Effective use of corporate presentations

This article focuses on presentations that are used in large companies to tell employees about their successes, reports and other internal needs. As a rule, such companies use corporate templates and any speaker should take this into account when developing slides. In this article I will focus on creating beautiful and clear slides within these templates.

The peculiarity of working with such a presentation is that a change in the corporate template itself will lead to a misunderstanding on the part of the authorities and colleagues. Thus, it will not be possible to do anything, for example, with the intrusive company logo on each slide, which does not carry any important information and only takes away precious space. The same can be said about various frames, lines and other graphic elements, which often look completely superfluous and severely limit the working area of ​​the slide.
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Despite all this, there are several ways to improve the overall impression of the presentation, using simple rules, which, by the way, are characteristic not only of presentations from the corporate sphere, but also for many others.

Talking headers

Use headlines that display the main idea of ​​the slide. Most presentations contain a large number of titles that do not say anything at all. Examples of such headings are: “change in the level of sales”, “development dynamics”, “fulfillment of activity plan indicators” and others. Sometimes there are even variants of “introduction” and “conclusion”.

It is very easy to get rid of such headings: you just have to write exactly what exactly you want to say with this slide. Instead of “change in sales level” write “sales grew by 25% in half a year”, instead of “development dynamics” - “development dynamics of such and such” (and even better if there are any numbers confirming this), etc. This method greatly increases the clarity of each slide and allows the audience to immediately catch the basic idea.

Data visualization

It is no secret that information presented visually is perceived much faster and better absorbed by the human brain. Here there is one slightly paradoxical moment: basically different numbers are visualized, and text information is safely forgotten. In almost every corporate presentation, you can find different charts showing particular indicators of a department / company. The use of such diagrams is a very good move (if they, of course, performed at the proper level, but more on that later).

The situation is quite different with textual information. It is usually placed in large paragraphs that are completely unreadable. Bullet points (bulleted lists), which also contain a huge number of words, are very widely used. During the presentation, such slides are usually read out by the speaker word for word, which causes boredom of the audience, because people in the hall can read it all much faster (if it’s possible to make out anything at all and the audience is interested in this topic).

Salvation from such situations is the visualization of not only numbers, but also the words of the speaker. This can be a simple use of icons instead of points in the list, which, together with the abbreviation of the text to a few basic words, gives an amazing result in terms of clarity and perception of information. Simple options can also include the use of background images with small text (this option is not so common in corporate presentations, because templates often prohibit any change in the background of a slide). A more complicated option is to compare the presented information with an event or subject. For example, talking about the introduction of some processes in the company can draw a situation "before" and "after" using different graphics, or depict these processes themselves using the same graphics. It is very important to use obvious images so that the audience will immediately guess what is being said. All these techniques, by the way, work with numeric data.

Of course, with all the advantages of visualization, too diligent use of it by a person who is poorly versed in this can only confuse everything more. Therefore, it is very important not to overdo it in this matter. To understand if you are too far away, just show the work to a colleague and ask if he understands what he is talking about without any further explanation. I also want to warn you against using a different clipart (for example, these terrible voluminous white men, which are very often found in presentations), images in which people look very playfully (there are a lot of such on various photo stocks and just in search results of popular search engines) and animated pictures (sometimes their use is justified and it looks very cool, but such examples are few).

A lot of slides don't mean bad

It is considered that the more slides, the longer will be the performance. This is not entirely true, because the same amount of information can be pushed into several slides or distributed across more slides without increasing the duration of the presentation (if we ignore the seconds spent on switching slides). If we compare how much easier the slides with a small amount of information are perceived, the choice towards this method will be obvious.

There is an easy way to determine the optimal amount of information on a slide, it is called “one slide - one thought”. If you, for example, report on changes in any indicators of a department / company, then it is not necessary to do all this on one slide. Each indicator can be given a separate slide (or a group of slides, if the information is still too much), pick up the talking heading and confirm it with a few facts on the slide. If the indicator is volumetric, it is better to choose several criteria by which it will be considered and put each such criterion on a separate slide, because each of them has its own specific thought. Thus, it is possible to decompose any information block, doing this until the slides are no longer overloaded.

Do not be afraid of free space on the slide and try to use all its space. The less elements are used, the easier it will be to understand this slide and more elegant it will look. In fact, the main problem with most corporate templates is that they eat up these empty spaces, cluttering them up with unnecessary elements.

Highlight highlights in charts

In fact, this applies not only to the diagrams, but also to the rest of the content on the slides. When you first look at the slide, you should immediately understand what it is about and what is the main one. The look should focus on the main elements in question. That is why icons and other visualization elements are usually highlighted with a contrasting color.

Charts are very often found in corporate presentations, so highlighting the main points on them is very important. For example, the slide uses a regular bar chart, reflecting the change of some parameter in time, let it be sales by year. If the main purpose of the slide is to report on the size of sales for the current year, then it is logical to select this column in order to focus the audience’s views on it. A talking heading is also used here, which also allows you to immediately understand what is being said and draw attention to the most important element of the diagram. This technique can be used with diagrams of any kind.

In conclusion, I would like to say that corporate presentations are one of the most complex types of presentations, because they imply a lot of restrictions and a large amount of data that need to be told. Nevertheless, such presentations can be made well and cause genuine interest among the audience. Even within a large corporation, the approach to presentations can be changed, starting with one separate presentation. Sometimes this first step can be made by yourself, having understood this question and having made a number of mistakes. The alternative is to attract professionals from the field of creating presentations that can help both an individual employee with a speech, and change the presentation standards of the whole company. In case of any difficulties in this area, you can always contact us at the Slidary presentation studio and we will definitely show you the best solution.