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How to prepare a presentation

Do you struggle when you have to do a presentation. Maybe it takes you too long. Or however hard you work, you think your presentation is boring.

In these guidelines on how to prepare a presentation, we’ll show how to plan a presentation quickly and how to make it persuasive and engaging for your audience.

The No 1 mistake people make when preparing a presentation

Many people try to deliver too much information in a presentation. It can be hard to prioritise what should go in a presentation, and the easy solution is to include everything. That’s overwhelming for the audience.

Imagine your knowledge is a lump of dough. It’s as if you took the entire lump and threw it at the audience. That’s why brainstorming is a bad idea when you’re planning a presentation. You don’t want to tell your audience everything you know on your topic, so why would you brainstorm it. See this post on The 4 reasons why brainstorming will sabotage your presentation

How to plan a presentation

To put together an effective presentation, you’ll need to discard most of what you know on your topic. To continue the dough metaphor, roll out your dough (your knowledge) and then take a cookie cutter and precisely cut out the pieces that you want to go into the presentation. Discard the rest.

The “Presenting by Boxes” system will help you do this. Here’s an overview of the system:

You construct your presentation by filling in the boxes. Here’s a preview of the boxes:

Setting the Scene

In Setting the Scene you’ll introduce your topic and get the audience ready to listen to your presentation. Many people believe that you have to get attention at the beginning of your presentation. You don’t have to. I’ve written a series of posts on this issue:

The Attention-getting myth

Attention-getting - The Evidence

Why you don’t need to grab attention

Key Message

Your Key Message is the main point that you want to get across to your audience. Here are some guidelines on crafting A Simple and Concrete Key Message. You’ll see that the Key Message box is there twice. You repeat your Key Message at the end of the presentation to help the audience remember it. See this post on Taking charge on what your audience remembers for more guidance on your Key Message. For some examples of short Key Messages see this post on Five word presentations.