I was at a conference a while back where I sat through so many dreadful PowerPoint presentations, that I considered setting up a PowerPoint training social enterprise on the side. Not that mine are paragons of presentational virtue, but these were the lowest of the low. My recipe for death by powerpoint is achieved as follows:
– give out a handout of your presentation at the start (so everyone reads it before you start)
– include lots of text on every slide (so people read it and don’t listen to you…unless they’re still reading the handout)
– read the text out word for word (the text that the audience have just read on the handout and/or on the slide before you started speaking)
Then stir in some additional ingredients (sound effects, animations, unreadable fonts, background images) and leave to simmer for absolutely ages….as the person has not rehearsed and has no idea that they won’t be able to do 54 slides in 30 minutes.
Ok, rant over. But presentations are an important part of social entrepreneurs’ work these days (indeed, lots of people’s…), and it’s worth addressing this. Powerpoint is not a teleprompter or a data dump (or a support mechanism for you being nervous), but a means to an end: to allow you to communicate and, yes, sell what you do with passion. If it’s getting in the way of you communicating, engaging, involving, enthusing, attracting attention for you/your organisation, then you shouldn’t use it (or start to use it differently). Many of the most powerful presentations at SSE graduation events have been by those who simply spoke without any slides, and, despite advice to the contrary, the less successful ones often use more features of PowerPoint than I knew existed. [for those present, the one that machine-gunned the letters across the slide will remain with them forever]
If you have written on the slide the words you want to say out loud, you can probably remove them and replace with a one word heading. If you haven’t thought about how it’s structured (and how it looks to someone from the outside), then you need to. If you haven’t rehearsed it, it almost certainly will take longer than you think it currently does. If you’ve used all the colours of the rainbow (my personal weakness), you should pick 2 or 3 and stick to them. If you love ClipArt, get over it and use some proper photos. If you love bullet points (another personal weakness), go "beyond bullets". If you love "those curly fonts", change them to Arial or Helvetica or something readable from a distance.
There’s a bunch of resources on how to avoid "evil" or "really bad" powerpoints (people get quite passionate about this stuff) in the SSE bookmarks / current reading. Feel free to send in your own, and any horror stories to share in the comments….
This presentation, by contrast, is absolute genius:
2 tips from me on this.
1 Remember you want the audience to connect with you – not with the powerpoint presentation. Make sure they spend most of the time connecting you and you looking at them. Only divert their attention to the slide when it really adds value to your communication. Make sure after they have absorbed the slide that they put their attention back on you.
2 Ask yourself whether you are the best person to make the presentation. If you are not a comfortable and natural presenter – perhaps there is someone else who could do the job better than you. I firmly believe that some people will never make really good presenters because they are simply not people people. Sure with training they can become OK – but often that is not good enough if you really need to influence and persuade decision makers.