(Author’s note: This blog is a supplement to attendees of my session “Knock ‘Em Dead: How to Craft and Deliver Winning Presentations.”)
When starting to design your presentation, ask yourself the most important question, “What do I want my audience to think, feel, and do?” Then remember the other four rules: (1) It’s about them, not you; (2) Stories rule. Stats rot. (3) Show, don’t tell. (4) When “stuff” happens, improvise.
After you’ve addressed the most important question and the four rules, use sources like these to put heart, energy and laughter into your presentation.
- Morguefile.com is an online “morgue” for photographs. You may not consistently get great quality images, but the price (free) is right.
- iStockphoto.com offers photos that are higher quality (overall) than morguefile, but also cost more. Plan to spend a buck or two on each photo you download.
- PollEverywhere.com allows you to build polls that your audience can respond to via text messaging. Think “American Idol” voting, and you get the idea. The free plan allows you to have up to 30 responses per poll. Plan upgrades are affordable, and you can downgrade at any time.
- Many-Eyes.com allows you to dump a word file into one of several visualization tools to design word clouds, network maps and more. Great when you want to see themes or connections among words. Run by IBM. Note: (Any data you dump into Many-Eyes allows other users to play with it.)
- Tubesock allows you to turn a YouTube video into an MP4 that you can play anywhere, even if you can’t connect toYouTube. Perfect for situations when you won’t be presenting from a laptop with wireless access.
