Quick Tips for Impactful Presentations
Raise your hand if you’ve ever been at a presentation and your eyes have glazed over. Ok, now raise your hand if you were the presenter, and you saw your audience’s eyes glaze over.
I’ve been there. But never again! Because I recently learned a few quick tips for giving presentations that will engage your audience—and stick with them, too.
How you organize your information and visuals, your pace, and whether you ask the audience questions can all make a big difference in what they’ll take away.
How to start?
Whatever you do, do NOT open PowerPoint. It isn’t bad; you can use it later. But PowerPoint was not designed with human learning in mind. Those slide templates are not evidence-based ways of sharing knowledge. You know what is? Stories.
Which brings me to these two principles of captivating presentations:
Learning is narrative. Start with an outline of the story you want to tell. Maybe it’s just a basic beginning, middle, and end that give shape to your ideas. Or maybe you step it up a level and use the Narrative Framework that I wrote about in my last blog post. For our entire existence, human beings have been passing knowledge through stories. Our brains are wired for it.
Design is important. If a story is the shape your presentation takes, the design is the look and feel. If you think that doesn’t matter, consider the billions of dollars that go into advertising, media, and product designs that compete endlessly to capture our attention. If you want your message to stand out and be remembered, the look and feel matters. Take some time to curate your content. Find images that illustrate your points. Don’t crowd too much onto a slide. Edit ruthlessly and put everything else in your notes.
Now for the nuts-and-bolts that will help you build the thing. Every great presentation should have these 5 elements:
Conflict. Explain what the obstacle is that must be overcome. Position problems to show how they can be solved.
Characters. Public health is all about people! Give your story a protagonist. Include yourself, when it makes sense. Draw people into your data. Humans want to hear about other humans.
Pace. Chunk your content into logical sections, clearly distinct. The human brain craves novelty, so spend 10 minutes max per section, and 2 minutes max per slide.
Composition. Less is almost always more, so declutter your slides. Only include the most important points. Fewer words, larger font, and make sure you leave some blank space around and between text and images.
Reflection. Get your audience to think about how the topic applies to them. The easiest way is to ask a question. If you’re virtual, have the audience write answers in the chat. If in-person, ask them to turn to their neighbor to answer or invite one or two people to share.
If you give a lot of presentations, check out the source for this post, Be Your Own Spielberg. The presenter, Brian Klaas, teaches communication and technology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He uses all of these tips and is one of the most captivating virtual presenters I’ve seen.