Presentation Workshop, December 14 in Austin

Posted on November 9, 2007 in The Rowan Report with No Comments

Since launching the Rowan Report, I’ve avoided overt sales pitches about my company. But you’re getting one today.

On December 14, I will be conducting a 3-hour workshop on presentations at LifeWorks (3700 South First Street in Austin). The workshop will be open to anyone who wants to learn about improving presentation skills and materials.

I conducted a short one-hour version of this workshop (without the hands-on and tutorial sections) at the Crossroads Conference in October (hosted by Greenlights for Non Profit Success), and the response has been remarkable. For those of you in Austin who did not attend the October conference, the December workshop will provide a longer, more interactive agenda and more opportunity for Q&A, group interaction and “learning by doing.”

The workshop will include three parts.

1. A plenary session, including research findings and recommendations from the book “Why Bad Presentations Happen to Good Causes,” as well as before-and-after case studies of presentation best practices. A copy of the book will be provided.

2. A group review of “real world” presentations (yes, that could include yours if you want it to)

3. A hands-on tutorial of common presentation software, including PowerPoint and Keynote.

The cost of the workshop will be $159 per person.

Here are the details. If you have any questions, email rsvp@rowcom.com.

What: “Why Bad Presentations Happen to Good Causes” plenary and workshop
When: Friday, December 14, 9 am to noon
Where: LifeWorks, 3700 South First Street, Austin, 78704 (map)

More Details
Cost for the workshop is $159 per person. The fee covers the work session and a copy of the book “Why Bad Presentations Happen to Good Causes.” Group rates are available for organizations sending more than two employees.

Attendance will be limited by space constraints. If you’d like to reserve a seat, please email rsvp@rowcom.com. Please state your name, organization, the number of people who will attend and your employer’s non-profit status. Employees of non-profit organizations will be given priority if the session fills up.

Payment will be accepted at the workshop. Please make checks payable to Rowan Communication, Inc. Receipts will be provided.

Attendees are encouraged to bring laptop computers for the hands-on session.

We will review presentations submitted by the audience. If you would like to volunteer to share a draft presentation, please note that in your reservation email (don’t worry, everyone will be very nice when we watch it).

More details will be distributed to attendees as December 14 approaches.

Final thoughts (for now) on PowerPoint

Posted on September 26, 2007 in The Rowan Report with No Comments

A friend of mine recently pointed out to me that if I keep going on and on about PowerPoint, then I won’t have much insight left to charge clients for. Good point.

So I’ll wrap up the PowerPoint sermon with a quick “Top 10 Things I Haven’t Mentioned Yet.”

10. Learn the hidden tricks. Pressing the “B” key during a slide show turns the slide black. “W” turns it white. Pressing any number key and return from within a slideshow will take you to that slide number, so you can hide “extra slides” that you’re not sure you’ll need. Learn to use PowerPoint’s “Presenter’s Tools,” which displays the upcoming slide on your laptop while the audience sees the current slide. You can find all of these in PowerPoint manuals, but you have to dig around a bit.

9. Come prepared. Buy a $50 remote clicker (I use Kensington’s) so you don’t get tethered to your computer. Arrive early to set up. Know the room layout and feel confident about asking about moving things around to “fit” the presentation. If you use sound, bring your own speakers. Bring your own power strip and keep an extension cord in your car if you present often.

8. Kill your logo. If you need to, include it on the intro slide. But including it on every slide is not only branding overkill, it takes up lots of room and distracts from the message. As one friend told me, if you need to show your logo on every slide for the audience to remember who gave the presentation, you have a branding problem that your logo won’t fix.

7. Use video. Use it wisely, but use it. It breaks up the monotony of a lecture and attracts attention. I often use it for comic relief, but it also serves a very functional role. PowerPoint is pretty picky about which format you have to use, so stick with .WMV files. Keynote will play just about anything.

6. Ease up on the animations. My personal goal for animations is “gracefulness.” I want them to look smooth and almost unnoticed. Dancing bullets and swirly photos don’t usually do the trick for me.

5. Look them in the eye. Eye contact makes the audience pay attention and puts you in charge. It helps the audience empathize with your message. And it just plain looks good. Presentations should be rehearsed enough that the script doesn’t have to be “read,” so this takes time and practice. But you will notice immediately the renewed impact your presentations have when you look up.

4. Ask the audience to do something — during the presentation and after. This is really two ideas. First, I mean that the audience should have some type of participatory role in the presentation. Ask questions. Invite questions. Secondly, all good presentations are a transfer of an idea, not just a transfer of information. What do you want the audience to do when it leaves? Tell them.

