Most of the work of creating compelling, interesting presentations happens long before any slides are designed.
If you’re starting your presentations by designing your slides, you’re putting the cart before the horse. Before you work on your presentation visuals, you need to develop your ideas, create the best framework for communicating your information, write your script, and figure out what messages will resonate the best with your audience.
Laying the Foundations for Great Presentations will help you get your next presentation off to a great start!
Highlights of the workshop
Writing Persuasive, Audience-focused Presentations
It’s easy to write presentations that describe your own products and services because you’re so familiar with them. But consider the audience’s point of view. How does what you’re talking about relate to what the audience is experiencing? And how do you overcome people’s fear of change and communicate the value of what you’re offering? In this session, we’ll talk about how to introduce your subject in a way that demands attention, how to structure your presentation so that the audience remembers your key points, and the importance of communicating the immediate next steps the audience must take after each presentation.
Features vs. Benefits (or “What’s in it for me?”)
Features are what define your product or service. Benefits are the good that is derived or the pain that is avoided by the use of your product or service. Benefits are far more important to an audience than features, yet we all can fall into the trap of creating laundry lists of features in our presentations because it’s the easiest thing to do. We need to dig deeper to learn what our products and services actually deliver. In other words, benefits answer the question, “What’s in it for me?” In this session, you’ll discover the differences between features and benefits. We’ll also conduct a features vs. benefits exercise using examples from your own organization.
Presentation Building Blocks
No great presentation begins with slide design. Instead, you must lay a strong foundation of planning, writing and goal-setting. In this session, you’ll learn how to craft a presentation from the ground up. You will come to understand how creating a strong story, developing an audience avatar and working on a Presentation Map are the necessary first steps before PowerPoint even enters into the picture!