Five Steps to Deliver More Effective PowerPoint Presentations

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As per estimates, each day millions of PowerPoint presentations are delivered in offices. It is unfortunate that only a few of these are truly effective. Most of these presentations were unable to achieve what the presenter intended to deliver. In most cases the errors were made before the presenter even displayed the first slide. The following steps will assist you in delivering an effective presentation and will help you avoid the mistakes that are most commonly made by presenters.

Step 1. Understand the Main Purpose Of Your Presentation

If you are trying to develop and deliver an effective PowerPoint presentation, the first step is to develop an understanding of what you wish to achieve through your presentation. There could be many stakeholders that you need to satisfy with your presentation, such as your boss and your client. Each stakeholder would be expecting something in particular to be achieved when you deliver your presentation.

It is important for you to identify all of the expectations of the various stakeholders and to chart out how you will meet them. If it is not possible for you to tend to all the expectations in one presentation then tell your stakeholders upfront. It can be said that you have a thorough understanding of what you are trying to achieve through your presentation, when you can answer with clarity the question "what do I want the audience to do or think by the end of the presentation?"

Step 2. Jot Down the Theme And The Main Points Of The Presentation

Having understood the main purpose of your PowerPoint presentation, it is time to jot down the key points and the theme. It is very important that you have a central theme to which you can tie all the points. This step establishes consistency and provides reinforcement for your audience. It allows them to clearly understand the message that you intend to share because whatever they see on the screen or hear links back to a single message - consistently reinforcing the message that you want them to understand!

Step 3. First Write Your Speech - Then Prepare Your PowerPoint Slides

A common mistake when preparing a PowerPoint presentation is to begin by launching PowerPoint and then starting to put pictures and words onto PowerPoint slides thus treating PowerPoint as though it were a speech-writing tool.

As a result the visual aids that were supposed to support your presentation become the central focus of the presentation. PowerPoint is only a visual aid, and it is meant to support the message that you are trying to deliver to your audience. To make sure that your slides do not contain your entire speech and dominate your presentation it is best that you first determine the structure of your message i.e. what you want to say, and the information that you need to cover in order to achieve the purpose of the PowerPoint presentation. You should start creating your slides only once you have done that.

The most effective way of doing this is to start writing your speech first, using a pen and paper; don’t switch on your computer just yet. It is advisable to scribble, cross out and move things around until you are satisfied. Once you are happy, you can open PowerPoint and start preparing the slides that you will display on the screen.

Step 4. Ask for honest feedback on your presentation

As we develop a PowerPoint presentation, it is natural that we get too attached to it. We have an understanding about what we are attempting to communicate to the audience. The best presenters are aware that they should test their presentation before they deliver it to the intended audience.

Ask a trustworthy colleague to listen to your presentation and give you honest feedback. You will be able to generate new ideas and identify mistakes when a separate pair of ears and eyes goes over your presentation. You will draw benefits from the ideas that come your way from a third person and you will be able to deliver a better and more effective presentation that achieves the purpose it was intended to. Do ask for feedback regarding how effectively your presentation achieves the purpose that you identified in step 1.

Step 5. Develop your delivery skills and gesture

It is important to develop your delivery skills, for example, your gesturing and your vocal impact; this will enable you to have a greater impact on the audience when you deliver your PowerPoint presentation. Don’t consider this to be a quick fix though as your delivery skills improve over time with continued focus and practice.

Ask a colleague who is considered to be a good presenter, or find a qualified presentation skills coach to help you out by giving expert feedback on how you need to improve your delivery skills. Ask them to provide you with feedback on many presentations and each time apply the advice they give you. It will take a number of presentations, but over a period of time you will see significant improvement in your delivery skills which will make you feel more confident when you stand up to deliver your presentations!

By following the five steps above, you will be able to deliver more effective PowerPoint presentations.