Quiet achievers. Unobtrusive. Professional. There to make sure your presentation gets the results you want. These are your visual supports. They support your presentation, underscore its impact, give power to your points.
It may be that in the culture of your organisation or of your audience, impact will be created by your visuals. If the message of your speech means nothing, your speech means nothing, and your image beyond the ability to create those visuals means nothing, then you will need to develop a high level of competency in creating those visuals and in presenting them. Invest in courses in construction and invest time in becoming competent with their operation.
If, on the other hand, your results will come from your message, or from your presentation skills, then the visual supports need to be just that – supports – unobtrusive in themselves. They need to be professional, yes, excellent, yes, to support your credibility and image, but they should be seamlessly supporting your message, not announcing their presence.
And if you want them to be excellent, work on your design skills. Try to be unique if you can, especially where you want to make an impact. Using the same old clip art and graphics that everyone uses will not be noticed, but originality will.
In creating visual supports, be sure that your material can be seen by everyone in the room. Make your words large and uncluttered. Five or six lines on a slide, flip chart page or transparency is adequate, and they will create far more impact that a mass of written material. The same applies to images.
Objects should be large enough to be seen, too. You can pass the smaller ones around, but know that while people are looking at the objects, they are not looking at you, and you have lost their attention. It may be better to have a display that people can look at after the presentation.
Using the “equipment” has to be as unobtrusive as possible. The first step here is being prepared. If you can practice beforehand, do so. Organise all the physical objects so that you can reach them when they are needed, without having to search, and without having to fumble. This may mean arranging them in the order in which they will be presented. It may mean practising the presentation so that you know automatically where to reach for something. This can apply to objects you want to display, the remote control for projecting equipment, the pens for flip charts or overhead projectors or a whiteboard, or to slides or overhead transparencies.
During these practice sessions, work out how you will move around the visual supports and equipment. Where will you place the objects you want to pick up – on a table, or another piece of furniture? Where will this, or the equipment, be so that you can move around it and communicate most easily with your audience – in front of you, beside or behind you? Always consider the least distracting way of accessing your material and the greatest ease of movement.
If you are using projection equipment, visualise its placement. Think about how you will work with the laptop or the overhead projector – standing beside, or behind? Do you want your silhouette projected on the screen as well as your visuals? Walking in front of the screen will also obscure them.
If you cannot organise the positioning of your equipment, then try to become familiar with it before the presentation and then visualise how you will use it best.
Plan to use visuals so that they support your message and do not detract from it, or overtake the attention. You need to be able to use the visuals easily. Turn the pages of a flip chart from the bottom corner. If you can find the remote control for your PowerPoint, use it, or be familiar with the keyboard shortcuts to use. Practice the way you will pick up, place and put down your OHP transparencies. These operations are all meant to be as unobtrusive as possible, not part of the message.
Please do not treat your audience as illiterate. If your words are on the screen or sheet of paper, then let the audience read for themselves. This will have enormous impact, especially if your audience is used to presenters slavishly following the test on their visuals.
You are presenting your message verbally, and visuals are just that – images or groups or words that support your message They are the quiet achievers, and are certainly not the message itself. If necessary, you may have to explain this, first, because many audiences have been trained by presenters who cover their inadequacies by using their visuals as the message. And this is why you will make an impact if you can present without using this method. You will be different. You will be seen as so much more confident and competent as a person. And this confidence and competence will be the underlying basis of the power of your presentation.
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© Bronwyn Ritchie If you want to include this article in your publication, please do, but please include the following information with it:
Bronwyn Ritchie is a professional librarian, writer, award-winning speaker and trainer. She is a certified corporate trainer and speech contest judge with POWERtalk, a certified World Class Speaking coach, and has had 30 years’ experience speaking to audiences and training in public speaking. In just 6 months time, you could be well on the way to being admired, rehired as a speaker, confident and sucessful, with the 30 speaking tips. Click here for 30 speaking tips for FREE. Join now or go to http://www.30speakingtips.com
So much is written about the problems of PowerPoint. There are so many lists of dos and don’ts for PowerPoint presentations. But in the end, the answer to producing an engaging, successful presentation actually does not originate in the use of PowerPoint itself. It originates in the speaking skills. Good PowerPoint presentations are presented by people who are good speakers first, and who apply those skills to their PowerPoint as well.
A good speaker does not allow PowerPoint to be a wall to put between themselves and the audience. She uses it as a visual aid to the words and the presentation style of the speech. It is not the dominating feature of her presentation. It has to be the speaker, who leaves the impact and the memories with the audience, not the PowerPoint slides, excellent though they may be. Her speaking skills will make the difference. PowerPoint simply supplements them.
With or without PowerPoint, a good speaker will respect his audience. He will prepare the speech so that he can give full attention to the audience and engage fully with them. If he is reading his slides, or using them as a memory prompt, then that respect is obviously diminished. Did he care so little for this audience and this occasion that he could not be bothered to fix his material in his head so that he could engage with them?
With or without PowerPoint, a good speaker will be able to engage with her audience using many techniques. Speaking is so much more than the words used. If it were not, then those words could be put on the slides and emailed or printed and posted. Making a presentation in person gives you a vastly increased chance of persuading, inspiring or affecting your audience with all sorts of vocal, content and presentation techniques that are completely impossible with words alone. So if you put all of the words on the slides, or many of the words, then the attention of the audience is focussed on those words and you waste the power of your presentation techniques.
With or without PowerPoint, a good speaker has the skills to maintain attention and engagement. This negates the need for flashy, distracting animation. It negates the need for multiple slides for each point. The slides should be unobtrusive and supportive of the spoken word, not the focal point of engagement and attention.
