Day 3 was the last day of the Presentation Summit and had fewer scheduled sessions.
Nick Morgan on using stories to lead an audience to action
In the morning, we heard a keynote by Nick Morgan. His main point was that the only reason to give a presentation is to change the world. Is it a coincidence that I had just started a new website called ChangetheWorldMarketing.com before coming to the conference?
Nick gave us a 4-step structure for a presentation:
- Start by answering the question “why,” not with an agenda slide or executive summary. He recommended starting with an “explosion,” a story or interesting statistic.
- Cover the problem for which you have the solution, making it an emotional journey.
- Explain your solution
- Lead them to action. His tip here was that if you get the audience to do an action in the room, they are more likely to take the big step. You can do this by having the audience do an activity, perhaps writing something down.
Nick also listed 5 universal story lines to use:
- Quest
- Stranger in a strange land
- Revenge
- Love story
- Rags to riches
Connie Malamed on planning online learning
Connie Malamed is an instructional designer and author of Visual Language for Designers. You can see my interview with her here. She explained 5 steps for creating self-running courses:
- Analysis: Purpose, audience analysis, content
- Design: Objectives, organization, creative strategies
- Development: Collecting assets, storyboarding, writing scripts
- Production: Selecting an authoring tool, finding graphics, recording audio & video, producintg interactions, animations, screencasts
- Testing: Running through every possible path, subject matter reviews, and user testing
Design for the artistically challenged
At the end of the conference, several people did very short presentations, including me. I spoke on “Slide Design for the Artistically Challenged.” It was a blend of two other presentations, I’ve done, but you can see one of them online here.