Friday, March 11, 2011

The trick is in the planning - step three. Make life easier for your audience!

When you figured out your main message and your purpose for being there, and you've considered who the audience are and what they want to hear from you, then you should have at least a general idea of what you're going to put into the presentation. At this point you might want to try the following approach. Open up a number of empty slides in PowerPoint (just keep pressing the new slide button). Pick a suitable number for the time that you're going to present. Then fill in the titles of the slides by writing what the point of that slide would be. Another way to look at this is to write the conclusion or the bottom line that belongs to each slide. Ideally you ought to be able to read all the titles from start to finish and hear yourself telling a story that has a beginning middle and end. So you can also start by writing out that story and then break it up into slide titles of course.



For example a slide somewhere in the middle of the presentation might describe a series of costs that would be entered into a budget in the form of the table. The title might be "Our total costs amount to XXX". So the conclusion becomes the title and the audience don't really need to listen to a description of the rest of it unless they are particularly interested. The more common title on a slide like this would be "Costs" or "Budget"or something else equally non-informative. It's usually a description of what the subject is rather than what the actual point is. You're placing quite heavy demands on your audience if they've got to listen to every detail you say in order to figure out themselves what the point of each part of the presentation is. So make it easy on them!

No comments:

Post a Comment