Thursday 20 October 2016

Presentations: From Design to Delivery

Photofunia provides the image, you add your own text, et voila!

I attended this on a whim, really. There were spaces left, it sounded interesting and probably quite useful, and I happened to be free that day (then they had to change the day). Definitely worth going, really fun and has relevance beyond presentation-giving.

Claire Sewell is a great speaker. She's excellent at distilling the information into simple messages for people to take away, and talks openly about her experiences at presenting - including the disasters! It makes for refreshingly honest and very practical advice.

The first half of the presentation covered design, the second half delivery, and I made a note of the things that grabbed me as being most relevant for my situation. Some of these things are probably common sense, but I think they bear repeating.

Design

Before starting you need to be aware of two things: your message and your audience. These will dictate whether if a presentation is even the best medium for communication, let alone how you go about presenting.

Storyboarding the presentation, keeping a post-it with your take-home points on visible while you write and working backwards from the message in order to make things flow are all good ways of keeping on-message.

What not to do - basic design of slides suggests that you should be sparing with fonts (max 3), colours and animations. This is one of those situations where it's important to know the rules before you break them, because sometimes you might want to create a particular impact through breaking a rule (for example, Claire created a beautifully awful slide demonstrating what not to do!).

Good resources for creating presentations are: Powerpoint (and Keynote, the Apple equivalent), Google Slides (apparently very popular with students, works well for collaborations), Canva, Haiku Deck (image-based) and Prezi (bit faddy and informal for most situations but quite nice for maps).

Good sources for images are: Piktochart (charts, diagrams, maps), Pixabay (all cc-0), Photofunia (which puts your text into images - like the one at the top of this post) and Spell With Flickr (which is a fun tool that creates words from letters in Flickr photos). In all cases it's really important to make sure you're not breaching copyright.

If presenting, then making the slides available online after, the easiest way to not duplicate effort is to add the text for each slide in white text on a white background behind the picture. This gets picked up by Slideshare (other online slideshow databases are probably available) so you don't have to create two separate presentations.

Delivery

We had a break, where I caught up with the lovely people at the Pendlebury (miss it so much!), then it was onto delivery. This was a lot more active than the first bit, which in itself was an example of great presentation design! (People can only concentrate for about 20 minutes at a time, so try to break it up with activities if it goes on longer than this.)

We started with the Elevator Pitch: if you got into a lift with the head of libraries, what would you say? This was distilled into 4 points:

  1. Identify your goal
  2. Explain what you do
  3. Communicate your USP (unique selling point)
  4. Engage with an open-ended question asking about them/their work

How to deal with nerves: as a musician I'm used to being on stage, so a lot of this I'd heard before, but there were some tips which were good for public speaking specifically. Hands shaking? Use a clipboard. Getting really flustered? Physically take a step back, breathe, step forward and just pick up where you left off. Filming yourself is a great way to highlight a lot that you might not be aware of (but bear in mind you may well be far more critical of yourself than the audience is!). And finally, a 'fun' fact: smiling represses the gag reflex. Take from that what you will.

When it comes to questions, do do DO clarify the question you've just been asked - it lets the audience hear the question, it gives you time to think of answer, and it ensures you're answering the question instead of what you think the question should be. If you're hassled by someone persistent, you can say something like: "we've talked about that for a while. I think it's a really good point, can I discuss it with you afterwards?"

Another aspect which I thought was absolutely brilliant - make sure you have at least one more slide after the questions. This enables you to finish the presentation on the note you wanted to, and to really drive home the message, particularly if there were no questions and everyone shuffled around awkwardly, or if there was a heckler!

Voice projection saw us all attempting tongue twisters, which was a lot of fun. I demonstrated my party piece of being able to execute 'red lorry, yellow lorry' perfectly. Another excellent point that Claire made was the different between what you say when you read aloud and what you say when just making use of odd prompts - it really does make for a startling contrast (needless to say, talking more naturally and only relying on prompts rather than reading out is waaaaay better).

Dealing with disaster - I really liked how Claire shared with us her experiences of disastrous presentations, both on the delivering and receiving ends! Hearing about the things that can go wrong is great - forewarned is forearmed, after all. Just hearing about the things that went wrong already makes you more able to cope with things going wrong, even if there was/is no solution. The second thing I really appreciated was her point that: unless you tell the audience something went wrong, they'll never know (usually). Finally, preparedness helps: knowing where you're presenting, having time before to get ready, etc goes a long way to mitigating the risk of a disaster ever happening.

All in all, this was a great session - very enjoyable, very practical, with lots of take-home points for me, and useful too for scenarios where presentations aren't the best method of communication. An excellent way to spend an afternoon!

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