Make them Say “Yes!” Learn the 3 Keys to Killer PowerPoint® Presentations

The purpose of a presentation is to communicate an idea or information to an

audience, often with the goal of persuading them to take action. How your

message is received by your audience all depends on how well you plan, craft,

and deliver it.

There are three key steps to creating and delivering the best presentation

possible:

1. Plan Carefully

The way you structure your presentation is the most important step you can

take to ensure its success. A great presentation delivered badly is better than a

bad presentation delivered well. In other words: Garbage In, Garbage Out.

So, how do you create a great presentation?

Start by examining what you want it to achieve.

What are the points you want to make?

What is the evidence to support these points?

What action do you want the audience to take?

Using a mind map to think through these questions is a very quick and helpful

technique.

Thanks to mind mapping, you have your goals set, and you’ve crafted your

message.

The next step is to plan out your story line, or the flow of the presentation.

This is where storyboarding can save you a lot of time and ensures the best

presentation flow. First, storyboarding allows you to think about building your

argument at the outline level. Thinking out the presentation in a visual

storyboard gives you that “forest through the trees” view that is much more

effective than jumping straight into creating slides in a program like

PowerPoint®.

To read How to Plan a Killer Presentation click here

2. Communicate Visually

How many PowerPoints have you sat through where the slides are lists of

bullets and the speaker just reads through them? Do you give presentations like

this? Be honest!

If so, your audience is not only bored, but they also resent it as a waste of their

time, and much worse, they are not likely to remember anything you say.

Instead of using bullets, communicate visually! We’ve all heard the expression

“a picture is worth a thousand words,” and it’s true—what takes one thousand

words to explain correctly can be described much more easily using a simple

image.

Not only is it easier to communicate something using a picture, but it’s also

much easier for people to remember things that have been communicated to

them visually. Psychologist Jerome Bruner of New York University has studied

the art of communication, and his studies have shown that:

People remember 10% of what they hear;

20% of what they read; and

80% of what they see and do.

Most people are visual learners; a recent study by the U.S. Federal Government

suggested that up to 83% of human learning occurs visually. The study also

indicated that information which is communicated visually is retained up to six

times greater than information which is communicated by spoken word alone.

Here are a few examples that make the benefits of communicating visually

abundantly clear.

But how do you create visuals like these without an art department? As the

video demo shows, it’s remarkably easy with SmartDraw.

To learn more about how to communicate visually, read this article

3. Present with Poise

So you’ve created a well-planned presentation

that goes beyond boring bullets. The final step

is to deliver it to your audience in a way that

gets their attention and keeps it.

While replacing bullets with visuals in slides

increases comprehension and retention

immensely, the way the visual is presented is

also very important. Simply showing a

complete chart, graph, or other info-graphic all

at once is almost certain to overwhelm the

audience. Presentation expert, Rick Altman,

calls this “drinking from the fire hose.”

Even the best-designed visual can contain too much information to be absorbed

at once. The solution? Reveal it step by step using animation (also called

sequencing). You present the visual sequentially instead of all at once,

explaining the significance of each step as go.

Click here to see a video

demonstration.

To see for yourself how effective sequencing can be, watch the video demo.

To learn more about how to deliver more effective presentations read this

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