How do you organize and structure your presentation content?

Olivia Mitchell recently presented in the Outstanding Presentations Workshop and recommended that everyone use a planner to organize content. (You can get her e-book with the planner here.)

In her presentation (and the planner), Olivia recommended answering the following questions that your audience will have about your topic:

Why?

What?

How?

For example, Olivia did a short demo presentation that recommended lending money to a person in a developing country with Kiva.org.

In this demo, she answered the questions as follows:

• Why would you lend money to a person in a developing country? Because you can help that person become self-sufficient with his or her own business.
• What is the organization that lets you do this? Kiva.org is a site that lists people who want to borrow small amounts of money, starting at $25.
• How does it work? You go to the site, choose a person from the listings, and use your credit card. Kiva gives the person the money. When the person repays the loan, you get back your money and can then lend it out again.

Go ahead, try it! I’ll wait here.

Other models for content structure

In a sales presentation, a concept called solution selling suggests the following structure:

Problem/pain

Solution (your product or service)

Call to action

I recently had the thought that the problem/pain is the Why. Why should you listen to me? Why do you need my product or service? Because you have a problem that I can solve.

And the solution is the What. My solution is what can help you solve your problem.

The Call to Action is the How. How do you solve your problem? By buying my product or service. Here’s the order form; sign here.

How do you structure your content?