Handouts on a Flash Drive

At a recent local library conference, I gave a short talk on the “Three Rules to Better Presentations.” Rather than prepare paper handouts, I did something else: I loaded up flash drives with PDFs of those handouts:

Caption: An artfully arranged pile of prepared flash drives.

I didn’t know how many people would attend my particular session so I didn’t really know how many information kits (sets of handouts) I would need.  Even though I try to use recycled paper, the thought of printing out several hundred pages of handouts made my inner environmentalist cringe. 

I first thought I’d put everything up in one area on this site for people to get to and just give them the URL during the presentation.  This would work fine, and I’m sure I’ll do this for particular workshops or groups in the future.  But let’s face it, everyone loves to get a prize, and so I decided to put everything on flash drives instead so the audience could take something tangible (and unexpected) home with them.

It was a fairly straightforward process, though if you plan on doing a lot of them, be sure to plan ahead as preparing each flash drive individually can take some time. The copying itself didn’t take long (the folder was only about 8MB in size), but each time I put a new flash drive into the USB slot, my computer would take about 20 seconds to “install the device driver software.” It was a simple, assembly-line process once I got going, and it took about an hour to get them all done (35 total).

I put a simple “Start Here” HTML file which served as the “menu” for the flash drive and gave detail about each of the files in the folder:

Caption: The “Start Here” menu for the flash drive.

The flash drives themselves were 512MB capacity and came in nice (but plain) grey boxes, which I then customized with some simple labels and my printer.  In addition to being eco-friendly, the capacity of the flash drives makes them more likely to be reused later by the audience.

So the next time you give a presentation with lots of handouts, consider putting them all on a flash drive and giving them to audience members.  After all, everyone loves a prize they can take home with them!

Best,

Lee

Presentation Worksheet

Hello all,

I’ve created a presentation worksheet for you to use to help you capture all the logistical details (date, time, audience, etc.) of your presentation and to help you focus on the goal of your presentation.

Try it out, see if you like it, and let me know if it works for you (or if you have suggestions for improving it).

Peace,

Lee

Recent Quotes Worth Mentioning

From recent research (of both old and new materials), here’s a few good quotes to mentally chew on:

“I ignore wordy slides because if I start to read them I stop listening and lose the plot.”

These are the words of a venture capitalist who has to sit through presentations to determine whether or not they will fund someone’s company.  I’d venture a guess (pun somewhat intended) that some of your audience members would agree with that statement. As Mr. Abela says in his posting, you really can’t listen well and read at the same time.  Remember that the third rule of great presentations is: “Text is for take-away”

Source: Abela, Andrew. “Presenting to Venture Capitalists, Part II.” The Extreme Presentation(tm) Method blog (http://extremepresentation.typepad.com/blog/). Posted October 8, 2008.

“Remember that a presentation should not be designed to tell your audience everything you have ever learned about a given topic.  The key words are selection and focus. You have to make choices between what you really need and what amounts to nothing more than trimmings and trappings” (p. 241).

I emphasize the words “selection” and “focus.” In the words of E.B. White, “edit vigorously,” people.  Your audience will thank you.

“…your visual presentation is intended to support your verbal content and can never become a substitute for it.” (p. 245).

I see lots of conference websites where they’ve uploaded the speakers’ slide decks.  Often when I look at these, since I don’t have the benefit of the speaker’s narration, the slides make no sense.  At best, I looked at some pretty slides; at worst, I’ve misunderstood the presenter’s content.

“What you can do is come to your presentation armed with supplementary material that you can make available to anyone who requests additional information.” (p. 250).

Echoing the venture capitalist from Mr. Abela’s post above, text (and 100-row spreadsheets) is for your handouts, not for your slides. 

Source: McIlroy, David. Studying at University: How to be a Successful Student. London: Sage Publications, 2003. ISBN: 0-7619-4706-X.

My best to you!

Lee

Leaving Comments

I just want to let readers know that you do not have to give your name and email to comment on blog posts.  The comment form at the end of each post has fields for name and email, but you can just leave them blank and enter your comment.

All comments are moderated (meaning they get reviewed and will be invisible until I release them), but unless you use dirty words or diss my mother, comments relevant to the posting will be made visible.

Have a great day!

Lee

The Presentation Process Model

Models are especially useful for giving you an overview of a process, procedure or way of thinking. Then, once you’ve used the model repeatedly and encoded it into your long-term memory, the process described by the model becomes automatic, and then you don’t have to consciously think about it – you just use it.

Chapter 4 in the book introduces you to what I call the “Presentation Process” model*, which consists of four steps:

1. Preparation
2. Practice
3. Presentation (Actually delivering the presentation)
4. Review

A lot of presenters perform Steps 1 and 3, but skip steps 2 and 4, which are crucial for great presentations and for skill development.  In Step 1, you do your research, write your report, identify your key points, select your spoken remarks, prepare your storyboards and your slides. The activities in Step 1 often require extensive time and effort (as they should).

Step 2 (Practice!!)–well, let’s just say it’s evident that a lot of presenters skip this step.  Allowing adequate time to practice helps you to really hone your message, edit out any extraneous material, ensure that you stay within time limits, and can help reduce your anxiety. In many cases, after practice, you’ll cycle back to Step 1 to edit your words, refine your pictures, or move text from slides to your handouts.  To paraphrase the shampoo bottle: “Prepare. Practice. Repeat.”

Step 3 is the actual delivery of the presentation.  If you’re properly prepared and have practiced enough, this step should go smoothly and you’ll have your moment of glory at the podium.  But once you step off the stage, it’s time to move to Step 4 – Review. 

Once we finish a presentation we often breathe a sigh of relief and never think about it again.  But to really understand if you’ve been effective as a presenter requires some review, both from yourself and from your audience. Below are a few suggestions to help you with your own review process:

Evaluations

If the conference you’re at has an evaluation form for audience members to rate presentations, be sure to get those data when they become available.  Evaluations help answer the question: “Did I share my information effectively with the audience?”  If there is not an evaluation system in place, why not have your own forms for the audience to complete?  There is a great set of evaluation questions in the book Why Bad Presentations Happen to Good Causes by Andy Goodman.  It used to be available in print, but now it’s available as a PDF from his website.  (Read this book, people. It’s fantastic.)

Recording Yourself

If you recorded yourself (or were recorded), listen to the audio or view the video.  Did you do well?  Did you have any distracting gestures or did you stumble over your words?    What do you see on the video or hear on the audio that you will change the next time you present?

Self-Reflection

Spend a few minutes thinking about what parts of your presentation went well and which ones didn’t seem to engage the audience.  Do you need to find a better example to illustrate your point?  Are the graphics enhancing your message or detracting from it?  Write your thoughts down somewhere. This may seem like a chore, but it’s worth the time and effort.  I still do it after my own presentations. Conscious self-reflection will help you to identify your weak points and strengthen them, and to enhance the strengths you already have.

So there you have it, the “Presentation Process” model, according to me, at least.  Try it and see if it works for you.  Work with it consciously first, then after a while you’ll find it’s become automatic for you, and will lead you to better presentations.

Peace out!

Lee

 

*If you want to see a model-of-the-model, check out figure 4.1 of the book (it’s on p. 48).