Written on 7/23/2008 by Aaron Stannard, editor of Working Smarter.
You can find plenty of information on presentation blogs about how to design effective slides and how to , but one aspect that often gets overlooked is the work that goes into preparing the substance of a presentation.
You
can be the most charismatic presenter in the world with well-designed
slides, but if you try to present information in an incomprehensible
sequence then you’re just as ineffective as the guy who does nothing
but read bullet points out loud.
That being said it’s important
to prepare your presentation and get organized before you begin
worrying about your slides, your delivery, and all of those other
details. Here are 5 steps you can take towards preparing an effective
presentation:
Outline Your Objectives What
do you want the end result of your presentation to be? Do you want to
convince people to buy something? Do you want to instruct them? The
objective of your presentation will determine most of your substance;
the simple act of writing down your objectives will make it that much
easier to organize what you’re going to say and when you’re going to
say it.
Gauge Your Audience’s Expertise The
next step is to determine how much your audience already understands
about the subject you’re going to present. If you’re asked to give a
lecture about gravity to elementary school students then you’re not
going to treat all of them like tenured physics professors.
Try
to gauge the level of expertise and design your presentation to build
upon what they already know. If you’re not sure how much experience the
audience has had with a given subject, try to meet them somewhere in
the middle.
Make an Outline The next step is to make an outline of all of the concepts that you’re going to cover in your present. I like to use a mind map to organize my thoughts
into a rough outline, since I think that they’re a better tool for
fleshing out ideas than traditional bulleted lists are. Regardless of
what tool you use, build an outline of the topics you want to cover
during the course of your presentation.
Sequence Your Presentation Once
you have an outline of all of the topics that you want to cover in your
presentation then you need to determine the sequence of your
presentation. A good way to do that is to use a simple flowchart which
lays out the order of the ideas that you’re going to present. Some
people, usually hardcore PowerPoint users, prefer to use real
storyboards where they produce mock-ups of each stage of the
presentation.
Personally, I think using a real storyboard can be
pretty time-consuming so I prefer to stick with a basic flowchart when
I’m sequencing a presentation.
Determine What Visuals You Will Need The
final step to preparing a presentation is to figure out what sort of
visual aids you’re going to need. You probably won’t need a complicated
visual for every single point of your presentation, but when it comes
down to explaining something complicated, like how a business process
works, then you’re going to want to support yourself with a good visual.
Figure
out which concepts are going to require a visual – typically it’s the
most complicated or important concepts which really need it. Go ahead
and make a list of what sort of visuals you’re going to need.
And
that’s it – it’s really not too tough to plan a great presentation,
especially if you start using these five steps more frequently. I’ve
already prepared two different presentations this week using these
steps and they really do work for me; feel free to ask me about my
three-page-long flowchart storyboard :p
Feel free to leave some comments below with any questions you may have about planning presentations; I’ll be checking them!
