Another presentation? Transform your PowerPoint!

Although we revel in the value of experiencing historic places, often we’re sharing those experiences with others through a PowerPoint presentation at a Kiwanis Club luncheon, a classroom full of students, a gathering of guides, or our colleagues at a professional meeting.  Adequately expressing the three-dimensional nature of these places in two dimensions is difficult, but the greater challenge is that we resign ourselves to the basic default mode of the technology.  As a result, there are:

• far too many PPT (PowerPoint) presentations
• using Times Roman type and
• slides of bulleted lists that
• we read along together like a Teleprompter.

Ugh.  Another room full of bored people with an anxious speaker flying through their slides.  Some places have even banned PPT because they are usually so badly prepared and presented—but rather than abandon it, we need find ways to harness the power of the technology to engage audiences in our mission and programs.  PPT is the dominant presentation format for the moment, so let’s take advantage of it.  It’ll require some training and rethinking but it will be worth it.

I do many presentations and recognized that PPT offered many capabilities missing from the traditional slide show, but in many ways it also made things much worse.  Edward Tufte clarified for me how PPT was dumbing down presentations in his essay, The Cognitive Power of PowerPoint and offered some solutions, but it wasn’t sufficient.  My initial improvement was to abandon the bulleted list and replace it with full screen images, essentially making a digital version of a slide show.  At the AAM meeting in Boston, Judy Rand gave me a glimpse of the potential of PPT in her presentation on exhibits.  The content of her lecture was great but the presentation was even better (and I believe it was produced by her husband, just to be sure I give credit where credit is due)—I had an “aha” moment.  I neglected the very advice I give everyone else when it comes to interpretive planning:  start with the content first, figure out the method last.  Oliver Adria has a clear and fun presentation on this very point.

Now that my presentations are confined to either flipcharts or PPT, I’m always on the prowl to improve both methodologies.  If you make presentations about your historic site, you need to master both of these to be effective, persuasive, and engaging.  The risk of boring and discouraging your audiences is too high and jeopardizes our efforts to preserve and protect historic places.

You’ll find lots of great information and tips at speaking.alltop.com, which consolidates many of the best blogs.  My current favorites are works by Garr Reynolds and Nancy Duarte, so take a look at:

• Garr Reynolds of PresentationZen:  his lecture at Google on YouTube, blog and his book PresentationZen.
• Nancy Duarte of Duarte Design: her Webinar at VizThink, Web site, and her book Slide:ology.

For more books, check out the recommendations from VizThink.  If you have developed a great presentation, consider sharing it with the world at slideshare.net!  If you have other suggestions or recommendations, please share them as a comment.