PowerPoint has been around for years, and it is a great tool to enhance presentations. Unfortunately, much of the time, PowerPoint is THE PRESENTATION! I have watched presenters stand in a dimly lit room, face shrouded in shadows (so the audience can see the screen), droning on with some tedious explanation of the minutia-filled slides on the screen. The audience is not paying any attention!
The reason you are there is to provide something technology cannot provide. The human touch! It is your job to make the audience care, to give them a reason to listen, to help them understand, to cut through the excruciating detail and get to the heart of the matter. Your PowerPoint is not the point!
If you want to captivate your audience, let me suggest you use the 10/20/30 rule of PowerPoint as presented by Guy Kawasaki.
- No more than ten slides in a presentation
- No longer than 20 minutes for the entire presentation
- No smaller than 30 point font on any slide
Click here to read Guy Kawasaki's entire article.
Anybody can stand in the dark and read slides on a screen. It takes a communicator to make the audience care. Become ruthless; eliminate every slide that isn’t absolutely critical to ENHANCE a key point in your speech. Make sure you are lit at least as well as the screen. (Ken Davis has a great chapter on lighting in his book, "Secrets of Dynamic Communication"). If they can’t see your face, they won’t pay attention to what you have to say. And if they aren’t paying attention…well then, we’re back where we started aren’t we.
More on proper lighting in my next blog...
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