How to make an effective Presentation

Some of us think that Presentations are required only for Business Meetings, but that’s not the case. Today almost everyone needs to design Presentation to convey their message. For example, students need presentations to present their projects, artists need to demonstrate their work/arts to their clients, Non-profit Organizations need for fund raising campaigns. So here you are and chances are there that at some point at your life you will have to face an audience and engage them with your presentation.

Presentations are required to be effective or else they can bore your audience.  Your presentation should have the ability to influence, entertain, and inspire your audience. So here are some tips that will help you create an awesome Presentation.

1. Prepare a base story : Before starting working on actual presentation, you need to start by developing a theme story. Your audience are humans and if you start by explaining logic or technical jargon to them, they will get bored easily and may be won’t listen to you. But everyone of us are interested in stories, so you need to develop a theme story which has a beginning, a middle and an end.

2. Connect with you Audience : The introductory part of any presentation is very important because if couldn’t engage your audience right from the beginning, you are going to lose them. To connect with your audiences you need to create slides which would lead your audience to say ‘YES’. The beginning of your story should be very relevant to your audience so that you can actually arose interest from your audience.

3. Answer the questions why & How : Once you connect with your audience you need to explain them why they need this presentation and how will it be be beneficial to them and hence convey your message or present your product.

4. Don’t use bullet points : Lot of data on slides actually ruins a presentation. If your slide is full of data, your audience will start reading the content directly from the slide and wont be bothered to listen to you. Bullets are to make To-do list, not presentations.

5. Use Lot of Images to convey your message : Images have a very strong impact on human brain than text. Humans process images 60,000 times faster than words. Hence to make an effective presentation you need to use a lot of images to convey your message.

6. Use Simple Language : Your presentation can be effective only when your audience will understand it. If you use vague sentences or language which is full of jargon, you will just confuse your audience and spoil the presentation.

7. Use proper templates and fonts : We have already discussed why we need lot of images in our presentations. And if we using lot of images, we actually do not need silly template around it. Also you can use plain colored template instead of a fancy one. You also need to take care of the fonts you are using. These should be clear and readable. If you are writing on an image, make sure you are using a colored text box, so that it is clearly visible. You can also use a lot of metaphor to give meaning to your text.

8. PRACTICE : The most important of all is Practice. Its not just a presentation, it’s a Performance. And when you are on stage you need to be confident and prepared which is possible only with Practice. Since there is no shortcut to excellence, you will have practice, practice and practice to make your presentation effective.