Taking Presentations To The Next Level

I have been giving a lot of public multi-media presentations lately. More than I have given over an extended period of time ever before in my career. This has gotten me thinking a lot about multi-media presentations. It has made me think about the things I love about public presentations and all the things I hate about public presentations

PowerPoint has been going strong for over a decade now and it has revolutionized public multi-media presentations. Meetings, classes, worship services, and even rock concerts will never be the same again. People are visual by nature and anytime you can reinforce what you are saying with something visual you are going to increase your audience’s learning and content retention (and hopefully entertain them along the way).

With all progress there tends to be some growing pains�”it’s just how it is. The main growing pain I am sensing in multi-media presentations is the over over over over over use of the bulleted list. Cliff Atkinson has a great book called, “Beyond Bullet Points” that discussed this very thing. In it he describes how to begin thinking creatively about multi-media presentations. He offers lots of great tips on using PowerPoint to make much better presentations that engage audiences, entertain them, and increase their learning.

There is a new generation of presentations, presenters, and resources cropping up all over that are taking the idea of beyond bullet points and running with it. Presentations are getting cleaner, more compelling, and more effective. As PowerPoint continues to evolve new products like Apple Computer’s Keynote have entered the presentation market which are making people fall in love again with the task of creating public talks.

We desire continually improve our communications here at WMC-AP. This way we can more effectively communicate Christ and provide better service to our ministry partners and clients are we are finding the next generation of multi-media presentations a critical part of that effort.

If you are involved in creating public presentations I would encourage you to do a few things.

If you work on a Mac, put away your copy of Office for Mac and upgrade to iWork ’08. This will give you the latest version of Apple’s office suite containing word processing, page layout, presentations, and spreadsheets that are 100% two-way compatible with MS Office  both on PC and Mac. It’s only going to cost you $79 and it will be the best investment you’ve made since buying your Mac

Spend some time visiting sites like Presentation Zen and 43 Folders.

Get creative, stay inspired, and take the time to find nice pictures and graphics for your presentations.

Think like the audience. Put yourself in their shoes and create the type of presentation you would like to watch.

Pick a visual style, 3 fonts at the most, an image style, a graphic style and stick with it. Don’t make your presentations a shotgun approach showering your audience with as many cool random fonts and graphics as you can find.

Use your handouts to list all the bullets and complete script of your presentation while using your multi-media to accentuate this content, not repeat it.

Have Fun.

this post was filed under Media Tips on Aug 31, 2007