By Alison Riggan
Death by PowerPoint. This is the phrase that’s used to describe those presentations that are the same ugly overflowing slide again and again and again, often accompanied by a presenter whose charisma makes you want to A) take a nap or B) take a long walk off a short pier. In the age of constant connection, how do we connect with our audience?
Earlier this year, RISQ Consulting was given the opportunity to give a three-hour presentation on insurance. We were then confronted with a question. How exactly can we make a three-hour presentation, about insurance no less, not just bearable, but actually enjoyable and fun? *Cue Mission Impossible theme song* In order to figure out how to make an awesome presentation, we first had to identify what about other presentations did we not like. The list looked something like this-
Death by PowerPoint Causes:
- Being talked at rather than talk to
- No audience participation
- Ugly slides
- Lots of jargon
- Too much information condensed on each slide
Step one was complete, we knew what NOT to do. However, we still were looking for a way to keep the audience on their toes and so immersed that three hours would fly by. That’s when a member of our team brought up the idea of finding a program that would allow us to poll the audience on various slides. The googling frenzy began. I found several sites that would allow us to engage the audience during presentations and did a cost and feature comparison before reviewing with our team and settling on Mentimeter.
Mentimeter allows the audience to follow the presentation on their phones, answer polls, and ask questions in real-time throughout the entire presentation. Here’s where it gets really cool, the presenter can ask questions to better gauge and understand the audience that will allow the presenter to connect more with the audience. The presenter can also see if there’s an influx of questions on a specific slide and spend more time on that slide to make sure that the audience understands. There are also several poll styles available, which ensures that there’s a format for any question style you can think of.
