How do you create an awesome presentation?
Firstly, we need to ask, what makes great presentation content?
So far we have established our presentation objective, determined what our audience would need to know and have placed our content in a logical structure that makes sense.
The next challenge is to see what content you have and whether they address the audience’s questions.
Remember in our previous video I told you to divide your questions into groups within PowerPoint? (missed them? You can watch them here Powerfulpoints Youtube channel)
Now that you have all the questions, your job is to place all the content you have into these question groups.
Identifying what content to use for your Presentation is very important.
Adding content is the easy part, the challenging part is what content to REMOVE that most presenters get it wrong …
So far, we have established our presentation objective, determined what the audience would need to know and then put it into a logical structure that makes sense of and can easily be followed.
Challenge yourself to identify what content you have and whether that answers the questions.
By now you should have, as we said in the previous session, all your questions divided into groups inside of PowerPoint…or word, or excel…at this stage we aren’t using PowerPoint for anything more than placeholders.
Your job now is to collect all the information you have and put it under each question. These may be slides from other presentations you have done, it may be excel spreadsheets, photos, scans, documents…everything you think is relevant to answering the particular questions. When you have done that, you have done the easy part of collecting the information you need to run a fantastic presentation.
The other advantage of this technique is it will identify questions where you don’t have necessary answers, areas where you will need to get more information.
Now comes the hard part…
You need to go through and sort the material, both the section and the questions so they make sense, that they make a logical story. One of the reasons we recommended you did this in PowerPoint is that using the slide sorter mode, you can do this fairly easily.
Now, the even harder part…
Getting rid of what you don’t need. I can be fairly confident you will have either too much information or irrelevant information. You will also probably have a limited amount of time to give the presentation so you need to identify what you can get rid of and here is how: go through EVERY slide and ask yourself
“If I DON’T include this, will it seriously jeopardise the chance of achieving my objective?”
I promise you, when you start using this technique you will find it very hard because you will think everything is important but it won’t be or, even if it is, you won’t have time to present it. What you need to do is to hide the slides that have information you cannot use. Don’t delete the slides, because it may turn out you need it later on, just hide them.
So now we are about 30% of the way through the process. Next we will start working on how to craft your message so that it is engaging for your audience and effective for you.
Until then, bye for now!
Lee Featherby (@mrpresentations)