3. Don’t use bad cheap photos. Use good cheap photos. Google Images offers scores and scores of public domain photos (check for photo rights unless you don’t fear copyright lawyers). Istockphoto.com is a cheap place to find professional quality graphics and photos for a few bucks. And please, please, don’t use Microsoft’s clip art. Your cause is better than that.

2. Don’t end with Q&A. Just as the first thing you say when you begin should be prepared and memorized, the last idea you leave the audience with should be a message from the heart. Look them in their eyes and leave them with a parting thought or call to action. If you end with Q&A, your inevitable last line will be “No more questions? Well, thank you for having me.” And everyone will leave sad.

1. Tell them stories. As a friend of mine says “No one ever marched on Washington because of a pie chart.” Telling stories — above all other PowerPoint tips you will ever learn — is the single most impactful change you can make to your presentations. Everyone has seen bullet point slides. Everyone can read your website or brochure to learn about your budget or mission or “success metrics.” But stories have the ability to get people to CARE ENOUGH to hear your message. If you want to move people, tell them your stories.

And with that, my summer-long series on PowerPoint comes to a close. If you want to review the series, click here.

Breaking the Rules – With Style

Posted on August 16, 2007 in The Rowan Report with 1 Comment

So much for all my pious advice about what makes a good presentation.

If you’re a technophile, you may have already seen the Identity 2.0 presentation by Dick Hardt. If you haven’t, click here (you’ll only need to watch a few minutes to “get it,” but I bet you’ll watch most of it).

Hardt’s presentation breaks so many of the “rules” I’ve preached about here.
He reads his slides.
He uses a glaring white background.
It’s long.
He uses distracting text animations.
And so on.

But the presentation is pretty damned cool. Why? How?

Here’s my take:

1. He knows his audience well — they are tech experts. This allows him to present at a breathtaking pace without slowing down to explain some concepts that might confuse you and me. He doesn’t care about you and me — we’re accidental audience members.

2. It’s funny. Part of this is his personality, and part of this is the presentation he created. But he did a great job of mixing up instruction, opinion and humor.

3. It is INCREDIBLY rehearsed and choreographed. I can’t imagine the number of hours he spent making then scripting then rehearsing this thing, but it is as smoothly presented as it is chaotic.

4. It’s simple. Despite its length and technical complexity, each image (screen) is painfully simple, as is his narration. He never tries to prove his brilliance by demonstrating complexity. He proves his brilliance by demonstrating simplicity.

5. He uses images well. The same images are used several times to “call back” points he made earlier.

6. Maybe most importantly, it’s different. It’s more like performance art (Spalding Gray, maybe?) than a presentation. You’ve never seen something like this at the office. And you’ll remember it.

So I forgive him for breaking all my rules.

Give Us a Hand(out)

Posted on August 7, 2007 in The Rowan Report with No Comments

In his book “Why Bad Presentations Happen to Good Causes,” my friend Andy Goodman outlines one simple rule about handouts: Don’t distribute them until you’re done or until they are needed for a specific part of the presentation.

Passing out a stack of material before your performance will ensure only one thing: a large percentage of the crowd will NOT be paying attention to you. They will read ahead. They will find all of your well-planned jokes. They’ll use the handout to gauge how much longer you’re going to talk. None of this helps you.

Alas, even Microsoft’s PowerPoint web page recommends post-show distribution.

Building on Andy’s sage advice, I’ll offer a few more thoughts about how to use handouts.

First, I think it’s useful to think about handouts as reinforcement of your presentation, not a reproduction of it. For this reason alone, I think Microsoft should eliminate the “print handout” option or at the very least, rename it “print boring, ineffective handouts.”

Because slides are supposed to “reinforce” your verbal presentation, a print out of them shouldn’t be very helpful to an audience who hasn’t seen you present it. (If it were, why did you bother showing up? You could have just sent a memo.)

Unless a thorough recap is necessary, I encourage clients and colleagues to identify the one or two things that the audience HAS TO LEARN OR REMEMBER in order to consider the presentation a success and then design a simple handout that reinforces those points.

Consider these simple examples.

1. My colleagues at Environmental Defense have a rather robust presentation about energy consumption in Texas. Lots of charts and data. But there’s one chart that sums up the organization’s opinion about Texas energy. So we created a simple one page handout that explains that chart in great detail.

2. If you’ve seen Al Gore’s 300-slide “An Inconvenient Truth” presentation, you know it’s heavy on science about the global warming problem and light on solutions. So when I began giving the presentation in my community, I figured that people didn’t need a handout that recaps the presentation (they can rent the movie). A simple one-page handout about “what you can do” seemed to be the most helpful leave behind (I print four on a page and cut them into small leaflets). I also hand out copies of a longer report that details the role Texas plays in global warming. But I didn’t create it for the presentation. It’s just a fortunate coincidence that I worked at a place that produces such reports.

