It isn’t enough that your slides look pretty. Find out how storytelling, creating visions of an ideal future, and crafting the audience journey can make your presentations compelling even before you design a single slide. (Available as a single 1-hour module or a comprehensive 4-hour training)
Presentation design is much more than just making pretty slides
If you’re starting your presentations by designing your slides, you’re putting the cart before the horse. Before you work on your presentation visuals, you need to develop your ideas, create the best framework for communicating your information, write your script, and figure out what messages will resonate the best with your audience.
Laying Foundations for Great Presentations will help you get your next presentation off to a great start!
Workshop Modules
Presentation Building Blocks
Features vs. Benefits
Persuasive, Audience-focused Presentations
Optional Module: Analyze and Synthesize
Presentation Building Blocks
No great presentation begins with slide design. Instead, you must lay a strong foundation of planning, writing and goal-setting. In this session, you’ll learn how to craft a presentation from the ground up. You will come to understand how creating a strong story, developing an audience avatar and working on a Presentation Map are the necessary first steps before PowerPoint even enters into the picture!
Features vs. Benefits (or “What’s in it for me?”)
Features are what define your product or service. Benefits are the good that is derived or the pain that is avoided by the use of your product or service. Benefits are far more important to an audience than features, yet we all can fall into the trap of creating laundry lists of features in our presentations because it’s the easiest thing to do. We need to dig deeper to learn what our products and services actually deliver. In other words, benefits answer the question, “What’s in it for me?” In this session, you’ll discover the differences between features and benefits. We’ll also conduct a features vs. benefits exercise using examples from your own organization.
Writing Persuasive, Audience-focused Presentations
It’s easy to write presentations that describe your own products and services because you’re so familiar with them. But consider the audience’s point of view. How does what you’re talking about relate to what the audience is experiencing? And how do you overcome people’s fear of change and communicate the value of what you’re offering? In this session, we’ll talk about how to introduce your subject in a way that demands attention, how to structure your presentation so that the audience remembers your key points, and the importance of communicating the immediate next steps the audience must take after each presentation.
Optional Module: Analyze and Synthesize
Add this module to your session if you want to learn how to quickly redesign problem slides and how to design slides correctly the first time.
The Analyze and Synthesize method is a way of determining the main message of a slide, then choosing the best way to convey that information with the addition of photos or graphics. This module includes the redesign of three of your own slides so that you can see right away how the Analyze and Synthesize method can work for you!
This training session lasts 3 hours (4 hours with the optional module), is suitable for groups of any size, and can be presented in-person or remotely.