Why Bad Presentations Happen to Good Causes - The Goodman ...

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“When you talk for an hour to a group, they are not going to remember the whole hour,”
says Kim Klein, who presents on fundraising as often as twice a week. “They’ll probably
only remember three things. So pick three things, illustrate them, and repeat them.” This
advice was echoed by many of our expert commentators, with most agreeing that the
magic number of retainable main points was somewhere between three and five.
A B
1 2 3
4
Identify the major points that
make your case or explain your subject.
Once you decide which main points are essential to your presentation, sort through your
materials to find the data, visuals, stories or other elements that will reinforce each point
– and put the rest aside. Rather than add to your presentation, extraneous information and
images only confuse and overburden the audience. So when in doubt, leave it out.
Peg Neuhauser tries to find a story to illustrate each point she wants to make, and she
told us that if she cannot find a story, she is likely to drop the point. “The audience won’t
be convinced anyway,” she says, “so why keep it in?”
In his book, Lend Me Your Ears, Max Atkinson describes a study he conducted that
vividly shows the value of supporting each point with examples. By training one video
camera on a speaker, a second on the audience, and putting both images side-by-side on
a split-screen, Atkinson was able to precisely monitor how the audience members reacted
throughout a presentation. The tapes showed that, “almost every time a speaker used the
phrase ‘for example,’ people’s heads or eyes would move upward in anticipation of what
was to come.”
pg. 23
“If everything I want to
present is a foot long, at the
end they’ll remember about
an inch.”
– Christina Harbridge Law
Bridgeport Financial, Inc.