We hope you have enjoyed our blog series on presentation skills so far. In case you missed them, our first blog focused on making your presentation more focused and impactful and our second blog helped you better understand the audience perspective.
This is part three of our presentation skills series and it looks at the importance your Visual Billboard can have on your presentation.
Background – The Visual Billboard
When used effectively, this is your storyboard. Before you create your first slide, you must determine your message / story from start to finish. To be audience effective – the creation of your message / story should take the most preparation time. Your overall story must have a logic and a flow, a start and a finish. When you create your slides, you must have a way to transition in and out of every slide. Information must pass the storyboard filter. Unrelated information must be eliminated or it will create audience confusion and weaken your message. Every slide must have a purpose with an introductory transition into the slide and an exit transition from one slide to another. All this is done before we really begin to create the presentation slides themselves. Start with your story and develop the slides to support, not the other way around. Remember, the sides are not the presentation. You are! The slides are your supporting tools.
Today’s Tools: A Blessing and a Curse
Today, the ability to use powerful tools to develop your visual story are both a blessing and a curse. Why? It’s a blessing because you can now create presentations, on demand. That was impossible years ago. On the flip side, it is also a curse. It is now so simple, we don’t put as much mental effort into the presentation’s creation or presentation value. It often comes across as ‘first draft – last draft’ quality. Just because the tools make it mechanically easier to create presentation materials doesn’t mean you are creating effective, high-impact presentation materials. The effective Visual Billboard must still focus on the powerful, high-impact presentation from the audience’s perspective.
What can and does go wrong with the Visual Billboard?
- Visually boring material
- Visual is too busy creating visual bombardment
- Too much text
- Sentences and paragraphs should be minimized – if used at all!
- At all costs, avoid reading, verbatim, from the text
- Too many numbers – they can kill your material
- Use abstracted numbers like percentages or ratios which are easier to understand and flow easily into the brain
- Where have all the effective grow charts gone?
- Not enough well thought-out abstract information (which the brain understands better than text and numbers)
- Graphs
- Charts
- Images / Pictures
- The visual is not referenced by the speaker – so why is it there?
4 Must Do’s for Presentation Materials:
1. Use abstract information – Graphs, Charts and Images / Pictures
When correctly used, abstract information is always more powerful. In creating an abstract visual, you have done the thinking for the audience and depicted the information in a very easy-to-understand way. They do, however, take more time to properly create. The impact and retention level of abstract information is always higher than text or numbers.
2. The KISS principle – keep it short and simple
Visual overload creates visual overstimulation for the audience. The audience doesn’t know where to go on the visual. Their attention jumps all over the place or they focus on something you are not talking about at the moment. Test this premise and you we quickly understand the importance of KISS.
3. Use Grow Charts
They control what people see and when you want them to see it without losing their attention. When effectively done, they heighten interest in the next part of the message. Be careful. When overdone, they can become annoying. Use them judiciously.
4. Test your Visual Billboard for the Audience Value with Others
Just because you think they are great visuals doesn’t mean an objective audience member will think the same. Make sure others can understand what you are intending to impart. If your message doesn’t meet their mark – listen to them and adjust. The presentation is for them, not you.
In our blog series on presentation skills, we focus on the elements of great presentations and provide a framework to follow that allows you to control your message so it creates the intended impact at the highest possible level. Just click here to read all of our presentation skills blogs.
