“I loved this course; it helped me create better PowerPoints and enhanced my effectiveness for
presenting in front of clients. Highly recommend!”
The firm was finding that clients often had an incorrect notion about its offerings and solutions based on its proposals; in addition, some clients were complaining that the oral presentations were dull, boring, and didn’t clarify the proposals.
The company had been using PowerPoints for years as a way to convey information to clients about their services both as proposals and in oral presentations. As proposals, these presentations had distinct sections and were organized to take readers from the problem to the proposed solution.
The oral presentations used the same PowerPoints and weren’t altered much, if at all, for a live audience.
The company needed to create PowerPoints that could be used as proposals that focused on client needs, while creating additional PowerPoints that would augment their presentations and engage the audience. The goal of both was to drive the client to act.
Their PowerPoints included too much information and presenters would often read from the slides rather than speak about them. In addition, their proposals suffered from lack of clarity; irrelevant information; and were not written for non technical readers, which was their targeted audience.
We developed a series of workshops that focused on concepts of readability and usability and best practices in terms of using PowerPoint. One aspect of the workshop focused on teaching participants how PowerPoint should be used based on reader expectations and how they could get more information across by using PowerPoint as it was intended. We also taught them strategies to use PowerPoint to augment, not be the focus of, their oral presentations.
The workshops included opportunities for participants to create two versions of PowerPoint for their intended audience: one that would be used as a written proposal and one that would augment a speaker. From these workshops, the team developed internal guidance for creating these two types of PowerPoints.
The company reported that most of the team was spending less time creating PowerPoints for oral presentations because they understood that PowerPoint should be used to augment, not take the place of, the presenters.
While they continued to use PowerPoints for their proposals, they reduced the amount of information and used the design and research-based strategies they’d learned in our workshops.
The company also hired Hurley Write to help its speakers learn better strategies to present information.
“I loved this course; it helped me create better PowerPoints and enhanced my effectiveness for
presenting in front of clients. Highly recommend!”
