Phil Couling

A presentation is essentially about getting some important ideas out of your head and into the heads of your audience. Sadly, that simple fact is missed by the vast majority of presentations that I see. Sitting through an uninspired presentation with no flow, unintelligible main points, too many slides, too few slides, overcrowded slides, slides full of bullets in tiny fonts, and no consideration for the audience can be mind-numbingly painful. Sitting through a conference of such presentations is excruciating.

There is a better way, and it doesn’t start with laying the blame on PowerPoint. However, my number 1 tip is:

1 - Never, ever, EVER start with PowerPoint

Using PowerPoint does not make you a bad person, but using it improperly can make you a very bad presenter. If the first thing you do when you have to start developing a new presentation is open up PowerPoint, then you are setting yourself up for failure. PowerPoint can be a great tool to assist you in delivering your presentation effectively, but it is not an effective tool to help you start the layout and design of your presentation. Use PowerPoint to help illustrate your presentation, but do the planning and construction elsewhere.

2 – Define your objectives

Define YOUR objectives for the presentation. Why are you doing this? Your audience members will only be able to take away 2 to 3 key ideas from your presentation, so you had better make sure that YOU know what they are from the outset. If your presentation is one of many in a busy conference schedule, the likelihood that your audience will remember more than those 2 or 3 ideas is diminished further.

Consider your audience’s objective for attending your presentation. Assuming you know what you want to say, do you know what your audience wants or expects to hear? If you cannot align these two objectives then you have a problem, or perhaps an opportunity. If your goals are different from those of your audience, then one of your key objectives has to be to convince your audience that what you want to say is more relevant and more important to them than what they expected to hear. That becomes your key idea #1, and you will need to make that point convincingly or you will have a dissatisfied audience.

3 – Outline your presentation

Having identified the 2 to 3 key points of your presentation, the next step is to flesh these out with the ideas for your introduction, ideas for your conclusion, supporting details and proof points. These will help you build the body of your presentation. These details are there to support your key points, if they distract from those key points, then leave them out.

Make sure that you plan to repeat your main points almost to the point of annoying your audience (but not quite!) If you succeed at this, they should be able to tell you what they are, and tell their co-worker when they get back to work, and remember them well after your event is over. If they remember the main points of your presentation you have succeeded.

Some people use a word processor for this, some prefer spreadsheets, I prefer to use mind maps and my tool of choice for creating those is Mind Manager from Mindjet. At this stage you need to quickly lay out ideas, details and supporting materials, and then be able to organize them efficiently. I’ve not seen a better tool than a mind map for that task.

4 – Kill your template

I have never seen your PowerPoint template, but I’d bet that it is toxic to your presentations as I have rarely seen one that wasn’t. Most templates encourage the very worst bad habits and should be removed.

You do not need any template that includes bullet points (see below) – delete it.

Kill the logo from your slide template. Why is it there on every slide? Do you think members of your audience may have wandered into the wrong presentation? Is it there to remind them where they are if they should wake up suddenly during the presentation? A logo on your first and last slide is sufficient.

The same advice goes for headers and footers – they distract from what you are trying to say. Lose them.

This can be a challenge because a lot of corporations often require you to use a “corporate standard template” and they are typically abominations, with distracting and irrelevant logos, text and graphics all over the place, and seem purposefully designed to encourage every kind of bad practice imaginable. Ironically (or sadly), corporate templates are usually designed by people who never have to give presentations themselves. If you cannot break your company rules, try bending them by using the corporate template for the first and last slides and then using something more appropriate for your presentation.

Think about the most simple design that will allow you to illustrate your presentation.

5 – Kill the bullets

Research into the human cognitive-information-processing model and memory, strongly indicate that learning is enhanced by combining dual stimuli i.e. viewing images which complement the spoken word. That makes sense, we all enjoy sight and sound, movies, TV, conversation and so on. However, recent research shows that learning is actually impaired by presenting the same information through multiple channels. In other words, if an audience reads text while hearing it read, their ability to store and recollect that information is less than reading it or hearing it alone. So, reading the bullet points from your slides while the audience reads along = worst case scenario for learning. It also explains why I hated reading aloud in class.

There is always a better way to communicate what you need to communicate than using bullet points.

