Improve your presentations before the first slide
- Rafael Ruiz
- Feb 19, 2024
- 2 min read
Updated: Mar 14, 2024
- Talk with the person who is inviting you to give the presentation. You need to know the purpose of your presentation, what they expect, and who your audience will be regarding age, background, and cultural aspects. Any information helps. These questions are fundamental since your presentation not only has to touch your audience but also has to satisfy the organizer.
- Try to know your audience better. Find their references (music, celebrities, food, cities, recent news, weather, anything). Here, the goal is to detect something you can mention in your presentation that resonates with everybody.
- Define the number of slides FIRST. A general rule of thumb is to keep one slice per 90 seconds. So, the total number of slides is n = T x 60 / 90, where "T" is the time (in minutes) you have in your talk.
- Divide your presentation into 4 Blocks: Emotional Hook, Perspective, Results, Cost
- Block 1: Emotional Hook. You need to transmit "Why are you there?" and "Why is it important to listen to what you have to say?". This drags your audience's attention and gives a broader meaning to what you will present.
- Block 2: Perspective. It always is a good idea to show a brief "Story" about the "History." Show some historical facts, evolution, or progress across time. You need to contextualize your audience in the main topic of your talk. This is just talking about the work of others.
- Block 3: Results. Now, it is time to talk about your work, thoughts, opinions, processes, or whatever comes from you or your work group.
- Block 4: Cost. This is about being sincere with your audience. You need to show some weak corners of your results. This step is crucial to identify future actions. If you do not have problems recognizing that your results are not perfect, you gain credibility.
- Be careful to give more weight to Block 3. This means more slides/time for this block.
- After that, you can start filling the slices with specific information and using the references detected in step 2.
