Crafting A Presentation
As my recent blogs have described, I’m in the middle of prepping a big presentation at the moment. I had a discussion the other day about how you construct such an event.
There are many common errors that you can avoid. A major one is structural. In our case we are presenting a document. Most solution-orientated presentations will be accompanied by a meaty tome, whether it be sales proposal, business plan or strat paper.
I’ve long held the belief that you should never merely present your doc section by section, one page after another. Many an inexperienced presenter stumbles along this path.
I’m heartened that the message is spreading; don’t give a recital, tell a story.
In my current case, our story begins by asking ‘why’. Why is it we want to do what we want to do? Everything else follows from there, the flow dictated by the impact of the change on the people that will experience it, even down to being spoken from their first-person perspective.
There are three speakers (ten minutes each) with a fourth person doing the intros and pre-Q&A close. One of these is the numbers man. I thought it’d be useful to share how the financials are being presented as many a rep trips up on the figures. In essence there’s half-a-dozen slides which can be loosely categorised as:
- Assumptions
- Capital Requirements
- Statements
- Ratios
- Ownership/Governance
- Funders Commitment
A final item to mention is slide construction. Most times a presenter is constrained by an imposed template, typically a corporate one with all the attendant colour and logo stipulations.
Whilst we haven’t got a theme as such, we do have previous output to base ourselves upon. Even though it is from a completely unrelated piece of work, it allows for use of a suitably large pic of relevance to the audience, with neat way of presenting data
I’m pretty minimal when it comes to slides. I use as few as possible. I tend to stick to individual use of single full-frame photos, huge-fonted figures, graphs, well-known logos and more lately, video grabs of key people/stakeholders. Bulleted points of text are anathema to me.