Avoid text altogether if you can.

If you must use text – make it stand out like any other part of the illustration for your presentation. Make it BIG. Guy Kawasaki who knows a thing or two about presentations advocates 30 point font for slides. Try to go bigger though.

If you must use text, always use Active Voice not Passive Voice, and do not read the text. Active voice is more interesting and stimulating for the audience, it is also usually more concise.

If you must use text, talk TO your audience, not ABOUT your audience. e.g. replace “businesses in this industry have….” with “You have…” etc.

If you must use text, use a single font if you can, two fonts if you must, but only use legible fonts. Informal font styles are okay as long as they are very easy to read and are used consistently. However, unless you enjoy ridicule do not EVER use comic sans.

6 – Don’t put titles on your slides

Titles are passive, they distract from what you are saying, artificially interrupt your flow and mostly do not convey information relevant to your message. If you must have headings for your slides, use declarations and make them part of your story.

7 – Illustrate your ideas but don’t use illustrations in place of ideas

Clipart is evil – it makes you look lazy, bores the audience, and lets them know that you couldn’t be bothered to to take the time to find better artwork to illustrate your point. Kill it.

Kill the special effects unless they specifically illustrate the point you are making. Animation and moving pictures are not inherently bad, they just usually are unless you know how to specifically design animations or clips to illustrate your point.

Use graphics if they help explain or illustrate your point. Draw them yourself, or find appropriate images. There are numerous sources for free stock images online. Flickr is a great source for images. Many images are provided for any use, some have very specific restrictions. Pay attention to the licensing terms for the images you find and respect them.

Use graphics to illustrate, but if you are trying to provide visual cues and interest rather than specifically illustrate a point – use icons.

Use all graphics and all icons of a similar style throughout your presentation.

If you have even basic skills with Photoshop or other image editing program, please seriously consider editing your stock images to eliminate distracting backgrounds, make composites or otherwise alter them to be more appropriate for your use.

8 – Use color to communicate, not to decorate.

Color is powerful tool and can help to provide subtle cues to your audience. If you have three main points to make – assign them colors. Use the assigned color only for slides where you are presenting that point.

On one of my presentations I used black against white background for all positive points and white against black for all negative points. I did not need to explain that, but after a few slides it was obvious to the audience and they subsequently picked up on the visual cues.

9 – Use as many slides as you need to tell your story and no more

I have very successfully given very long presentations with a few slides, and I have given very short presentations with many slides – so I do not believe in hard and fast rules about number of slides. My most effective presentation ever had over 300 slides delivered in around 14 minutes – almost slow motion animation. The slides comprised key words and images to illustrate my talk which was scripted word-for-word.

It’s not great to run out of slides before your talk is over, but more importantly never run out of time before your presentation is over. So you need to really know the material and ensure that is appropriate to your allotted time and you can comfortably deliver it within a minute or two of your target time.

10 – Repeat your main points

Make sure that you repeat your main points almost to the point of annoying your audience (but not quite!) If you succeed at this, they should be able to tell you what they are, and tell their co-worker when they get back to work, and remember them well after your event is over. If they remember the main points of your presentation you have succeeded. Did I mention this already?

Final thoughts - Practice, Practice, Practice

The only reliable way to ensure that you deliver effectively is to practice your delivery. Know in advance exactly what you want to say.

If you are used to reading from your slides, it may take some practice to present well using slides with just visuals.

When I present, I like to use cue cards, which I prepare in Microsoft Word, print onto postcard stock in a large, legible font and finally put into a cheap flip-style photo album. This works well, not only for simple cue cards,  but also for an entire speech where you don’t have the luxury of an auto-cue.

If you use cue cards or sheets, it takes a lot of practice to make the delivery sound natural, to know exactly what is coming next, and have the audience not be distracted by your page turning. For cards with the entire transcript, I prominently place an arrow symbol at every point where I need to advance the slide – that helps keep everything on track, and helps reduce anxiety on the day. For my 14 minute-300 slide presentation, getting out of synch was my biggest fear!

Try something completely different for your next presentation. Be willing to entertain them as you get those ideas from your head into theirs. Have fun with it and your audience will love you for it. You may even start to look forward to giving presentations.

Oh, and repeat your main points…