Optimizing a PowerPoint Presentation

Greetings,

It may not be immediately obvious that there is a strong connection between a performing artist's musical program and an executive delivering a business presentation, but there is. As part of my elevator speech I often tell folks that I put the show in the business. It's true. The presenter needs to connect to his or her audience just as does a comic. And let's face it, usually the material isn't nearly as much fun.

I think we all remember show and tell from when we were kids. We'd bring in on item and then have to tell about it. My goodness how hard was it to go even 1 or 2 minutes about dad's new post hole digger? So it's natural to gravitate toward many supporting aids and great detail within them. But that is not the best way to go because the more you put attention on the screen the less brain power your audience has left to pay attention to you!

So your PowerPoint slides have to:

1. Complement your story
2. Illustrate points you make
3. Provide just enough cues to help the audience (and you) follow your train of though
4. Be simple enough so that they spend their time looking at you, not the screens

Then practice your presentation until you own it.

Rather than get into a long diatribe (that might be boring anyway) about font sizes, # of lines, slide layout (photo left half, bullets right half etc.) I'd like to use a presentation I saw recently as an example.

The Bates Business Network presented Steve Fuller, the Chief Marketing Officer of LL Bean, which currently does $1.5 billion gross per year.

The topic was LL Bean's 100th Anniversary, their celebrations and associated programs that they put in place to commemorate it. Along with the key takeaways specific to my work as a special event and meeting producer, I was struck by certain elements of his PowerPoint and how effective they were. So let me now share these with you.

1. The presentation was over an hour long and used only about 20 slides.
2. It was unbranded! Slides were so clean!
3. It used a plain forest green background with knock out white text - very clear and easy on the eyes (white is very hard on the eyes, especially in a dim room)
4. It was incredibly simple
    i. Only 1 slide used a build.
    ii. More than half the slides used a visual with either no text or less than 6 words
    iii. Only one had a complex illustration, a 3D representation of a process
    iv. A sentence was used 2x and when done, it was the only thing on the slide, 3 lines, large font size, highly readable
    v. All the slides were very sparse - only critical cue words or images were there
    vi. The focus was therefore on Steve and what he had to say, not on the screen
5. There were two videos which were TV commercials shown for very specific reasons:
    i. An example of a national outdoors program that LL Bean supports
    ii. An example of their employees' commitment to LL Bean, as an employee was the person in the commercial
6. Steve had practiced the presentation - he'd been giving similar presentations for the whole year, with adjustments for different audiences. It really showed.

I hope that this can help all of you build and deliver great presentations. And of course if you ever want to talk about this, or communications generally, in more detail I am always available.