Thanking the Audience
At some point in your career you are going to present to an audience that collectively deserves your gratitude. But where to start? What is the right balance? How will you do it?
We usually end presentations with a Thank-You-for-Your-Attention slide. Yet often their attention is not the only reason we have to thank them. Maybe they are a management group who have given your project the green light. Maybe they are are a foundation board who have approved your grant.
In the midst of our presentation, without being obsequious, we want to show our appreciation for their support. In a cynical mode, we want to give positive feedback to those who have supported us, hoping to encourage them to reward us again. In a more honest sense, it is simply courteous and correct to express thanks.
Leslie Harpold has some simple pointers to writing a personalised Thank You note, that we might want to translate into advice for a few slides that we could insert in the presentation. Her advice:
- Greet the Giver. Go beyond ‘Ladies and Gentlemen’. Address the audience personally. Identify those among them who have been influential in the support decision while making sure that the whole group gets credit for the collective decision.
- Express your Gratitude. Just say the words: Thank You. In my own line of work, non-profit, health-related, support decisions are taken for idealistic reasons but there is a more business-like element too. Funders want a return for their investment. Thus express thanks, but not emotionally, simply acknowledging the fact that they have been selective and their decision has given you the privilege of delivering on their ideals.
- Discuss Use. What are you going to do with their support? How are you going to use their investment? What are the steps to realize the project? This may be the main reason behind your presentation and may turn out to the longest part of your talk.
- Mention the Past, Allude to the Future. Use at least one slide to establish the relationship with your group. Identify the history you have with them, and the similarities between your circumstances and theirs. Specify the next steps in this relationship, not simply in the reporting milestones but in the way this new collaboration will build on your commonalities.
- Sign off with Grace and Express your Regards. Don’t be stingy. Towards the end, say thanks again, professionally and with good humor. Your audience are business people and hopefully you have convinced them of your own worth, now you can simply pass on the credit to those who made your work possible.
What techniques do you use for saying Thank You in your presentations? Add your experience to the comments below.
Picture credit: Photo Id 409405305 by J. Star (2007) entitled “Thank you everyone!”. Published under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License.
A Slideshow to end Death by PowerPoint
I have just discovered this:
- Alexei Kapterev made it
- Over 100,000 people viewed it on Slideshare
- Michael Byatt blogged about it
- Lifehacker.com passed it on
- I devoured it and am spreading the meme.
Here it is, the single must-see presentation-about-making-presentations. Sixty-one slides, four key points, one essential manual. Click the next button and you will be a better presenter within five minutes.
Zen and the Art of the Slideshow
The best blog on presentations on my regular reading list is Garr Reynolds’ Presentation Zen. He combines design, technology, and skills in delivery in a series of short articles that are always practical and full of insight.
He is currently finishing his book, aptly entitled Presentation Zen, so his posts are nowadays rather infrequent and filled with the angst of the closing weeks of authorship. I will take the liberty of reflecting on his lessons in this blog but I will limit myself here to just one of them: his discussion of the place of the slideshow inside a presentation. He uses this personal slideshow to illustrate his point:
It is a simple, but very attractive idea, to use a slideshow, mid-presentation, to break the flow and to summarise a point in pictures. I will seek an opportunity to include a slideshow at the first major presentation I make. I can think of at least three reasons why I could use it:
- as a break from my continuous speech,
- as a way of making a point across cultures for audiences who may not have English as a first language, and
- as a means of appealing to the emotion in the audience without resort to a more contrived rhetorics.
Don McMillan: All those PowerPoint Mistakes
There is no better way of learning than from your mistakes. No, actually, there’s no better way of learning than from someone else’s mistakes. And maybe, actually, the best way of learning is from someone else’s parody of all the mistakes everyone ever made in PowerPoint presentations.
Don McMillan pulls together all the common errors in a four-minute sketch. It’s easy to laugh with and at his mistakes. Why? Because I am sure you never make any of them yourself, of course!
Presenting in Seven Dimensions
Hans Rosling is a wizard presenter. He is the founder of Gapminder and a Professor at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. His new presentation, a so-called Gapcast, is a perfect illustration of his flawless presentation technique. He manages to integrate six, maybe even seven, dimensions of data in one series of animations. He builds them up in perfect rhythm, describing 300 years of health and development in six minutes. His data dimensions? Watch the short video first.
Here are the six dimensions of data, or rather six plus one:
- Time
- Geographic region
- Life expectancy
- Gross Domestic Product
- Population size
- Historical milestones
- And there’s one more…
His fundamental technique is to review the historical development of public health in Sweden in the context of today’s data from developing countries. He tracks Sweden’s progress over the last 300 years in the context of a scatter diagram that summarises the current state of development in all countries of the world. He makes the experience of a developed country like Sweden relevant to our understanding of the state of health and development in Sierra Leone. His observations suggest a way of tempering our expectations, implying that we should not expect quick fixes in the poorest countries.
His one flaw: he overplays the sexual health element towards the end of the Gapcast. I am not sure why he does this. The logic seems to fail at that point. Is he implying that sex education in schools and condom availability are related to the most recent improvements in life expectancy? It is interesting that in this last phase, in Sweden, he fails to mention heart diseases, smoking, or alcohol at all, or any of the major developments in public health in that country, however recent they might be.
And what was that seventh dimension of data in his presentation? I would think that Rosling’s own presence inside the presentation, his gestures, his emphasis, his interaction with the data, all imbue the screencast with an extra layer of meaning.
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