It’s that moment you’ve been preparing for: over several weeks, you’ve been perfecting your presentation; creating the ideal slide deck, with all the right facts and figures in all the right places. But there’s a problem.
It’s boring.
While your audience manages to sit all the way through your presentation, it isn’t clear if it has had any impact. And some of them seem to have fallen asleep. Not ideal.
This kind of situation is all too familiar. Creating and giving a presentation takes a lot of work, so it’s important to make it count. How can you elevate your presentation to the next level?
Of course, there are many different types of presentations. It would be foolish to imagine there is a single formula that will work for all situations. Each type will have different needs to make it a success: presentations for sales, investor pitches, shareholder meetings and management board meetings all have unique considerations you need to factor in. However, all presentations can benefit from being elevated from dry monologues to ‘memorable experiences’.
To achieve this, your presentations need to be fundamentally redesigned with a new approach.
Although each presentation will always be unique, they must engage the audience by becoming interactive experiences with impact.
Redesigning your presentations for greater impact
First, forget the slide deck. These are relied on far too much, and they create predictably boring results.
Slide decks are intrinsically linear, meaning they end up reading like a list of boring facts which blend into each other, just like those blissful moments before falling asleep.
Another drawback is that the audience (or even the presenter) can end up reading from the slide deck instead of focusing on the presentation itself.
Instead, start by brainstorming stories that illustrate the situations you want to discuss. Make these customized and relevant to the specific audience you’re presenting to. A good approach is to begin with a central theme (the topic of your presentation), create a story or two about it, then brainstorm ‘satellite topics’ and stories that support them.
What is storytelling?
What does a ‘story’ mean in this context? There are several scales of story you can employ, ranging from a simple anecdote or ‘hypothetical scenario’, to a fully fledged digital story that illustrates your idea in complete detail.
It’s worth being aware that the more in-depth your storytelling is, the greater potential for impact.
Digital storytelling can elicit powerful, emotional ‘full body’ experiences that stimulate adrenaline, cortisol, dopamine, and serotonin, by using relatable characters and strong plot arcs. In contrast, at the other end of the scale are ‘hypothetical scenarios’ which are told in such a distanced way that they have very little impact.
Even a personal anecdote can be much more engaging, so consider converting your ‘scenarios’ into personal stories instead.
Connect your stories to each other (in a non-linear way)
The next stage is to see how they link to each other. This can be challenging, as complex subjects are often highly intertwined. In this case, you can designate a limited number of specific jumping-off points between topics, and use them as a segue when needed.
This mapping-out stage ensures you can easily move between topics in a non-linear way, and use fortuitous moments in a conversation to jump to the next relevant topic. By doing this you can easily focus on the issues most relevant to each audience, based on interaction.
You should aim to support your stories with media and digital storytelling wherever possible. For example, you could start to introduce a topic, list some common issues around it, and then show a short digital story that illustrates the personal impact of one of these issues.
Digital storytelling can take time and preparation, but they’re easier to use when you make space for them. Also, you may be surprised at how easy it can be to create or use digital storytelling when you have the right software and digital assets available.
Creating more interaction for presentations
Always consider ways to build-in opportunities for interaction with your presentation design. There are many ways to do this, and you should try and mix it up a bit by using different methods throughout.
Question-and-answer sessions are a low-threshold way to get some interaction with your audience, but these too often happen at the end of presentations. Find ways to get the audience involved throughout the session, such as the use of role play (which can also break the ice), or ask them what they think about specific topics at different points. Use their answers to prompt the next topic jump, or see if a particular ‘common issue’ is relevant for them at all.
Aim to use the available audiovisual hardware, screens and other equipment as much as you can. Think about warming up the audience, before you start speaking, with music, interactive displays or digital storytelling while they wait for the main event to start.
Use the right stage: Briefing Centers and Experience Centers
Many companies have their own Briefing Center or Experience Centers, and these are the ideal venue for better presentations. These setups are already often perfectly equipped for digital storytelling, with state of the art immersive rooms and good quality screens.
Immersion is a powerful thing if you can use it well. The idea with immersion is to create a unique environment that ‘transports’ the audience and turns them into active participants. The effect is to put the audience at the very center of the experience, and to remove all barriers between them and the experience.
An immersive experience room (IX) is perfect for this, but there are other ways of immersing your audience in the brand or central stories you want them to experience. Briefing Centers have incredible potential for immersion, even when they aren’t equipped with an IX. The dedicated briefing center environment can be furnished with physical props, screens displaying digital stories, or any other creative concept you choose.
The right digital storytelling software for presentations
You can stand in front of a crowd without any additional tools and still give a great presentation. But it’s much easier to give top-level presentations when the right tools are available.
There are a lot of free tools available, including web-based slide decks which can embed digital stories and media. However, a cool template isn’t going to make the difference if your presentation is still designed with a ‘slide deck mentality’. It will still be flat and boring.
To create the most engaging and interactive presentations, you need the ability to go non-linear. And that means using professional digital storytelling software. The Hyro storytelling platform is a perfect example. It has an easy-to-use content management system (CMS), which makes adding and managing stories a piece of cake. With professional digital storytelling software you can easily create and choose the right story for the right moment.
In addition to supporting next-level presentations, your digital storytelling software can also power complex Customer Experience Centers, hybrid events, webinars, and help create more customized storytelling that will be more relevant and memorable.
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