Creating content - keep it simple

Avoid differences in your formatting that are not necessary to communicate the content. Differences attract focus and reduce the audience attention. 

In a good slide you don’t notice the formatting but the message.

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The Audience

Probably the very first question you need to ask yourself is: who will read my presentation?

This is not a taken for granted information because according to the people you want to present to, the wording, the number of slides will change as well.

We can distinguish the following large groups:

• ·  Executive Management
• ·  Technical
• ·  Sales
• ·  Advertising
• ·  Workshops

Understand the difference between the groups is very important; an “Executive Management” session would expect very high level key messages while a workshop or a technical session will require a larger detail.

The common part in this will be the Look and Feel and it will be covered here.

Make Effective Presentations

This blog will focus on the pre-work to do before the actual presentation occurs.

Build powerful presentations means prepare targeted slide decks, being able to guide the audience through the concepts with a storyline, it might seem easy but there are several “tricks” you can implement to transfer the message to your audience in a clear and concise way.

If you are not the one to present, be sure that you will need to allocate at least 40-50% of your time in finishing the slide; formatting is the key requirement particularly when someone else is using our slide deck taking the responsibility / critics.

The thing to remember is that we live in a visual word and there is no message (not matter how important it is) that can be communicated without “wrapping” it into a nice package.

The rules that are going to be covered here shall be considered as guidelines, checkpoints to observe the developing of your work; you do not have to stick with all of them but if you do, you will notice an improvements in the way your manager or your colleague perceive your work.

Communicate with effectiveness is one of the key tools to move up in the organizational structure/through your customers, because it reflects your way of problem solving and capability to access a larger community.

It does not matter if your work in sales, if you want to promote yourself or you work in a team that does reporting, what you will learn here is going to give you a powerful tool to be used in your very daily job.

More, if you are a web site developer, some of these concepts could be moved one-to-one to how to structure a webpage, which font, which color, how to position the objects. The web page design will require a lot more in addition and for this reason a dedicated volume will be available, BUT nevertheless you will see that the basics are valid in both areas.

Enjoy!