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

pg. 54
FIGURE 6
Roca’s values are: Belonging,
Generosity, Competence and
Independence
PowerPoint Is Your Friend
Seriously. – cont’d
Use style to convey substance.
Nonprofits, foundations, government agencies – they come in all shapes and sizes with
enormous differences in their public personae. So why do their PowerPoint presentations
look so similar? The problem is not with the software. There is enough flexibility built
into PowerPoint to create a look to match your organization – beyond simply slapping a
logo onto each slide – and to bring greater clarity to each presentation.
Conveying Identity
Roca is a nonprofit organization based in Chelsea, Massachusetts, that works primarily
with adolescents who need help finding their place in the community. To do this, Roca’s
staff works diligently to instill four core values in the youth they serve: belonging,
generosity, competence and independence. Roca runs a community center as the hub of its
operation, but its staff often takes to the streets, going to the kids when the kids will not
come to them. As Molly Baldwin, Roca’s executive director, will readily tell you, the work
is rewarding, but it comes with a lot of rough edges.
When Roca’s staff used PowerPoint to describe their
programs, they would show the slide “Roca’s values …”
(figure 6) when they reached the four values. The slide is a
classic example of excellent programmatic work undermined
by pedestrian presentation. The text is clear and concise, and
it leaves plenty of room for more powerful visual elements,
but the images chosen use less than half the available space.
For the audience, details in the images will be difficult to
see, and the relationship of each picture to the core values
is unclear. Putting everything inside a blue box does little to
distinguish the overall look of the presentation from other
nonprofit slide decks.
Given the opportunity to revamp this presentation,
I began by looking for design elements that would convey
the grittiness and “rough edges” of Roca’s daily operation.
I searched its image library to find pictures with strong emotional appeal. I only used
black-and-white versions (even when color was available) because these help viewers “see
the story” in the image instead of being distracted by an array of colors. I used PowerPoint’s
“scribble” line to create irregular frames for the key words in each slide. And by selecting
a black background, I created slides that broke out of the familiar four-wall frame while
focusing viewer attention on the important elements.
Because the four values are so central to Roca’s work, I decided to create separate slides
for each value (figures 7–10). This allowed me to choose photographs that would portray
and visually reinforce each value, and with just one word on each slide, I was able to run
large versions of each image. Expanding one slide into four also made the presenter’s visual
backdrop more dynamic and interesting without lengthening the presentation.