How to Craft a Persuasive Presentation

Last week just after I packed my family off for a month in Japan, the land of Presentation Zen, I found a "Business Tip of the Day" about a new Harvard Business Review Guide to Persuasive Presentations. It's a collection of useful tips by various authors on everything from preparing visuals to overcoming stage-fright. The "Business Tip" summary boils the contents down to four main points:

• Figure out the question you're answering
• Create the opener
• Draft the ending
• Put it together and edit down

While highly simplified, I found a lot of similarities between these points and Garr Reynolds' approach, in particular his suggestion that we should approach presentations as telling a story.

"Figuring out the question you're answering" is about knowing what you want to communicate to your audience and crafting your presentation with their needs and situation in mind.

To "create the opener," the guide recommends starting off with a story or anecdote. As Garr has frequently pointed out, human beings are storytellers, and respond well to stories. A good story at the opening is a great way to engage your audience's emotions in that critical first ten minutes of your presentation. Garr has a good Garr has a good post featuring Ira Glass on treating presentations like stories here.

To "draft the ending" is to leave your audience not just with a summary of what you've just presented, but to present some action you'd like them to take. After all, a presentation, just like advertising, is generally done with the purpose of getting people to do something.

Last, "putting it together and editing down" is probably the most time-consuming portion, and is critical to maintaining your audience's attention. In a recent post on Dr. John Medina's book Brain Rules, I mentioned Medina's suggestion that ideally you should shift gears every ten minutes to maintain a high interest level. I think the most practical way of "putting it together and editing down" is Garr's practice of storyboarding presentations.

Most of us who create presentations have fallen into the trap of putting them together directly in PowerPoint. This is a sure-fire way to get bogged down in the details, lose sight of the big picture, and succumb to the temptation of attempting to include everything you want to say in a few over-stuffed slides.

Storyboarding, however, lets you lay out the outline of the whole presentation visually, then go back to PowerPoint to construct it and fill in the details. Garr writes a bit about storyboarding here, but you'll get more of a how-to if you buy his book, Presentation Zen. Garr recommends getting "off the grid," that is, getting away from your office, leaving your laptop behind, and sketching out your ideas in storyboard frames on blank paper, or using post-it notes that you can rearrange later on your wall.

This practice is good for at least two reasons. One, by looking at your slides as frames, it gives you a way to grasp the whole and organize it into major thematic sections. Two, having to work within the frames forces you to keep the ideas on each slide simple, encouraging you to draw pictures of what you want to say and come up with short headlines. Storyboarding helps you look at your presentation more as a slide-show, in which you are presenting visuals and big ideas that back up the story you're going to tell.

So, check out all these books, and the next time you have to create a presentation, try storyboarding first, with the emphasis on telling a story.

Comments

[Cameron Scott]

Well that was a really sound business advice. More often than not, the fate of a proposal, report, or anything else depends on the presentation. And it's not just in the slides, but also in the presenter. It's not enough to just flash a slide and tell something about it. What's more important is to get the message across, solidly. This is especially true for business presentations aimed at inviting investors.