Do you want the opening of your presentation to make your audience sit up and take notice? Then start by writing the last slide of the deck!
Why the last slide? One of the biggest problems with the technology of Power Point is that it forces you to write one slide at a time in a linear or consecutive order. So you never think about the last slide until you get there. And it's really hard to get a clear picture about the flow of your whole presentation because you're looking at one slide at a time.
When you start with the last slide, you'll write down your call-to-action. This will be crystal clear and relevant to the issues of the audience you've been speaking to. (If you don't understand this concept visit What's In It For Me?)
Then work backwards, one slide at a time. Think: if my call-to-action is X, what must I say before that to have X make sense? Write a slide that reflects that leading-up-to-X idea. And keep working like that until you get to the first slide.
Use the one-slide-per-2-minutes rule as a guideline. If you're speaking for 30 minutes, you should have about 15 slides. So when you open that new deck, enter 15 blank slides, then start working on the 15th slide.
You'll shorten the time it takes you to write your deck because you've been so clear about the content for each slide. It must be related to the slide that you've just completed.
Presenters must make technology work for them, not the other way around. Start at the end and work backwards and you'll decks that are more meaningful to your audiences and you'll shorten your own preparation and practice time too.
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