It doesn’t matter if you’re planning on talking one-on-one—teaching your daughter how to operate the lawnmower—or speaking to thousands of Macworld attendees: if you care about the message you’re about to deliver, it’s worth spending time organizing your thoughts before you begin composing your presentation.
Tip
While you’re planning your presentation, don’t forget to make a contingency plan too. Identify parts of your presentation you could simplify, gloss over, or cut out completely in case your guest speaker rambles on for ten minutes instead of three; audience questions take much longer than anticipated; or you have to send someone to find the janitor when you turn on your projector and trip a circuit breaker.
Begin by thinking through what you want your presentation to accomplish. There’s nothing worse than being on the receiving end of an aimless talk. In other words, what do you want your audience to walk away with? Here are some examples:
Gain knowledge or skills.
Understand a new concept.
Be inspired or moved.
Change their behavior.
Change their belief system.
Take action.
Buy something.
Donate to your organization or invest in your company.
Become involved in a process or a cause.
Get media coverage for your business or organization.
In order to increase the likelihood of achieving your goal, you need to learn as much as you can about the kind of people who’ll be in the audience. Put yourself in their shoes and figure out how you can make your presentation interesting and relevant to them. Sometimes you’ll know exactly who you’re talking to: the members of your project team, the Board of Directors, or your fellow Rotary members. In these cases, you’ve probably already got a pretty good idea of who these people are, what interests them, what their group culture is like, and what the norms are for typical presentations.
At other times the audience may be much more of an unknown quantity: the attendees at a conference you’ve never been to before, reporters at a press conference, a brand new client, or the circuit court judge. In this case, make an effort to learn about your audience to give yourself a better chance of really connecting with them.
Figure 15-1. As you plan and present your presentation, you’ll have to deal with lots of details—but always keep the big picture in mind and tackle the tasks in the proper order. There are many steps between determining your desired outcome and celebrating a successful presentation. Most vital is defining your target audience as clearly as possible, and then figuring out the appropriate information to give this group. The evaluation and the resulting feedback loops (shown by the dotted lines) provide important opportunities for you to tailor the design of your presentation. See Designing an evaluation form for advice on how to create evaluation forms.
With your presentation goal and target audience clearly in mind, you can tailor what you’re going to say to this particular group.
What language do they speak?
Do they use a colloquial language or jargon?
How might their culture—their regional, ethnic, class, or corporate culture—affect how you communicate with them?
What would this audience consider appropriate dress for a presenter?
What would make this topic important to this audience?
Start by creating an outline of your presentation on paper or in Word—but save PowerPoint’s Outline view for later, when it’s actually time to start working on your slides. Start rough with the high points of what you want to say and refine your outline as you go. If your presentation is part of a larger event, then outline your part from the time you take the podium to the time you leave the stage. A PowerPoint presentation may be all or only a small part of this outline.
Tip
Using Word’s outlining feature (Draft View) will save you time later, since you can transfer it right into PowerPoint, as described on Using a Word Outline.
Work from your outline to create your PowerPoint presentation. The following chapters cover the mechanics of working with PowerPoint. But before you start creating slides, refine your outline so you’ll know how and where to make use of those slides.
It’s certainly not the only way to do it, but an old favorite structure for speeches is the overview, the presentation, and the review. In other words, tell them what you’re going to tell them, then tell them, and then tell them what you told them. That may sound excessively simple, but it’s a wonderfully easy way to keep your audience oriented.
You might find it useful to start with a joke, a quip, or humorous anecdote—especially a self-deprecating one—that somehow relates to your topic. If skillfully delivered, this kind of icebreaker helps lower the audience’s defenses and can endear you to them. But if you can’t tell jokes, or if you’re sure you’re going to be so nervous you could never pull it off, don’t attempt it. You certainly don’t want to start off with a poorly-told joke that falls flat.
Remember as you design your presentation—and later as you make it—your job is to communicate your information clearly, simply, and interestingly. Your mission is to engage the audience and keep their attention for the duration. Keep these points in mind when you’re sketching out what you want to say:
Know your subject thoroughly—but don’t feel you have to tell everything you know.
Use as many slides as you need—and no more. Slides are supporting materials—use them where they do the most good. It’s possible you could give an hour-long talk and use five slides. Some slides may be up for several minutes each, while others may be on screen for only a few seconds.
Slides are especially good for tables and charts, pictures, and strong bullet points.
Don’t fill your slides with text. Use a larger font than you think you need.
If you have several bullet points on a slide, build them in one at a time as you discuss each one. Otherwise, your audience will be reading ahead and not listening.
Try to approximately balance your use of slides containing bullet points, charts, and pictures.
Try to make your presentation interactive. For example, present a problem or question to the audience and open it up for discussion. Alternatively, ask them to discuss the question with their neighbor for a few minutes and then gather responses from the room.
Vary the pace of the presentation—especially if it’s a long one—by pulling audience members up for demonstrations, bringing out surprise guests, giving attendees one minute to furiously scribble responses to your question, and so on.
Use every different communication method at your disposal: auditory, visual, and direct experience. Involve the right brain by using stories, movement, or song.
Be careful with how much color you use in your slides. You don’t want color to distract from the point you’re making, and you always want your slides to be legible.
Don’t use slide animations or fancy transitions just because it’s easy to do so. These features should serve the presentation, not distract from it.
Your presentation should keep the audience involved by keeping them thinking or reacting emotionally; by generating questions, new thoughts, and new dreams.
Practice giving your presentation to a coworker, an indulgent spouse, or an attentive dog, and listen carefully to any feedback—from the humans anyway. Watch yourself in the mirror or shoot a video of yourself as you practice. Pay special attention to your gestures, expressions, and body language. Be yourself, but remember you’re essentially “on stage”—even if your audience is composed of only two people. And in order to reach an audience you need to project not only your voice, but your movements and gestures as well.
Have someone else proofread your slides. If you have to proofread them yourself, print out the slides so you can see the words on paper instead of on-screen. Misspelled words or incorrect punctuation that you read over a dozen times on-screen will jump out at you on a printed page. Double- and triple-check the spelling of people’s names or product names that appear in your slides.
Tip
At this point, you can use your watch to get an idea of how long it takes to do your presentation, factoring in time for introductory comments and any question-and-answer period. Once you’ve finalized your script and typed out your slides, you can use PowerPoint’s rehearsal mode (Setting Up) to determine the exact timing.