How To Nail Your Next Presentation (And Every One After That)

Hey Everyone: This week’s quick tip is to check out Ann Emery’s upcoming course on creating powerful presentations. This course includes both live and recorded lessons, so it only opens once a year for registration, and the deadline is Friday, April 29.

This course will transform you into the powerful presenter that your organization needs. Here's what's included to make that happen.

  • 80+ video lessons that you can watch anytime (the equivalent of my two-day Powerful Presentations workshop)

  • Step-by-step process to deliver data-driven presentations that engage audiences

  • Your Turn activities after every lesson to post your own work and get the instructor's feedback

  • 12 additional Live Trainings just for participants in this cohort

  • Office Hours sessions (almost) every week in 2022

  • Powerful Presentations ebook with our checklists and case studies

  • Private Data Vizards community of fellow participants

  • Weekly emails to cheer you on

  • Lifetime access so you don't feel rushed

  • Examples from a variety of industries (public health, juvenile justice, museums, and more)

  • Behind-the-scenes PowerPoint magic tricks guaranteed to make your jaw drop

LEARN MORE AND ENROLL HERE!


Let’s talk about YOUR data!

Got the feeling that you and your colleagues would use your data more effectively if you could see it better? Data Viz for Nonprofits (DVN) can help you get the ball rolling with an interactive data dashboard and beautiful charts, maps, and graphs for your next presentation, report, proposal, or webpage. Through a short-term consultation, we can help you to clarify the questions you want to answer and goals you want to track. DVN then visualizes your data to address those questions and track those goals.


3 PowerPoint Laws to Always Obey

60-SECOND DATA TIP_3 (1).png

Charts, graphs, and maps often make their debut in PowerPoint presentations (or the like.) This is a problem. A bad PowerPoint can kill even a great data visualization.

We already know PowerPoints are a problem. We have napped through many of them in our careers. And we even know, when we are on the creating end, that they shouldn’t be text heavy. But we don’t know what else do besides typing in a few bullet points and pasting in some bad clip art.

Since I’m committed to giving you something useful in 60-second portions, this week I give you my top three PowerPoint laws (yes laws – you might not take mere recommendations as seriously, and this is important!)

Law #1: Slides are for seeing. Think about the last subtitled movie you saw. Did you miss a lot of the action while reading? Research shows we are quite good at simultaneously processing pictures and spoken words. But our brains go on overdrive when processing pictures plus written text – like during subtitled movies. And our brains can completely shut down when processing written text plus spoken words, which is what we ask audiences to do during our Powerpoints.* So move those bullet points to your script or speaking notes and use a well-designed data visualization or a great free photo from websites like Unsplash.

Law #2: Portion control. The hard truth is that our audience members are going to walk away from our presentation retaining just a few ideas whether we like it or not. If we shower them with ten, twenty, thirty ideas, we don’t control which ones they retain. So choose just a few and weed out the rest. Then feature only one idea per slide. And go easy on the charts, maps, and graphs. They are more difficult to process than photos or illustrations, so give your viewers a cognitive break between charts.

Law #3: Obey visual hierarchy. Remember what Antoine de Saint-Exupery said: “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” Simplify your slides with one compelling image or one chart, map, or graph (which, itself, has been stripped down to what is necessary). Make sure there is plenty of empty space around the image or chart to give it prominence. Then enlarge only the most important elements while reducing the size of the rest. Similarly, use color sparingly to draw attention to the most important aspects of the slide. And for much more on visual hierarchy, check out this great article on Canva.

See other data tips in this series for more information on how to effectively visualize and make good use of your organization's data. 

* For more on this, check out Moreno and Mayer’s studies on multimedia learning.

Photos by NeONBRAND and Cody Davis on Unsplash