I teach a method of presentation development that I call Tell ‘n’ Show. Tell ‘n’ Show covers the 3 areas of a presentation: content, design, and delivery.
Increase the impact of your slides
Text-heavy, bulleted slides are deadening. Audiences immediately think, “It’s boring,” and they tune out. You can lose your audience’s attention in the first few seconds this way.
People are essentially visual and remember visual images better than text. There are a number of good sources for free images. So, get rid of bullets on your slides. You should not, I repeat, should not, put everything you say on your slides.
Yet, many presenters do just that. A slide should not be a teleprompter. It’s meant to be a visual aide, and nothing more. If you don’t have anything to show, don’t show it.
Research shows that the brain doesn’t multitask very well, and specifically doesn’t deal with visual and audio inputs at the same time. If you have your text on the slide, people naturally read it. But if you’re speaking it out loud, they aren’t listening to you. Really. You might as well stand silent and go click, click, click and just let them read.
Instead, remember that you are the presentation. Your slides are not the presentation.
The Tell ‘n’ Show concept
Before you start your presentation, write down your goal, research your audience, figure out 2-3 points you want to make, and how you’ll show those points. Will you have a theme? For example, the theme of this tip is “high-impact, low cost” – it runs through everything I write. You write all this down before ever opening up PowerPoint.
There’s more to organizing your content of course – thinking about how to persuade an audience, keeping their interest, getting them to act, and so on.
It’s strange, but true, that although companies use a professional designer for their Web site and printed brochures, they often do their presentation design in-house. Yet the presentation is often the last and most direct means of marketing to a potential customer, just before the sale. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
Nevertheless, budgets are limited, and I teach people how they can get professional-looking results even though they may be artistically challenged. I also teach people how to deliver in a way that connects to the audience, for maximum impact. After all, the presentation should be about your audience, not about you.
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