Giving Effective Presentations

Aaron Schmidt has a really great post over at Walking Paper on "How to Give a Good Presentation." It's definitely worth reading through, including many super comments.

A few months back I posted a collection of links, "Talk Good: How to Give Effective Presentations". In addition to those links though I'd like to add a few of my own thoughts to this conversation. First, let me say that I prefer to frame this as giving "effective" presentations rather than "good" ones because effective implies that you're actually trying to, well, have an effect. And I think that one of the most important elements of any presentation -- the element that makes it much more likely that your presentation will be effective -- happens before you've written one word or found one cool image for your powerpoint. The most important element is asking the question, "What do I want people to do as a result of seeing/hearing my presentation?"

Should your slides be graphic heavy? Text Free? Should you provide handouts? Should the presentation be posted, and if so in what form? Should additional information be included in the posting? My answer is, it all depends. I think it makes absolutely no sense to dictate the answers to these questions without first asking, "what am I trying to achieve?" The next question of course is, "and how can I best achieve it?" How you answer this question dictates your content and sequencing.

There are also many variables that will affect how you craft your presentation: Just a few variables of the top of my head:

• Who will be in the audience? Is it heterogeneous or homogeneous? Are there certain people in the audience with more influence that I would like to reach?
• How large is the audience? Will I get to mingle? Am I miked, or is it more intimate?
• What is there outlook?
• What is their predisposition to change their behavior? Are they a friendly or resistant audience?
• What is their knowledge level?
• How much time will I have to present?
• How much other information is being thrown at them (am I the main act, or one presentation of many?
• What technology tools do I have at my disposal? Live internet? Projector? Just a microphone?
• What is the room setup?
• Will the presentation, or parts of it, be archived or made available online after the fact? Do I intend this to ever be seen again?
• Is the presentation intended to be instructional? provocative? informative? heretical? inspiring? challenging?
  

I'm sure you can think of more variables that you've considered when crafting your own presentations. The important thing while preparing is to continually refocus yourself on what you are trying to achieve and critically evaluate the content and sequencing of your presentation to make sure everything supports and nothing detracts from your goal.

A few other ideas that may enhance the effectiveness of your presentation:

• Share your presentation with others before you do it and get feedback to see what's working and what isn't. Inevitably, you will have written things that are clear as crystal to you, but clear as mud to others.
• If it's appropriate to the presentation, try to make it as interactive as possible. Ask questions. Encourage audience members to talk to each other. Doing this early in the presentation with a provocative question can create an immediate buzz and get a lot of energy flowing.
• Conclude the presentation with a challenge or a request. Ask something of the audience. Ask them to commit to doing one thing differently.
  

What are your tips? What's worked for you?

Talk Good: Giving Effective Presentations

Note: See related post from October 2008

Since I started doing Toastmasters about two years ago I've been Furling every good piece of information I could find on how to be a better speaker and presenter. I mentioned this recently to some of my fellow Toasties and they asked me to share my links.

The pieces speak for themselves (no pun intended), so without extensive annotations, here are my top 10:

1. Garr Reynolds (see also: his great blog, Presentation Zen):
   • Preparation Tips
   • Presentation Tips
   • Powerpoint Slide Tips
   • Sample slides
   • Gates, Jobs, and the Zen aesthetic
     
     
2. 10 Tips for a Killer Presentation, Neil Patel
   
   
3. Get Your Message Across by Creating Powerful Stories, Kevin Eikenberry
   
   
4. How to Change the World: World's Best Presentation Contest Winners There are some great examples of how to effectively use powerpoint.
   
   
5. Bert Decker (Also see his blog, Create Your Communications Experience)
   • 6 Do's to Open Your Presentation
   • Giving Good Introductions
     
     
6. How to Get a Standing Ovation, Guy Kawasaki
   
   
7. Kathy Sierra (See also: her blog Creating Passionate Users which, sadly, is no longer being updated; but there's great archived content!)
   • Better Beginnings: How to Start a Presentation
   • Add Graphics to your blog, book or presentation
     
     
8. Effective Presentations: More than one way to impress an audience Dave Pollard
   
   
9. All Presenting is Persuasive Guila Muir (see also: Guila's other training/presenting resources)
   
   
10. A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods From Visual-Literacy.org. Great ideas for how to use visually represent your ideas.
    
    
11. BONUS LINK: The 5 Immutable Laws of Persuasive Blogging, Brian Clark.
    Ostensibly written for bloggers, I'm finding that the "5 Laws" (provide value, have a hook, etc.) are also helpful in organizing talks and presentations.
    

I'd love to get feedback on your favorite resources and tips. What's helped you be a kick ass speaker or presenter?

Tags: presentations, speaking, public speaking, toastmasters, blogging, writing, effective presentations, libraries

World Cafe Power Point

At The Futures Conference, Peggy Cadigan and Barbara Cole stayed up all night working up this great powerpoint to capture all the great thoughts and comments that came out of the World Cafe that took place after a great day of presentations!

Take a look here!

(Great use of SlideShare.net too!)

The World Cafe was a chance for everyone to socialize and talk about what we had experienced throughout the day. We were in small groups and talked aabout a question that was posed something like, "If you die 100 years from now what will be different about the world you leave compared to the one you came into?" And one other one I can't recall right now - help me out someone!

FYI if you look at the pictures, the World Cafe pics are the ones that show lots of glitter and stuff on the tables and tables named after books and/or movies, and all those newsprint papers hanging up with all our doodling, drawing and brainstorming on them! It was fantastic and excellently created, organized and run by Peggy and Barbara! Kudos!

Slides from NJLA Spring Conference

Bob Keith and I gave a new version of our Fantastic Freebies presentation on April 24th at the NJLA Spring Conference. It was our first attempt to cover 15 Freebies in fifty minutes -- we usually do this as a 90 minute or 2 hour presentation. Due to schedules, Bob and I did not have time for a complete run through before going live -- a little nerve wracking. We incorporated a lot more screen shots than we normally do and limited the number of live demos and the presentation came in at 47 minutes, so we even had 3 minutes for questions at the end.

As promised to the participants, the slides are now archived on SlideShare and also being posted here for easy access:




Since doing this version of Fantastic Freebies we have found several more possibilities that we will use the next time around to keep it fresh, current and relevant.