencing using animation to reveal them piecemeal as you walk through your presentation with your audience.
Here’s an example, and yes, it uses multiple slides because SlideShare doesn’t support animation. I highly recommend expanding it to full screen so you can read it properly.
And if you’d rather see the entire presentation as an image, click on the mind map below.
What are the benefits of this approach?
- It can be produced in just minutes;
- The presenter can refer back to previous points and topics without having to refer to an earlier slide because the older content is already on screen;
- The relationships between topics on the mind map help keep you organized;
- It doesn’t give you the opportunity to fall into bad habits such as reading your presentation word-by-word off of long series of bulleted lists – instead it forces you to adopt good speaking and presenting practices; and
- The Single Slide Presentation still gives you the ability to control the flow of your presentation using PowerPoint®’s animation capabilities to sequence the different topics and sub-topics on your mind map.
I’ve presented a handful of presentations since using this technique and it takes me fifteen minutes or less on average to prepare them. That, in my opinion, is the single greatest benefit of this technique.
