Delivering a presentation

The moment of truth. The day of your presentation.
Here is a little checklist that should be completed beforehand:

1. Your presentation is designed and ready to be shown to your audience.
2. You rehearsed
3. For the sake of stressing the importance of point 2: You rehearsed again!
4. You checked the venue and made up your mind if the room needs any rearrangements
5. All technical equipment works fine and everything will be ready at the day of delivery
6. You have handouts printed 
7. You are rested and prepared
8. You are excited, not nervous to present the next day

Alright all necessary steps are taken, but there are still some issues that distinguish a good presentation from a great and engaging presentation.

I will go into detail with the following points in future posts. Here are some things to think about:

1. Did you use your available resources to your and its full potential?
• write down things that didn't work out quite as well as you planned for future presentations
2. Are you aware of your body-language?
• do you manage to connect with the audience?
• videorecord yourself and analyze your performance without tone
3. Does your voice tremble or gets too high? Do you lose your voice?
• record yourself
• there are great techniques to master your voice!
4. Are you nervous or do you have stage-fright?
• there are exercises to get over stage-fright and nervousness
• I realized that with increasing knowledge and rehearsal of the subject, my nervousness decreases
5. What prompts do you use? Notecards, a script, nothing at all?
• do they help or confuse you?
6. Do you use a presenter, pointer, stick or any other presentation tool?
• or do you press the arrow keys on the keyboard to get to the next slide?

These are all issues to consider when delivering a presentation and I will dedicate much detailed attention to these in future posts.

Have a good week!

Designing a presentation

So, your research turned out to be a huge success and you are now looking for a perfect delivery. I want to let you know upfront that this post is not about PowerPoint slide design, maybe a little, but I will probably dedicate multiple posts to slide design in the future.

The design stage of my presentation creation process talks about utilizing different mediums to later present your findings. I will be trying to give an overview over a couple of media, tools and techniques to help you deliver your presentation.

Maybe you decided up front what kind of presentation you want to do. Maybe you changed your mind a couple of times as your research progressed. That's all very good and now you should decide what you are definitely going to use and start designing to it.

With "designing" I am not saying to fire up PowerPoint and start punching in bullet points. Again, as with the very first stage of the process, don't do anything stupid, and with "stupid" I mean using PowerPoint without any thoughts and planning.

Here are some suggestions you can adopt in designing a presentation:

1. Outline your presentation. You may already have a rough outline from your preparation and refined it during your research. Now you decide on the structure or outline your presentation will have. You can either go with pen and paper or finally turn on your computer and start a word processing program like MS Word or a simple text editor. All these programs have basic outlining tools and you should use them.
2. Decide on the medium of your presentation. PowerPoint is perfectly fine, but there are also other options. You might even split the presentation into parts and use different tools for your presentation. Here are some suggestions:
1. Presentation software like MS PowerPoint, Keynote from Apple, Prezi or others.
2. A demo can be very effective, if you want to show your audience a feature. This could either be a planned navigation through the internet, or a specific website; a demonstration of a software program or a video that you created can also be very effective. You can also show off a tangible good if it is appropriate.
3. A whiteboard, flip-chart and similar can be very helpful, if your presentation requires quick improvisations or interaction with an audience
3. Storyboard your presentation. Jot down what you like to display, it can be a lot of work, but it will help you to design your presentation later on. Especially when it comes to Presentation Software, it is easier to implement something that is already drawn up, than to create it in PowerPoint.
4. Script your presentation. Write down what you want to say like a speech. It will help you rehearse and create prompts like notecards. The script will be the place where your bullet points appear, not your PowerPoint.
5. Design your presentation. A presentation is about you and what you have to say. You can and should use tools to help you visualize your ideas for the audience. This is where I could go on for hours and I thought about it. I will exploit this in further posts about slide design in particular. The bottom line I try to tell everybody is: Text is not visual. Pictures definitely are and graphs can be visual if they are created the right way. Just consider this for now: If you want to talk about an elephant sitting in a tree - for some strange reason - how would you do it? Would you put the sentence: "The grey elephant with a big green spot on his head was sitting in an elm tree" on a slide? Try this just for fun. Then read the sentence and record your time. Once when reading it out loud and once reading it for yourself. Next, imagine you could draw an elephant with a green spot on a tree. Now put this picture on a slide. You want the audience to realize that there is an elephant with a green spot sitting in a tree. What is more effective and retentive? The text on the slide, while reading it out loud to the audience? Or just the picture and you reading the text off your script or notecards, if you need the prompts? I hope you see my point. We can all read faster than we speak and once I see text on a slide, I read it and when the presenter gets to the last word on the slide, I am already asleep. Visuals should be used carefully and accordingly, so your audience will have a real visual aid to your presentation.

There is so much to add to designing a presentation, and I will cover it in future posts. Until then, think about some new ideas you may have gained and try to apply them. I promise it won't hurt and if you do it right, as always, you will save time in the long run.

Comment, if you like to add thoughts and share if you value the information. Until next week, have a good one.