3. Sometimes, however, a more robust recap is necessary. When I present Andy Goodman’s “Storytelling as Best Practice” workshop, I often leave behind a front-and-back synopsis of what we discussed (see a portion of the first page here … sorry for the low-resolution). It’s not a word-for-word recap, and you have to have “been there” to remember most of the examples the handout mentions. But it serves as a good reminder for folks who attend the workshop.

None of these examples is the perfect, most beautiful piece. I work on a budget. But all of them provide the audience what it needs or what I want it to have (memory triggers for later, what you can do, more info about a complicated concept) without interrupting the presentation itself.

Amazingly, this approach barely adds any prep time. Here is your chance to give in to your addiction to bullets. Remind the reader what you said, and give him a few bullets that will help him recall your points. Handouts are also a great place to detail source material (New York Times, July 25, 2005 or Science, June 2005) for audiences who require that kind of specificity.

So give it a try with your next presentation. Think about what your viewers really need when they leave the room (or what you want them to have) and give it to them.

Admissions Bored

Posted on August 1, 2007 in The Rowan Report with No Comments

Every now and then, you see something that reminds you how steep the hill really is. I was about to upload a post about handouts last night when I came across a story that took the wind out of my PowerPoint sails (the handout post is coming).

You can read the AP story here…but I’ll give you the short version and why you should be careful about listening to any of my PowerPoint advice.

The school of business at the University of Chicago now requires applicants to submit, with their applications, four “PowerPoint-like” slides. They can cover any topic and must follow only two rules: no hyperlinks (let’s not encourage interactivity) and no video (God forbid). Surprisingly, pictures are allowed.

Not only does the story illustrate that the world has accepted that presentations are awful but necessary, it is now clear that I could never get accepted to graduate school today.

So be careful. If you’re planning to apply to a top-notch b-school, you might want to ignore all of my crazy posts about stories, pictures, simple design and verbal narrative. All that crap wouldn’t be understandable much less compelling if a stranger double-clicked on my .ppt file and ran through my slide show. He’d see four pictures and maybe a word or two. My presentations would get the boot in the first round. I never thought I’d say this, but I’d recommend the Template Wizard. After all, you should give the audience what it wants, right?

Welcome Back to PowerPoint World

Posted on July 18, 2007 in The Rowan Report with No Comments

Based on (1) feedback from friends and readers and (2) the fact that I’ve been creating a lot of presentations for clients, I’ve decided to spend the next several posts on some more PowerPoint tips. Some will seem familiar (my hatred of bullets, for example). But even the familiar ones will have new examples of dos and don’ts.

And if you have any other suggested PowerPoint topics, please send them my way.

First up, Back in Black.

I’ve mentioned this briefly in a couple of previous posts, but I have found that nearly every presentation that I create from scratch is based on a black background. Why? Maybe it’s personal taste. My car is black. My phone. My computer. My t-shirts. My dog.

But there’s more to it, I think.

1. Microsoft template colors are painfully ugly. So anything is better than what PowerPoint serves up. And no matter how much you like your organization’s pre-approved template, chances are your audience would rather see a black slide. Look at these examples…all the same slide but with a white, blue and black background. Which one looks the best?

2. Black doesn’t get old. Most colors age and fall in and out of fashion. Black will always be the new black.

3. Black is consistent across computers. PowerPoint colors look slightly different on different computers, whether they’re PCs or Macs. Black looks black. So you won’t open your slides on another computer and say “that looks different.”

4. White is blinding. And distracting. When you display a blank white slide in front of a group, everyone stares at it (and not you) waiting for you to fill it with content. White also creates an unmistakable square on the wall. So if you don’t fill it up with graphics, you feel like the slide is incomplete.

The borders of a black slide blend smoothly with the color of the screen you display your presentation on. So when a slide is blank, it simply looks like the projector is off, and the eyes in the room focus on you, not a blank screen. This allows you, the savvy presenter, to insert a few blank slides into your presentation when you want the audience to stop looking and start listening…like at the beginning and end of your presentation, or when you are about to make an important point.

5. Black is an easy color to match. I like to delete the backgrounds of my photos and graphics so not all of my graphics are rectangles and so they appear to “hover” above my slides. To do that, I use PowerPoint’s “transparent color” feature which works pretty well but always leaves a few traces of color around the edges. These “traces” can stand out on color slides, but blend right into a black background. See examples here and here.

