Archive for September, 2010

New Presentation Course

No doubt Bill Gates is immensely rich and no one would mind being like him in that sense. But Steve Jobs, apart from immensely rich, is a great marketer, a great visionary, but, above all, a great communicator.

After the great success of previous talks on how to improve presentation skills, Project Presentation is launching an extended course, VIP (Very Improved Presentation), which will go deeper into the preparation, crafting and delivery of a great presentation. The event will take place at Tetuan Valley Startup School (Calle Pinos Baja 89) and will be a very exclusive course, with only 20 open spots for the participants to make the most of the course.

The dates are October 1^st and 2^nd, from 6pm to 9pm on Friday and 10am to 1pm on Saturday. The main covered topics will be:

Day 1

Intro: What is NOT a presentation; Types of presentations and how do I chose.
Message: Find your core message and how to convey it.
Prep: The power of storytelling and overview of story types. How to prepare a presentation (away from your computer). Thinking about your audience. Storyboarding

Day 2

Design principles applied to presentations
Represent information visually: which images to use; how to use graphs and data; combining images and text.
Colors: effective use of colors.
Animations and transitions: use with care; what program you should be using.
Presenting: Public speaking and getting over stage fright. Naturalness. Present in English.
Last notes and tips to the speaker.

The course costs 100€, get your ticket now with a 10% discount here or reserve your spot for 30€ and pay the rest at the event.

Check it out! You can only gain from improving your communication skills.

Monday, 06 September 2010 20:00 Written by Byron Stanford 0 Comments

Showing Data Effectively

When you are making a presentation one of the things you almost always include is the data that supports your point. You want your audience to know that there is science behind what you are saying; there are numbers that prove it! Data is very commonly used and is good to give your message credibility, but it is, most of the time, used wrong. Numbers on a piece of paper are intangible and although we can get the rough idea of what they represent, in the end, they don’t mean that much to us. It just doesn’t resonate with us and after the presentation we are likely to forget it. So what good is data then? It isn’t, not in the way we conventionally present it at least. What taps into people’s brains and stays in their mind are relationships.

The best example is the “one out of ten” relationship, you’ve seen it so many times that you don’t even notice anymore; but think about it this way: What if I told you, “Nearly 1 billion people in the world don’t have access to safe water”? Wow! 1 billion, that’s a lot, right? Who knows what 1 billion people look like? You can’t really picture or grasp the gravity of the issue; instead if I say, “More than 1 out of 6 people in the world don’t have access to safe drinking water”. There you have it, instantly you have a mental image of how many people don’t have safe water.

Relationships between numbers are more important than the numbers themselves. You don’t need to show the exact number of units sold by your competitors, all you want to show is a graph that shows where, in relation to them, you stand.

Consider these examples: