Slide Deck Skills Training Course
Crafting compelling slide decks is an essential skill for impactful presentations. This course explores the cognitive aspects of how audiences engage and retain information. You will learn to apply principles that enhance engagement and ensure your message is not only seen but remembered.
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Knowing How The Brain Works
In order to best convey our ideas to our audience, we have to take a moment to understand how they think. Especially how their brains work... indeed how all our brains work. Specifically, we need to understand how people process information and remember it long-term.
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Deciding How You Want Them To Feel
When you're thinking about why you're presenting, you also need to think about how you might want your audience to feel about your message.
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Introduction To Knowing Your Aim
This course will help you avoid the dreaded death by Powerpoint. By practicing the Triple-A method of creating your slides, you'll be able to deliver messages that are clear, interesting and memorable.
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Putting Your Bottom Line On Top
Bottom line on top is about stating your aim at the beginning of your presentation, and at the top of each slide. (We'll talk more about effective headlines in another video.)
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Stating Your Aim
Before you write anything, ask yourself: what am I trying to do? And write down in the answer in a sentence, including an active verb. I need to persuade my manager to adopt this new process.
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Creating An Audience Profile
It can be helpful to create an audience profile before you start drafting your slide deck. It will tell you what content is going to be necessary, what language you might use, what tone you might take with them, and what level of detail you might go into.
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Doing Your Research
If you're having trouble creating an audience profile, or answering the questions from the previous section, that means you have more homework to do.
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Introduction To Knowing Your Audience
No two people are alike. So it follows that no two audiences will be alike. So you need to take a moment to consider who you're presenting to, before creating your slide decks.
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Writing For Amiables
The amiable personality type tends to be non-confrontational. They are friendly and often a quieter presence in the office. They'll chat about life outside the office with you, and will likely make requests in a softer, less direct style.
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Writing For Analyticals
Analytical personalities tend to be detail-oriented. They prefer to have a lot of information so they can fully understand a situation. They also need time to process all of the data before they feel comfortable taking action or making a decision.
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Writing For Drivers
Drivers tend to be very task-oriented people. They're decisive and like to be the ones in control. They don't need a lot of personal rapport in order to get business done. Likewise, they also don't need much detail in order to make their decisions.
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Writing For Expressives
Expressive personality types tend to be the big idea people. You might find them in the Sales and Marketing departments. They are often big-picture thinkers, and effective team builders. Personal rapport is very important to an expressive.
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Writing For The Four Personality Types
We all fall into one of 4 personality types based on how Extroverted versus introverted and how task-oriented versus people oriented we are. Our personality type will often determine how we like to communicate and what type of information we like to process.
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Creating An Outline
Now that you've collected all of your ideas about a presentation, you can now start to organise them by putting them into an outline form.
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Deciding To Use Visuals
A picture is worth a thousand words. Or so the saying goes. But Is that true?
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Drafting What Not to Do
Trying to get started on a big presentation can be daunting. The two biggest obstacles we face are not knowing where to begin, and wanting to create the perfect first draft. This list of dos and don'ts will help you get past those obstacles and on your way to creating your slide deck faster.
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Drafting What to Do
Here are a few more things you can do to help you draft more efficiently, and set yourself up to succeed.
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SHAIK-ing It Up
Here are some simple guidelines to help you create clear and memorable slides, and to avoid information overload. To help you remember them, we‚'re using the acronym SHAIK.
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Slides Using The Do's & Dont's - Part 1
We're going to show you some slides and ask you if you think you can tell what they mean and what the key points are...
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Slides Using The Do's & Dont's - Part 2
We looked at the do's in the last video. Now here are some dont's...
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Taking The Right Approach
We've talked about knowing your aim and your audience. This section is about streamlining your approach to the creation of the slides themselves. We'll give you some tips to make drafting your presentation easier and faster.
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Being Specific
It's common for us to use vague language in slide decks. Of course, you know what you mean, but depending on your audience, it might create confusion.
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Creating Summary Slides
Delegates often ask us about the magic bullet of slide creation: how to create a single slide that will satisfy those audience members who love detail, and those who emphatically don't. This video shows you how to satisfy both requirements.
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Creating White Space
Having white space on your slides is crucial to making your slides readable, and your audience engaged. This video shows you how to create white space in your presentations.