Point, Click & Wow! -- Chapter 2: Organize Focused on One Objective
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If the presentation is supposed to motivate people to invest, the objective needs to be to show how simple it is to invest. This objective then determines the presentation's content and how it will be designed.

For those of you who have an aversion for filling out charts in preparation for a speech, here's a quick two-sentence objective preparation. Finish these two sentences:

During my speech I plan to [a verb and noun] so that [a noun and verb].
By the end of my speech, my audience will...

Here are two examples:

Example 1: During my speech I plan to present my company's new product so that my audience decides to buy. By the end of my speech, the audience will know logically and feel emotionally three reasons my product will help run their company intranet.

Example 2: During my talk I will motivate my manager so that she sees the absolute necessity of hiring three more people. By the end of my speech, my manager will have the information and presentation visuals necessary to convince her boss to let her hire three more people. She will be able to tell her boss how the department can achieve its goals on time with the addition of these three new hires.

Once you have a clear objective, you can structure the content of the presentation to support that objective. Include only the content that supports your clearly stated objective. As you get further along in the process, be sure you title your slides to persuade, not just to inform. Why? You will discover that most of your presentations should be designed to persuade. Say you are showing a chart detailing a machine's high efficiency. Rather than titling the slide "Efficiency," use the title to sell and convince by offering a benefit message, such as "Increase Efficiency by 20%." If you're delivering a training session for managers about doing business overseas, title a slide "Eight Ways to Infiltrate the Global Market," rather than "Global Issues."
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Once you have planned your objective and your slides, then consider the type of handouts needed to meet that objective. Nicely formatted handouts can extend the "life" of your presentation. In those handouts you can add details for the technical people. Decide what information is to be given out to the audience and prepare those materials. Print six slides per page. You save paper. The only times you will want to have one slide per page is if you have speaker notes with your slides or if you know that people will be taking lots of notes about each slide. For some technical presentations, you may wish to write extra information about certain slides in the notes page. Then you'll need to print that notes page. It is fine to have handouts in which some pages have three slides per page and some pages are printed in the notes page view, with speaker notes. Also, put a table of contents on the first page with titles of each slide so someone can easily find the information. This forces you to put informative titles on every slide. That way, the person will actually go back and look through the material. Before you start to print out every slide, consider that everyone does not need a booklet of all your slides. Only give them the relevant slides, if any.


Source: Wilder Presentations and Jossey-Bass Publishing

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