Presentation Tip: Write Down Your Objective And Key Messages First

Adapted from Wilder’s Presentations

There are two scenarios when creating a presentation.

1. Creating the talk from scratch when you are presenting at a conference, proposing a change, or being asked to explain a new product.
2. Choosing slides from several talks to create a new presentation.

Save yourself time and aggravation. Don’t try either scenario without a plan. Your job is to influence and convince your audience, so write up a presentation overview before you make your slides.

Briefly, you need to provide the information below before you create a single slide. If you coach people to create presentations, then you need to ask for their Presentation Overview. If they haven’t done one, you are coaching them blindly. How can you tell them if their voice, slides, and content are effective if you don’t know their objective?

Presentation overview:

The key objective for my talk is:

My 2 (or 3) key messages are:
1.
2.
3.

The theme of my talk is:

When I’m done I want my audience to…

• Do:
• Feel:
• Say to others:

Two ways I will engage my audience’s interest are:

1.
2.

Once you have a presentation overview, you are ready to move on to creating an outline of your content.