Feeding the Chickens
Today we are going to talk about feeding the chickens, at least that’s what we used to call it when I was in the army. Today they give it fancy names and call it “keynote” presentations and Executive presentations, most of the time though the audience is going “Oh Great, another Bozo presentation”. It’s otherwise known as powerpoint. And it’s been used to deliver presentations in the most horrible ways possible since y2k. In fact, a lot of the time it would be better for the presenter to play some soothing music and put their slides on auto rotate as then we could read their presentation and not have to listen to them read their slides verbose! That way too it would be much easier to not feel guilty about falling asleep.
So my mission by the end of this you will have some helpful tips for using powerpoint effectively in your presentations.
Here are the 5 key things to avoid when using powerpoint during presentations.
- Lots of Slides is a big NO NO They = Boring – Bozo Presentations
- Don’t use ONLY PowerPoint, Powerpoint is not the only presentation tool in your arsenal, you have many others including whiteboards, drawing sheets, props and so much more
- DON’T Make the slides your notes and prompts, The audience instantly catches onto this and read ahead of you, then they fall asleep while you recount exactly what is on the slides.
- DON’T use lots of of Long Boring Lists (Like This)
- DON’T use powerpoint to display pages of writing, your listeners are only going to be reading ahead of you and thereby removing the impact of you telling the story
The Golden Power Point Rule – Called the 10 – 20 – 30 Rule
- Have no more than 10 Powerpoint slides in your entire presentation! There is nothing worse than presentations filled with hundreds of slides, believe you me I’ve sat through a few!
- Have no more than 20 minutes worth of Powerpoint in any presentation – Powerpoint is a boring tool for audiences, believe it or not they don’t want to start at a powerpoint presentation for 1 hour straight!
- Use a font size no smaller than 30. In fact a good rule of thumb to follow is that if you take the oldest person in your audience and divide it by 2 that is the font size you should use, of course don’t apply that rule when talking to a room of 16 year olds!
CONCLUSION
In conclusion to re-iterate the points above, Stick to the 10-20-30 rule, no more than 10 slides, no more than 20 minutes of powerpoint and a font size minimum of 30. Make use of other props if at all possible to augment your presentation because the last thing you want is a sleeping audience and lastly never forget your voice, your presentation ability comes from you, not your powerpoint presentation.
