3 essential steps for creating your PowerPoint presentation

Making things easy is a virtue.

On that score, PowerPoint and other software presentation programs have hit home runs.

Anybody can put a PowerPoint or Keynote presentation together. It’s so simple people slap them together with such mindless ease that presentations too often suffer from lack of organized thinking. That’s a problem.

But there’s a solution. Follow these three essential steps to putting together a PowerPoint presentation.

1. The message
2. The content
3. The design

Consider this an information hierarchy for creating your PowerPoint presentation.

What commonly happens instead is that people jump right to the “design” phase, grabbing boilerplate charts, tables, images, and slides filled with text and bullet points. So the presentation starts to take shape based on past presentations and canned material the organization has sitting around.

This cripples your presentation from the start.

Stick with the plan.

Start with the message. If you were to distill your presentation to a sentence or two, what would you say? That’s your message. No, not the title of your presentation. No, not the call to action. Make it the statement you want people to remember when they leave your presentation, even if they forget all else.

It’s not as simple as it might sound. Make sure you’re getting the message right or everything else you do will go wobbly.

Once you’ve settled on your message, it’s time to build content that strongly supports your message. Content should be composed of two types of information – assertions and evidence.

Here’s an example of the message/assertion/evidence combo.

Message: Conventional wisdom says that within 15 years China will roar past the United States to become the world’s dominant economic power, but this will not come to pass for three reasons.

Assertions: 1) Rising social unrest across China, fueled by widespread adoption of social media, is poised to explode in coming years in a way that will make Tiananmen Square look like a junior high school fire drill. 2) The communist party’s centralized planning efforts are sure to fail because decision-making is being perverted by wholesale nepotism and cronyism. 3) Accelerating levels of inflation will make production in China more expensive, slowing the nation’s economic growth.

Evidence (regarding just social unrest): China had more than 80,000 “mass incidents” last year, up from about 60,000 the year before, according to reporting by The Wall Street Journal.

Some additional information about the nature and cause of these protests, as well as how social media is being used to organize and expand their impact would round out the evidence for the social unrest assertion.

You get the idea.

The visuals that support this presentation now become clear. They might include:

• A line chart showing growing social unrest over recent years
• Photographs of protestors
• Chinese youth using social media via smart phones, iPads, etc.

Plan your presentation properly. Use the three-step hierarchy of PowerPoint presentation development.

The impact can be very powerful.

 

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