Best Practices - Presentations

This e-mail was written by Erin Hall after she dramatically altered her Powerpoint presentation from traditional bullet points and statistics to pictures and stories.

When I returned from The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation strategic communications training, my staff and I worked quickly to re-create my standard project presentation. But when the time came, I almost backed out and used my old style. Here's what happened.

The room setup was different than I expected. It was a large oval "summit-like" table instead of a classroom-style arrangement. Also, the group included more powerful people than I was expecting. There were lots of critical decision makers and leaders in business, law enforcement and health care from the Denver area.

The first five brief presentations were full of very specific facts and stats and lots of examples of the tables that Andy hates. [Andy Goodman taught "Presenting with a Purpose." For more of his tips return to Best Practices.] Each presentation generated great conversation and questions. I knew that mine was going to be very out-of-step with the others.

Because we added so many pictures the file was huge and led to some technical difficulties. I was just about to opt for an ad-lib review of our project. By this time I was convinced that this was not the right group to use as guinea pigs for my new presentation style.

As fate would have it, they got it to work and moved my presentation up in the agenda. Before I could say anything they popped up my first slide and introduced me. Crud! Now what was I going to do? I took a deep breath and dove in!

The slides (PDF - 760KB) were almost all photos with a few bullets of text on three or four of them. I started with a story that highlighted all the problems with our system. Then I talked about our partnership, who we are, what we are working on and why we got started in the first place. I returned to my story and used the same character (Joe) but followed him through our system as if all the changes had been made. [Read the full story of Joe in the LFP Storybook.] Then I talked about a few reasons we have been successful. I stopped and took questions, then gave what I hoped would be a hard-hitting emotional closing statement.

To my surprise, they applauded for the first time that day. But even better than that, later discussions kept referring to "Joe." This group asked me to speak about our project because they are interested in duplicating parts of it elsewhere in the state. I was concerned that if I used stories instead of my usual list of key points they would only get the flavor of our project but not really understand how it works. I could tell from the comments later that day that they really got it! They had a much clearer picture of our project than they would have if I had used my old style.

And what happened next?

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