How to do Presentations at GANDT: A Guide to Creating Effective Presentations
Effective presentations are essential for businesses to communicate their ideas, products, and services effectively. At GANDT, creating high-quality presentations is key to achieving our goals of increasing awareness, defining standards, and increasing our chances of success. However, we’ve identified areas of improvement in our presentations, including the wrong approach, no recognizable storyline, missing subtitles and story elements, too many manual and incorrect amendments, and different font styles. Therefore, we’ve developed a process for creating effective presentations.
Understand Your Input/Findings
Before creating a presentation, it’s important to understand what you want to communicate and why. This includes:
- Making sense of your data,
- Deriving the impact of your outcome,
- And creating the narrative from the given output and impact.
Understanding your audience is also crucial. Different levels of detail are needed for different stakeholders, from peers who require high-level details to CEOs or investors who need communication at a top level and overall impact. Simplifying the information and coming straight to the point is always recommended.
Creation of the Storyline
There are many ways to create a storyline for a presentation. One popular method is using a Notion board to write down ideas on visualization, important points, and other relevant information. Alternatively, you can draw the storyline or write down headers and subheaders and arrange them accordingly directly in Google Slides. The headers of each slide put together tell the story you want to tell.
The Presentation Styles
There are two types of presentation styles: presenting slides and “to-send” slides or “informative” slides. Presenting slides are easy to digest and entertain the audience, while informative slides provide information in a way that can be understood without a presenter. Regardless of the type of slide, it should be written for the audience and should contain as little text as possible while still conveying the necessary information.
Sources of Inspiration
Looking at existing presentations can be a great source of inspiration. However, quality standards can vary when using this method, which is why we’ve created a checklist with steps to establish a common presenting style. This includes deciding on one template, using one source of truth, and undergoing presenting training to gain new techniques.
Cross Check
Collaboration is essential in creating effective presentations. The four eyes principle and gathering different perspectives can help to check if your storyline is clear, the tone of your message is right, the alignments are correct, and the spelling and grammar are checked.
Next Steps
In conclusion, creating high-value presentations is based on various factors. A defined process and execution guidelines provide clarity to the creators, while awareness of integrated Google Slides tools, shortcuts, and shared best practices from the team facilitate the creation process. Understanding the audience and the storyline created is more important than the alignment on the execution part. This will allow creators to decide on the right presenting style and the topics they need to cover to convey their message to the audience. By following clear guidelines, creating better presentations, and increasing the success potential, we can achieve our goals at GANDT.
