Regardless of where you are in the tech world, from start-up to seasoned professional, you’ve given at least one PowerPoint presentation in your career. With COVID-19 protocols making virtual meetings the new normal, chances are your presentations are carrying a lot more weight now.
Follow this advice to make sure your presentations are the best they can be.
Planning Your Presentation
Know Your Audience
The first step in creating an effective presentation is planning and creating an outline of your content. To do this you will need to have a good idea of exactly who you’ll be presenting to and why.
- Who will you be presenting to?
- What information do they already know?
- Why are you presenting this content to them? What is the main purpose or what do you hope to gain from the presentation?
Make note of all these answers before beginning to plan your presentation. They will help guide you in the right direction as far as how in depth you need to go and how you should be speaking. The language you use in a presentation to your engineering staff will be vastly different from the language you use when presenting to board members. You need to ensure that all content can be accessed by everyone in the meeting.
Plan Your Content
Create an outline detailing what information you want to cover and lay it all out in an order that makes sense. Similar to an essay outline from your school days, you need to cover the main areas and points you want to address.
Introduction:
Keep this brief and concise, gauge how much detail is needed depending on your audience.
Who you are. Why you’re here. What you’ll be talking about. What order the presentation will follow. Ask the audience to kindly keep their questions until the end of the presentation.
Body:
Break down your information into broad categories and then further divide into subcategories within the individual slides.
For example:
Category – The new app you’ve designed.
Subcategories – Why the app was designed. What the technical specifications are. What the user experience will look like. What the beta test results are.
Conclusion:
Similar to the introduction this can be kept short. Summarize your presentation and the main points. Restate the statistics you want your audience to recall and why they are important. Finish your presentation with a call to action or a final remark about the content. Open the floor to any questions your audience may have.