Planning Makes Presentations Effective

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By Dan Davenport

Large and small companies today express themselves in many ways, including presentations. Sometimes well, sometimes not. The best way to make sure ideas are understood is to organize goals and thoughts before attempting to create a presentation. As any good builder would tell you, you need good plans to create a good home.

Image: Yay Images

A simple process helps you get your presentation started off right. You’ll organize and unify thinking about what must be accomplished. The output of the process makes an excellent creative brief to pass on to non-staff production and writing people to make sure the desired result makes it through production and to the audience. The time spent early in the planning stages of a project creating solid answers to these questions yields better chances of meeting your presentation goals.

Often, a quick survey of the audience prior to answering these questions provides the best insight into where the actual problems are. This also provides a solid baseline against which the success of the presentation can be measured — paraphrasing Lord Acton, If you didn’t measure it, you didn’t do it!

Perspective (Most Critical)

1. What is the Primary objective?
   From simply introducing a new product, sales program, etc… to complex issues like an unmotivated audience where this attitude must be resolved before it is possible to accomplish anything else. Answering this leads to….
2. What specifically do you want the audience to do?
   Action verbs like; Do, Go, Sell, Increase, Have, Believe, Think, Act, etc. give you precise, measurable goals.
3. Are there any secondary issues that need to be addressed?
4. How big is the problem? This is usually an incurred cost that must be reduced or eliminated. It can also be an attitude that needs to be turned around. This becomes part of the baseline to measure success, and is background for….
5. How much can we spend to fix this?
   This figure drives the budget for the communications to address the problem.

Content

6. What is the subject? It could be hard goods like cameras, copiers, luggage, fruit cocktails, etc., or it can be concepts and ideas such as incentives, marketing strategies, or sales programs. Even ideas like companies or groups whose services are being sold to potential clients and customers.
7. What key information is available now?
   Preliminary information sheets, press releases, brochures, photos, tour itineraries, directives, procedure outlines, marketing insight, sales guides, etc. fill this need. As this is critical information, everything must be made available to production staff immediately.
8. The Two-Minute Drill. If you had to get an audience to understand the key points of this program in two minutes or less, what would you stress in that brief time? Be specific!
9. What additional relevant information is critical to understanding the issue?
10. What specific demonstrations of quality and reliability support the product or program?
11. Where does this product or concept fit in the competitive marketplace?
12. How do the strengths/weaknesses of your product or concept, and competitive products fit the market? What do we have that they don’t? What do they have that we don’t?
13. Why would customers want our product or idea instead of our competitors?
14. Historical perspective… what in the company’s or the industry’s history was the logical precursor to this?

Environment

15. Where and how will the idea be presented? In what form?
16. What is the Due Date for this Program?
    (This could be different from the presentation date because of preliminary approvals, or if a live event; travel time, set-up, rehearsals, etc.)
17. How many people will this be presented to?
18. For meetings: award or incentive meeting, closed meeting, required meeting, presentation to an individual, etc.
19. Who is the audience?
    Self-motivated or externally motivated, education, motivation, occupation, likes and dislikes, happy to be here or not, etc.
20. Continuing from Question 4, is motivation beyond the scope of the presentation needed… i.e. is the audience already highly motivated, or is a lack of motivation part of the problem?
21. Will there be any companion awards, giveaways, premiums, or prizes?
22. Can this be repurposed? i.e., is this a PowerPoint or a Video that can be made available through other channels like YouTube? Does the presentation have any Public Relations value, for instance, might it also be used at a Press Conference or Online? If this is not already a Trade Show Presentation, could it be used as one? If it is a Trade Show Presentation, might it be used in other ways? Are there any other opportunities like this to help spread the cost of production over multiple uses?
23. What else can anyone think of to help this presentation be the most effective possible?

Answering questions such as these honestly and using the answers to drive preparation and presentation virtually guarantees success. And you have a baseline to measure that success — as I said up front, If you didn’t measure it, you didn’t do it!

  
This is a guest blog post by Dan Davenport, an award-winning business communications producer. Dan created the original Minolta School of Photography which became The Maxxum Experience photo education seminars.

Dan has also managed and staged shows in many cities across the United States, Canada, and internationally: Acapulco, The Bahamas, Cologne, Munich, Glasgow, London, Monte Carlo, Osaka, Puerto Rico, St. Thomas, Vienna, and Caribbean cruise ships. He runs The Small Office Communicator site.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog post or content are those of the authors or the interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.