A presentation is a presentation, not a comms exercise

I just read a good post from Jon Thomas on good presentation ideas, which prompted me to make a comment and, this having set my mind running, I thought I’d expand on it a bit here.

The first use of a PowerPoint presentation (or other app) is to support the presenter (duh!). Jon lists five good ideas for this, and the information that resonated with me particularly was to avoid lists of bullet points and use images (he quotes Dr John Medina: “adding an image to a text-based message can increase recall by 55 percent”).

Follow Jon’s ideas and your presentations will surely be greatly improved. But (there’s always a ‘but’). Why is this not as easy as it seems?

Much as I would love to say differently, I think there is still a tendency for presenters to use the presentation as a reminder of what to say. A single image with one intriguing word is fabulous for attracting the audience’s attention. Not so intriguing if the presenter can’t quite remember the messages that are supposed to be conveyed alongside it.

If you’re the presenter, that’s fine. Get off your butt and practice. But as comms professionals we are often asked to prepare presentations for other people and they may not always do the same.

In addition to the provision of a ‘crutch’, the presenter may also be averse to what they see as a ‘long’ presentation. Much as Emperor Joseph II said of a Mozart piece “too many notes”, they see too many slides without realising that the number of slides is immaterial to the audience – one click can take you to the next slide or to a build on the current one.  A 20-minute presentation can be on one slide or 40.

Another problem – presenters think they should send on a copy of the presentation to the people who were in the audience as a reminder of what was said. (“What did that egg mean again?”)

And worst of all, I still see people using a copy of a presentation as a communication to people who weren’t even there.

So slides end up with lots of words. Lots and lots.

It’s all just laziness really.  And reinforces one of my fave rules, which is that a range of channels are needed to communicate anything but the very simplest of messages. (Shouting “fire!” is adequate, you don’t need an email to back it up.)

So put the detail on a website, or in a booklet. Put various key messages on posters, in the elevators, on the back of the loo doors, on cards on the canteen tables, on the cardboard coffee cup holders. Just don’t put the onus on the receiver to read through a presentation and play guess-the-message.