Recommendations | EoLIS 2023

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Recommendations

PRESENTATION RECOMMENDATIONS

Presentations are the essence of our conferences. Though you have probably already given a lot of presentations, both inside your organisation and to a wider public, there is always room to further improve the design and/or delivery of your presentation.

The guidelines below provide tips and tricks to guide you through the different stages of creating and delivering your presentation:

  1. General considerations
  2. Preparation
  3. Design
  4. Delivery

A. GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS

1. Slides are not documents.

Too much text turns your presentation into a document. A document is meant to be printed, not cast on a screen.

2. Slides should support your presentation.

Presentations need to tell a story, and the slides must support the story, complement it, but not replace it or dilute it.

3. A presentation should deliver a message to an audience.

The genesis of a presentation starts with a message, that translates into a visual story and is then delivered to an audience in different forms (oral, visual, web and paper).

B. PREPARATION

1. Presentations require preparation time.

2. Ask yourself the right questions:

Why are you presenting? To whom? How much time do you have? What’s the story here? If the audience will remember only one thing, what do you want it to be?

3. Know your audience

Research and focus on your message. The aim is to have the big picture – assess what is important!

Seven questions to knowing your audience:
  1. What are they like (as persons)?
  2. Why are they here?
  3. What keeps them up at night?
  4. How can you solve their problem?
  5. What do you want them to do?
  6. How might they resist?
  7. How can you best reach them?

4. Stimulate your creativity

To brainstorm, step away from technology. Avoid spending all the time in front of a PC, prefer paper and pen, whiteboard, post-it notes, take a walk in the park; use sticky notes to put down your ideas (1 idea per note), as it makes it easier to arrange and rearrange ideas and stimulate new ones, mind mapping and word associations.

5. Collaborate with others!

Test your ideas, pick others’ brain, get feedback (at every stage of the process)

C. DESIGN

Design matters: it is not decoration; it is about making communication easier for viewers. Through design, you display information in a way that makes complex information clear.

1. Make it simple and readable.

2. Use contrast to highlight main points.

3. Do not overuse animations

If you want to use animations, plan them. Animations should look natural and alive, the movement should seem familiar and make sense. Get inspiration from movies? Think of creating scenes.

4. Create a flow: order how the information is processed.

5. Generate unity

Information has to be linked by one element which can be a structure (grid), a look (graphical style, font), a theme (a big idea) or all that. This consistency will help your audience to follow and focus on the essentials.

6. Consistency matters, but there is also power in breaking the consistency, if it remains an exception.

7. Restrict yourself with text: do not use more text than is absolutely necessary.

D. Delivery

  1. Give an idea of where you’re going: Steve Jobs used to begin with something like “I’ve got 4 things I’d like to talk about with you today. So, let’s get started: first…..”
  2. Unveil the meaning of data: in the information age, data and information are everywhere, and your audience doesn’t expect you to give them data or information they can find themselves. They expect you to give meaning to the data.
    • Always compare data! (If the talk were only about information and new features, it would be more efficient to give that information in a hand-out paper for people to read).
    • Five principles to presenting data clearly
      • Tell the truth (i.e. be prepared to share whole dataset)
      • Get to the point (i.e. be clear from the start about what conclusions you want your audience to adopt)
      • Pick the right tool for the job (i.e. the right type of chart / image)
      • Highlight what’s important (use colours!)
      • Keep it simple (only graphs, no data chart next to it. If possible, avoid legend, or make it small.
  3. Make a strong start: people will make an assessment about your performance in the first two minutes and finish stronger! Tip: rehearse your opening and closing, and put your personality into the materials.
  4. Good slides should enhance a live talk: slides are not meant to tell the whole story without you there. Create slides that reinforce your words rather than repeating them.
  5. Be unexpected: surprise the audience by violating their expectations, make them feel a gap in their knowledge and fill it in.
  6. Be concrete: give real examples, concrete images.
  7. Tell a story: audiences remember stories better than bullet points. Describe a problem and how you have solved it. Stories should be authentic, if not, the audience will feel it!
  8. Sync with your slides: do not display content until you’re actually talking about it, or you will lose your audience (they will read and not listen).
  9. Do not go too fast: allow at least one minute per slide.
  10. Hand-out: if you prepare a proper hand-out, with as many details as you think is necessary, you will be free to focus on what is more important to the audience, and you will not have to worry for the exclusion of charts, figures or related points. This is precisely why, at the WindEurope Conferences, we give you the option to submit a full paper with your oral presentation. This paper will be available for download in the conference proceedings alongside with your slides, and you can refer your audience to it.

 

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WindEurope Annual Event 2022