We love helping speakers develop great multimedia presentations. But we also love training speakers how to use that presentation media. It’s more than the click of a slide remote. Delivering a presentation with other channels, like a slide deck for instance, means learning to use that media effectively.
So today, we want to talk about how to be a great slide tour guide. It starts with viewing your presentation media as your partner and then remembering to spend time explaining.
Understanding the Partnership
The first thing to remember is that you and your presentation media should be working as partners to benefit the audience. So you have to be careful that you aren’t competing with your slide deck. Either you are actively using it to help you get your message across, or not. Your slides are either helping you or upstaging you. There’s really no in between.
Public speaking coach Kevin Abdulrahman explains why in an article for Entrepreneur. He says, “your audience can either read text or listen to you, but not both. This means that when you first present a visual aid, you should explain its content and relevance immediately. If there’s too much of a delay between the presentation of the visual aid and your explanation, then the visual aid is not an aid, but a distraction instead.”
I tell speakers that they should imagine their presentation slides are always “talking” to their audience members. Just because a slide may not have sound, doesn’t mean it’s not actively communicating. So when you are presenting, always work in tandem with your slides.
Explain, explain, explain.
Some slides are self-explanatory. Your audience will be able to process and understand things like pictures or a short quote in a matter of seconds without much effort on your part. But some slides aren’t that simple. We often use presentation media to communicate information that is difficult to present verbally—things like statistics and charts. But just because you put a chart up on a screen doesn’t mean your audience will instantly be able to understand it.
You need to walk your audience through the slide. In a helpful handout, Michael Cribb reminds presenters to help orient the audience to the information being presented first. Once you’ve pointed to the major components of the chart or slide, you should state your main point for sharing the information. He says it might sound something like this (you’ll notice the main point is bold):
“This slide shows the stock market price for Sun Microsystems. Along the bottom we have the first few months of 2000. Up the right hand side we have the stock market price. The line shows price rises in black and price falls in red. As you can see, despite some falls, the stock market price has risen significantly since 2000.”
Don’t be afraid to actually spend time pointing to and moving around your slide. This is all part of becoming a great slide tour guide. You are partnering with your slides to get the message across to your audience. You take turns. The slides help you communicate, and then, you take time to help the slides communicate.
Ready to level up your presentation media or delivery? Get in touch with us now.
