Presentation Summit 2024: Conversation with Richard Goring

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    Richard Goring is a Director at BrightCarbon, a presentation and eLearning agency. He enjoys helping people create engaging content and communicate effectively using visuals, diagrams, and animated sequences that explain and reinforce the key points, which is supported by plenty of resources and tips at the BrightCarbon site.

In this conversation, Richard talks about his participation at the upcoming Presentation Summit 2024, being held on location in Oxnard, CA this year from October 20 to 23, 2024, and virtually from November 3 to 6, 2024.

Indezine.com is the official media partner for the Presentation Summit.

Geetesh: Richard, you’re delivering two sessions at this year’s Presentation Summit: Amazing Animations, which explores how animations can be used to create stunningly beautiful slides, and Kinetic Text, focusing on techniques for creating kinetic and video text sequences. Can you share more about these sessions and what audiences can expect to take away from them?

Richard: Both sessions share a common theme about creating dynamic visual content as the basis for a compelling experience and leveraging the capabilities in PowerPoint to build them. The Amazing Animations session, will focus on how to elevate your presentations, beyond the critical and essential use of animation to paste the flow of information, and create smooth, seamless, and professional animation sequences for your presentations that feel natural and elegant. I admit that this can sometimes be more of a luxury, but for special presentations it’s well worth it. And once you get comfortable with the ideas and techniques, you’ll find that they can enter into everyday presentations far more quickly and easily, enhancing everything you create.

The Kinetic Text session is focused more on the niche of explainer or promotional videos where you need to make an impact quickly. PowerPoint can actually be a pretty amazing tool to help you achieve that, and this session looks at the ways you can make fabulous looking sequences, that no one would expect could be produced in PowerPoint.

It’s all going to be live demo showcasing the various techniques, so plenty of opportunity for everyone to dive into discussion and explore lots of options. In both sessions, the animation pane will very much be your friend!

Geetesh: This year marks the final season of the Presentation Summit. Could you share some of your experiences from the conference over the years and what memories you’ll cherish the most?

Richard: Actually, the reason for doing two sessions of live demo using PowerPoint is because of the way everyone engages with the content and how it can be discussed during the session. It never really feels like it’s one presenter doing all the talking at the Presentation Summit, but instead there can be a real sense of collaboration, with so many folks in the audience bringing a huge range of views, experiences, and expertise. And I do mean expertise, with some of the very best presentation and PowerPoint folks in the world. You learn a lot and have a great time. But not just in the formal sessions. The entire event from morning through night is an opportunity to chat with like-minded people and gain a huge amount from all the discussion and interaction.

This will now be my fifth Presentation Summit, but some folks have been doing it for 20 years. The thing is, even at my first I felt so welcome, so part of it, it was an absolute joy to be there. And I learned a lot of stuff too!

There are, obviously, so many memories to choose from. But one that often sticks out, is when I was engaged in an in-depth conversation about the Morph transition with one of the PowerPoint development team from Microsoft, who worked on the feature. We realized that one of the, admittedly niche, functions of it didn’t work as intended, and so he got out his phone and made a change to the code there and then. That was just phenomenal, and it was rolled out shortly afterwards. I don’t know if you could get that anywhere else.

Geetesh: Richard, what do you believe is the key to creating a presentation that not only informs but also captivates the audience?

Richard: Story. It really is key to so many successful presentations. Obviously, it’s also pretty clichéd but I think you hear it a lot because it’s true. The thing you have to ask yourself, is what makes an effective story? Why do people engage with a story?

It needs two things. A clear direction and flow, which is set by your objectives. What do you want your audience to do as a result of this story? And relevance to the audience. Why should they care about this? If you can define those things and ensure that they are embedded in every aspect of your story, and presentation, it provides a compelling experience for your audience to find out more, and conveys information in a persuasive way, so they are likely to do what you ask of them, making it successful. Too often presentations lose sight of this as you end up copying and pasting slides and content into them in a rush to get it done.

Guiding your audience through a clear journey and showing them how they fit into it ensures that they remain engaged. Without careful planning up front and close scrutiny at the end of whether all the content in the deck helps you to achieve your objective and is something the audience actually cares about, then it can really fall flat. But if you ensure that’s done – and it doesn’t need to take long – it can be the basis of an effective and successful presentation.

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