Research - Sound Foundation for a great Presentation

Now, that the presentation is carefully prepared, we can go over to the research phase. If you are doing a presentation about a topic you like or just want to present your findings from a survey you conducted, this phase will be fairly easy, although for students like myself, this is the least favorable phase of the process.

Yet, good and thorough research is the basis for any presentation. If you have nothing to say but empty phrases and you can't back them up, then there is no point making a presentation in the first place. In the end, questions from or discussions with the audience after the presentation will reveal how good your research was and what you know about it.
So I don't need to stress that research is important and I won't go any further with this. Keep in check with your goals and schedules you set yourself in the preparation stage and point your research in the right direction. Everything should flow nice and easy.

Well, research can be conducted in so many different ways, and I won't and actually can't prescribe you a perfect method to do it. I like to share some tips though, on how you might organize your research a little more efficient.

Kicking it Old School:

In 2006/2007 I spent one year at a American High School as an exchange student. I liked my English teacher a lot, although she was very strict. I learned a lot from her in retrospect. We had to write a research paper in her class and she forced us to do it her way. She showed us how to use flashcards to do research and we had to go to the local library and use them to do research. She collected and graded them weekly and the flashcards were actually part of the assignment. I didn't like them a lot, but I could not actually think of a better way, and found it in the end very convenient, when consolidating my work at the end.
So here is how it works: You have one set of flashcards, which you will be using for your bibliography. When you find a book, the first thing will be to write down the reference to that book in whatever style you will have to do it in. If you do not have any rules regarding referencing choose the one you find the easiest. Harvard APA and MLA are just two of a variety of referencing styles. Now you find a passage that is perfect for your project. You write down a synopsis on a new flashcard and put down the author and date of the book as well as the page numbers. On the back goes the whole passage as a quote or keywords from that paragraph.
You might have gotten bored half way through this last paragraph and I can't blame you. Flashcards can be an effective method but they are not really efficient and far from being suiting to modern technology.

After flashcards I tried a couple of different approaches, like putting all the data into a word processing document or just a handy notebook, which all worked somehow, but weren't great.


Going Paperless:

In 2009 I found a great piece of software which suited all my researching needs and has been improving ever since. It is a free cross platform service available for the web, your computer and almost any smartphone. It is called Evernote and it is basically a big digital notebook that you can access basically anywhere anytime. If you are not familiar with Evernote be sure to give it a try. It is absolutely free. There is a premium version, but the free version will suffice for many research needs. I am planning to do a video about Evernote, to show how I use it to organize my research and work. I won't go much more into detail here, but be sure to check it out at www.evernote.com. There are a bunch of videos already out there covering different features, just check YouTube. I will let you know via this blog or twitter (@visupres), when the video is ready. I might dedicate even a whole post to Evernote after I covered the five step process of presentation creation, so stay tuned.


I can't wait to talk about design next week. There are so many influential people out there talking about effective slide design or presentation design; so I will try to gather it all here and put each approach into perspective.
Please comment, if you are also a fan of Evernote, or share your methods of research that fit your style the best. Follow me on twitter and tweet about your experiences or things you want me to cover or put my thoughts out about.

Have a good week!

Preparation is essential for a great presentation

When I talked about the steps to a great presentation, I defined the "preparation stage" as the first phase one has to go through. We could also call it planning or organization, but I went with preparation, because you prepare your presentation to be something lasting. Planning and organizing are just parts of it.
Anyway, it doesn't matter in which context you decided to do a presentation, preparation is essential. I propose the following aspects are worth thinking about. The outcome of the presentation will largely rely on your preparation.
While you go through the stages of creating your presentation, everything will essentially go back to this preparation stage and you will safe a lot of time later, if you commit to putting more time - as usual maybe - into the preparation phase.


The following points are only outlines of important things to consider and I will probably feature them in future blog posts in more detail.

Schedule to the DEADLINE:
This is supposedly the most important aspect to the whole process. If you have the greatest presentation ever, but you are 2 days late, nobody will hear you. The usual deadline is a good and fair amount of days ahead of the day you received your assignment. For me personally, it becomes more scary the closer I approach it. The easy solution is to "dress this scary thing up in a funny costume, so we can approach it with confidence". Kidding aside, what I mean is that with preparation (the costume) your presentation will become better and successful most importantly.

Here are some things I suggest you can do:

• Schedule a meeting, if you are in a team, or take some time for yourself aside to sketch out the process
• Create an overview over the next couple of weeks and put either your free time you can allocate to creating the presentation into it, or note down any appointments and schedules that will prevent you from working on it. You will probably find, that the more people there are in a group, the harder it gets to find times where everybody has time to attend meetings. Don't forget, that the sunday after a big party might not quite be the best time to work on your presentation, so stay ahead ;-)
• Plan the further stages of the presentation process. I suggest you go backwards from the deadline of the presentation.
• I will explain in later posts what the "delivery stage" means for me, but keep things in mind like technology. Be sure to include a day in your schedule where you check out the venue of the presentation. Test all the equipment you will need and make sure you have the number of the tech guys and call them before the presentation, not during!
• Keep at least the day before the presentation for rehearsal. Better yet are two to three rehearsals during the week before the presentation, if you can manage to do so.
• Maybe you have to prepare an essay or an handout as well. These documents need some time as well. Make sure when to hand them in and allocate time to do it.
• Putting your presentation together should be one of the last steps before rehearsal, but make sure to estimate the time you will need. At this stage, if you are working in a group, you probably want every member present, so find a convenient time.
• Allocate time for sufficient research. All your presenting skills will only work if you have good content.
• Think about short meetings to track overall progress.
• Have one or two brainstorming sessions before your research and maybe after you dug a little bit into your topic. It is frustrating to find yourself working in the wrong direction after a couple of weeks.

