Killer Presentations – wake up your audience!
Killer Presentations – wake up your audience!
Published: 20 September 2006
Microsoft estimates there are 450 million users of PowerPointTM giving around 1 million presentations a day – the vast majority of which have a dark background and bullet points with white text. This is more commonly known as death by PowerPoint.
The sad reality is that most presentations are too long, lack structure and fail to hold the audience’s attention. Why is this? Why does the audience switch off, or at worst, fall asleep? Can all these presentations really be that dull and boring?
The good news is that this situation can be changed, once you learn a few tricks of the trade.
The success of achieving the objective of the presentation largely depends upon the charisma of the presenter to retain the audience’s attention - but audiences can only pay attention for 20-30 minutes. The audience will make their decision to pay attention - or not - within the first few minutes of the presentation. They have come to see what’s in it for them and will judge your presentation on this basis.
But almost all the presentations we have seen are decks of slides containing lists of bullet points and text; all, unfortunately, written for the presenter’s benefit.
The reality is that whilst the presenter believes that they are conveying key bullet points, in fact, they are sending the audience to sleep.
However, there is a solution to death by PowerPoint, but first you need to change the way you think about your presentation. As a presenter, you should design and structure presentations from the audience’s perspective which means avoiding bullet points and text and, if possible, delivering your presentation in under 30 minutes.
Use pictures, not words – Why?
Bad presentations have Clip Art; text so small that it cannot be read; and distracting and annoying effects, such as words flying in from the left with the sound of a type-writer or screeching tyres. Whoopee.
Use picture not words – How?
Think about the message and then think about what type of picture or photo would help people understand this message. This is the basis of a good slide. It starts on paper with a pencil and a rubber.
Engage the audience, don’t bore them – Why?
Bored audiences struggle to stay awake. If they cannot pay attention, they will not remember the points made. In that case, why bother presenting at all?
Engage the audience, don’t bore them – How?
The manner in which a slide is revealed can also engage the audience. It is far more effective to present diagrams and pictures that reveal elements one step at a time rather than in one go.
Look at how the following slides have been improved by replacing text with imagery.
Examples of improvements you can make to your slides using PowerPoints features
Change your perspective
Business presentations are about imparting knowledge or convincing people to share a point of view. Presentations need to be designed to get information across to the audience without distracting or confusing them – and certainly not sending them to sleep.
Stop writing presentations that are nothing more than scripts. The point of a presentation is not to help the presenter remember all the information, it’s to help the audience comprehend, and retain, the information communicated.
A killer presentation is one that was designed with the audience in mind. Take a visual approach to your next presentation and have the audience hanging on your every word.
