Building Better Presentations

Here’s how to tell a story that gets & keeps your audience’s attention.

Whether you’re trying to get your team to buy in on that new strategic plan or facilitate an important conversation with leadership, the story you bring into the meeting matters. And so does how you go about telling it.

There are many moments in my work with clients where (I’ve found) a great set of slides or a thoughtfully built Mural/Miro board can make all the difference. 

As much as we’d all like to believe that people listen to everything we say and read everything we send them…I have bad news:

They don’t.

Sometimes, you need to show and tell (not one or the other) in order to get things done.

Think of those slides or that virtual workshop board like branding for your best ideas and initiatives. They help make the hypothetical tangible and give them a chance take root in the minds of your most important audience groups.

Need some tips and tricks to get started? Keep reading…

Anticipate Your Audience’s Needs

We’ve all been in that meeting room or on that Zoom call when a facilitator has gotten barraged with questions (maybe even obvious one’s) and did not engage them well.

Experiences like that are a major mood-killer for the entire audience. Not to mention the people who took the time to raise their hands in the first place.

Let’s use the hypothetical here: let’s say you’re a leader trying to get their organization to buy into annual goals for the new year. You’re getting the download from your C-suite and gearing up to facilitate a townhall. And you need to create some slides to share & guide your talk track…

So before putting any pen to paper, I want you to try and imagine for a second that you didn’t just put together all of these great goals with your organization’s best and brightest leaders.

Imagine you just had lunch and slid into a meeting room along with your fellow colleagues. You didn’t come to the last company town hall. You’re at ~100 unread emails in your inbox – and that includes the last 3 internal communications from the CEO’s desk. So effectively, you have no context for what’s about to be shared. You only have questions. And probably a bit of skepticism…

This right here. This is the person you’re creating this presentation for. Not the (imaginary) model employee who reads all the stuff you send them. The real one that’s confused, burnt out, and maybe even a little disengaged.

Think about what questions they’re going to have. Contemplate the clarity they need to leave the meeting with in order to effectively do their job.

Outline the Narrative

Before making any major moves, start by building a content outline. This is a words-only framework of the narrative you plan to take your audience through during the presentation. If I’m a leader trying to get my organization to buy into annual goals for the new year, I’d want to outline content sections like:

-       The Context: How were these goals developed? Who was involved?

-       The Why: How do these initiatives help your audience? Why should they care?

-       The What: What are the goals?

-       The How: How will this all come together and be implemented?

-       The Action Steps: What’s coming next? How can the audience get involved?

When the story makes sense, your audience is set up to internalize core messages, keep pace with change, and respond more thoughtfully to whatever’s being shared with them.

Tell the Story Visually

After I know what I need to communicate with my audience, it’s time to think about how to communicate it.

Your use of formatting is telling a story all its own. And you don’t want that story – told through pictures, shapes, and font sizes – to detract from the importance of the other messages you need to communicate here.

At this stage of the process, you’re probably thinking…

How many icons is too many icons?

Is this picture communicating what I hope it will?

Where should there be bullets? Where is it ok to include quotes or full sentences?

Does this important word require bolding? Italics? Neither?

After creating a mockup, look at your slide and ask yourself: Where does my eye go first? Is that where I actually want my audience to look first? If not, take another stab at directing your audience’s eye where it matters most.

Get the audience needs, words, and formatting right? And you’ve got yourself a presentation that will not only help you facilitate a great meeting and bring people together around your organization’s most critical initiatives.