6. Simplicity speaks volumes.

7. Black makes other colors look more vibrant and vivid. You’ll be amazed at how the same colors look so different when suspended over a black background. Use the same shading effect as before, but use white as the shade color instead of black and the shapes or line charts seem to jump off the screen. Check out this example in white and black, and this one in white and black. Both versions look pretty good, but I think the black slide gives the colors more impact.

8. At least for the time being, it’s different. I assure you, your presentation will stand out. People will ask you what software you’re using, because they’ve been inundated with the template wizard’s rainbow of bad colors. I posted this before, but look at this QuickTime version of a recent presentation and see how the simplicity of the black background stands out.

Next up is fonts. Doesn’t sound terribly exciting, but if you’ve tried to be fancy with clever fonts, you know that using the wrong ones can be a big headache.

Presentation example, the good and the bad

Posted on April 12, 2007 in The Rowan Report with 1 Comment

In the last post, I went on for a few hundred words about bullets and PowerPoint templates. Too much typing and not enough showing. So I thought I’d show you a quick example of what I meant.

A UT group asked me to give a presentation about the TXU fight: what it entailed, what Environmental Defense did, how we won, etc. So I have two movie files for you to watch. The first is what you’d normally expect for a quick 30 minute presentation about something. It goes by fast, so you might want to pause and restart a couple of times.

Click here to watch the video (Quicktime file)…then come back and read the rest.

Pretty boring. All the facts are there, but you could probably hear me reading the bullets in your ear.

Now look at another movie file. It’s a bit longer, but I think it’s worth the 3 minutes. And there’s no sound…so don’t adjust your speakers.

Click here to watch the next video.

It doesn’t look like a PowerPoint, does it?

Of course, there’s some narrative that you miss out on. And you might wonder what I mean by some of the text on the screen. But that’s OK. That’s why you have a speaker. If the slides were perfect stand-ins for speakers, we wouldn’t need speakers. This is an attractive and descriptive visual aid that supports a speaker who will inject anecdotes, factoids and commentary throughout the presentation. You want to see the next slide, and you want to hear what the speaker has to say about it.

Let me know if that helps show that the “no bullets” approach actually works.

Until next time…

Presenting Tips — Part One

Posted on April 7, 2007 in The Rowan Report with 1 Comment

I’ve recently been in a presentation groove. I’ve been giving various presentations — most of them related to global warming or the TXU power plant fight — for the last six months. And I’ve been through some interesting training on how to create and perform (yes, perform…not read) effective presentations. So I figured that I’d spend a few posts on presentation skills…from the basic tasks of outlining and organizing your presentation to platform and audience management skills.

One of the presentations I’ve been giving is the one Al Gore turned into “An Inconvenient Truth.” And after almost every performance the conversation turns from global warming to the presentation tool itself. People say they’ve never seen such a beautiful presentation. And they’ve never sat through a 75 minute presentation without yawning or checking their BlackBerries. Gore’s slide deck is an excellent example of what does and doesn’t work in front of a crowd.

And it shows what can happen when we resist PowerPoint’s two most tempting and powerful tools of boredom: bullets and the template wizard.

Remember this: bullets kill. They kill enthusiasm and they kill creativity. They kill audiences. And worst of all, they kill any sense of responsibility speakers used to feel — long ago, before PowerPoint — to develop a speech that they had to rehearse or even understand. People now click to the next slide. They read that slide. They click to the next slide. Bang! Another dead presentation.

The global warming presentation I’ve been using has 300 slides. I think two of them have bullets. Part of why the presentation is so powerful is that each presenter actually has to know, understand and practice it. It’s a performance. No reading allowed. It takes A LOT of rehearsal. But, holy cow, it makes such a difference.

If bullets are what kill presentations, the template wizard is the AK-47 that makes killing presentations so easy. Do not, I repeat, DO NOT use the template wizard — no matter how enthusiastically your IT guy promotes it. He’s an IT guy, not a communicator. The most compelling presentations I have ever seen, including Al Gore’s slide deck and Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ keynote addresses, are templateless. They have a picture and a word. Or a chart and a word. The slides enhance what the speaker is saying. They are not a visual crutch at which the speaker can simply stare and mumble.

The antidote to leaning on the template crutch is simple. I advise colleagues and clients to turn off their computers and think about the days before PowerPoint when we had to actually think through and write down what we wanted to say. Develop a snapshot of your main message, the key points you have to deliver and a few anecdotes, studies or facts you’ll need to prove your point.

Then, and only then, think about whether PowerPoint can help you make your case. You might realize that you’ve been leaning on a PowerPoint crutch you never even needed.

Stay tuned for more presentation tips. Due up next week: why reading your slides is not only terribly boring, but actually inhibits learning.