With or without PowerPoint, a good speaker is prepared. In PowerPoint, this means having words in a font size suitable to the room so that they can be read easily by anyone in the audience.
She knows how to use the equipment and has set it up and tested it, if at all possible before the presentation begins.
She can adapt her presentation to allow for audience interaction. The presentation is flexible so that she can respond to questions and obvious needs specific to this audience.
She has spent the time necessary to make the slides as effective as possible. This means giving time to design, ensuring all backgrounds, layouts and font are consistent. It means ensuring that the backgrounds are simple and do not create distraction from the main point and image. It means choosing images and words that support the message and no more. It also means choosing images that will appeal to this particular audience as well as establishing the brand and personal image that she chooses to represent. None of this can be done successfully by either putting the presentation together at the last minute or chopping pieces from other presentations that were not designed for this audience or situation.
All of these attributes of a good speaker – respect for an audience, being able to engage an audience, and being prepared – are also what make a PowerPoint presentation successful.
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(c) Bronwyn Ritchie
If you want to include this article in your publication. please do. but please include the following information with it:
Bronwyn Ritchie is a professional librarian, writer, award-winning speaker and trainer. She is a certified corporate trainer and speech contest judge with POWERtalk, a certified World Class Speaking coach, and has had 30 years experience speaking to audiences and training in public speaking. In just 6 months time, you could be well on the way to being confident, admired, successful, rehired. Click here for her 30 speaking tips FREE. Join now or go to http://www.30speakingtips.com
“No more than six words on a slide. Ever. There is no presentation so complex that this rule needs to be broken.”
– Seth Godin
We all need to simplify our PowerPoint slides.
What do you think … for this week’s discussion ….
One word … One image/graphic/data representation … Per slide … All slides >>>>?
Would you? Could you? Should you?
I would love to hear your response in the comments below ….
A designer knows he has achieved perfection, not when there is nothing left to add,
but when there is nothing left to take away.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Even the best messages can be ruined by a bad presentation. To get your information across effectively and to generate the right response from your audience, you need to know how to use audiovisual technology to your advantage.
Interested in how to improve your presentation? Read on for some audiovisual presentation dos and don’ts. => http://bit.ly/x1XXQu
Presenting data is a very difficult challenge. The first step is engaging the audience with a strong emphasis on why it is important for them to understand what is being presented. Nevertheless they do need to understand the data you present. While ensuring its relevance is understood is vital, so is it vital that your audience understand each and every piece of data that you present, or they will just as surely switch off, and your outcome is lost.
Visuals are very useful here. Use pie graphs and bar charts; insert them into your slides if you are using slides. If you are using a whiteboard, draw as you tell the story or make the point. If you are using PREZi you can let the audience look at the data from different angles. The visual representation will reinforce your explanation and the point you are making.
If it is necessary to use graphs, diagrams and charts, make sure they are as simple as possible. While you probably want to impress with your understanding of complicated data, being able to simplify it will have far more of an impact, particularly in terms of getting your message across.
And make sure that everything about them is clear. Sometimes it’s necessary to explain so that all the implications are clear as well. There may have been a very good reason for choosing the axes in the graph. There may have been a very good reason for choosing the increments that are used. While it may seem obvious to you, it may not be to the audience, and it may make the data relationships clearer.
You can also add to the impact of the visuals. There may be a story behind the points on a graph. It is the intersection of two values and maybe the relationship is reasonably clear. But if you can give the reason why this relationship exists or maybe the history behind it, then it will be so much clearer. And if you can put a human face on it, with a human story then the relationship and the point you are using it for will have so much more impact. If wages are going down and costs of living rising, for example, then a story about a family forced to live in a car will make the impact so much more real. Another way to add a human face, or a realistic face, is to use a graphic representing the actual item being quantified. This can be particularly useful in a bar graph. If the bar consists of pictures of dollar coins to represent money, or of groups of people to represent populations or groups, for example, again the impact is multiplied.
In the midst of all this, it is important to remember, still, that you are presenting points towards a persuasion of some kind. It can be useful to have the point you are making as the heading for the slide that contains the visuals. And while the visuals should be as detailed as is necessary to make them understandable, too much detail will overwhelm. Remember the visuals only need to make a point, not necessarily present all the data. If all the data is necessary for later inspection and verification, put it in a handout, and leave the slides as simple as they can be.
Visuals are your greatest ally in presenting data. They can add impact and keep your audience engaged with the thread of your message. Your simplification and design of the material to support that message and the thoughtful explanation you add to it, will support the success of your data presentation.
Used wisely, PowerPoint® and similar programs can be an effective tool to help audiences remember your message, while allowing you to prove, reinforce, and support your claims.
Used unwisely, PowerPoint becomes a distraction that upstages the presenter and buries the message. With its tumbling, whooshing, flying, singing and screeching graphics, PowerPoint can take on a life of its own.
All these bells and whistles can disconnect the slides from the presenter and destroy the reason for using them in the first place–to provide an audience with at-a-glance comprehension to support the presentation.
PowerPoint can represent essential data to support points in a way that boosts clarity, credibility, and retention. PowerPoint incorporates a wide variety of tools for selecting colors, fonts, formats and styles.
You can import content from word processing programs or charts from spreadsheet applications.
PowerPoint also lets you create your own graphics and tailor the data to meet your own special needs.
PowerPoint has a range and flexibility that allow you to quickly pull together some great visuals or to invest hours simmering a cauldron of confusion stew. The key is to know how to use it wisely. => http://bit.ly/nNv8as