Definitions:

Before you start gathering all kinds of great things and thoughts about your topic you need some clarification on a couple of things that are key to your success. 

• Purpose - Get the purpose for your presentation right. If you don't have a purpose, define one for yourself. It might also be crystal clear for you what you want to say and this will help you get along the other tasks very easily. In a university context, try to clearly understand the task you have been given. Ask for clarification, if the task is not specific enough. Maybe your creativity is encouraged. I talk about assignments in last weeks post. The bottom line for students is - unfortunately maybe - to get the assignment right and fullfil the requirements.
• Goals and objectives - Define your goals for the presentation. Do you want to score a good grade? Do you want to make an impact on peoples lives? Do you want to sell an idea. State clearly your personal objectives and have everybody working on the presentation commit to them.
• The Audience - Define your audience. Try this as detailed as possible. Are they your classmates you know. Are they total strangers. What do you know about them? Demographics and geographics can be very important. What is their prior knowledge of the field? Try to think about your audience with marketing goggles on: What are their needs? What are their wants? What are the trends? What are the uncertainties? Are there risks to disrespect a part of the audience? Remember: the audience is king and you will try everything to please them. Well maybe not everything ;-)
• Your message - Once you have defined your audience you want or need to reach, you need to tailor a message for them. This is the essence of your presentation. You want the audience to take something away from your presentation and you want to do it in the most memorable way. You might argue that academic presentations are only about delivering content slide after slide, point after point. I argue that this is not the case. A board meeting is not about presenting the sales figures of the last quarter, but about delivering a message - a new strategic direction perhaps - backed up with content. A presentation is not a written essay or a report. It is a visual way of delivering your findings. I will defend on this statement in future blog posts because I think, that this is the point where many opinions might differ.
• Brainstorming / Structure / Outline - If the basic structure is already clear to you, jot it down visually so that everybody in your team can visualize it. Maybe you need to work out the structure step by step and you need to do some brainstorming first. Make one or two brainstorming sessions to gather all your thoughts and ideas. Use different brainstorming techniques and try to visualize your ideas. This will ultimately help your audience as well to understand what you want to say, providing them with the visual aids. Create an outline of things you want and need to cover.
  The more detailed these steps are pursued, the easier it will be to research your topic and put the eventual presentation together. I will elaborate on these topics also in future posts.
• Medium - Lastly decide on the medium you will use to deliver your presentation. There's a crazy idea I want to float by you. Why not go PowerPoint free? Why not go technology free? It really depends on your topic, but you should at least think about it. Maybe you can create an engaging story that will stick in peoples minds longer than a set of slides. If you are not familiar with presentation software at all, either learn how to use it right, but never just use it because everybody else does it! If you are not a pro in slide design, a whiteboard, visualizer or a flip-chart will do just fine to help you get your point across. But remember, that presentation software has its merits and if you can use it in an effective way, then please do so. I am planning a whole section on software such as PowerPoint, so stay with me. Whatever you come up with though, know how to utilize in the best way possible.

Remember all these steps can be completed without using a computer and I suggest that pen and paper can do their magic. Please don't ever make the mistake to plan or outline your thoughts in PowerPoint. I know and I have done it, too. It is tempting, but this it not what it is for. There are plenty of planning, brainstorming and outlining tools for your computer and you should use them as they are intended. (I will cover some applications in future videos on my website.) PowerPoint or other presentation software, if any at all, should be the last application you open on your computer while you work on your presentation. Although, I encourage you to play around with it and familiarize yourself with it, if you are not an expert. I hope to feature some best practices and uses with presentation software on my website in a couple of months. Otherwise check YouTube for a ton of tutorial videos. But be careful, there are a lot of bad practices on YouTube, so I advise you to find channels from proven experts. Hopefully I can manage to gather some good links, when I am covering presentation software. So stay tuned!

One last thing. This might all sound reasonable, but why should we spend so much time preparing? Sufficient preparation will give you a clear vision of what lies ahead and it won't lead you in wrong and different directions. Try the NIKE approach: Just Do It! Take your next presentation project and try to apply thoughtful preparation and analyze afterwards if it helped you.

Well this wraps up this weeks topic. There are so many things I just mentioned and I can assure you, that I will address them in the future. I hope you found this useful and worth spreading. Comment if you want to add anything or if you disagree.