The intrinsic power of a crisp and clear presentation cannot be overstated.  Communities both personal and professional thrive on the sharing of ideas.

When your presentations are clean, clear and coherent, you will:

• Make it easy for your audience to focus on the idea, opposed to the tool being used
• Be able to more easily mobilize your audience
• Make better use of the allotted time

I’d like to share a few practices I’ve found beneficial when creating and delivering presentations:

1. Keep the Presentation Lean

This has nothing to do with slide count or duration. Deleting slides is not the objective. When analyzing your presentation, reengineer or remove overly wordy slides. Case in point: if your audience is able to read your presentation and garner 90% of its meaning, there is no point showing up.

You are the voice. Your frame of reference and your anecdotal stories are the show. The actual slide show is a framework to work from.

Effective presenters use the presentation as way of introducing talking points and providing the audience with visual stimuli. By all means, use graphs and charts where appropriate but don’t let them take over. Where appropriate, think about using descriptive pictures or even video or audio.

In a previous life, I had the pleasure of working with John Dragoon, who is the CMO of Novell Inc. He is a master of the keynote. Granted, being a great orator is part of his job but he’s also adept at communicating complex stories using slides with minimal text.

His level of proficiency is high, but achievable. The first step is assessing, honestly, the quality of your presentation. Use these questions to start things off:

• Is your presentation designed to be read or presented?
• Does the audience ask questions about points you haven’t addressed yet?
• Role-reversal: Would your presentation bore you to tears?

2. Leave something meaningful

All too often, the leave behind is the exact same presentation that was just delivered. Don’t do this; you’’ll be squandering the opportunity to leave the audience with supportive information . Post-presentation supportive information is essential to the communication of your idea. Reason being, the average audience will only retain 25% of your information on the first pass. The implication, then, is that 75% of the information you present will be lost on the audience without an additional effort on your part. It’s essential to bolster the initial learning experience with supportive information if your ideas are to take root. (This fact alone sells the reason why on-demand or self-paced video-casts and recorded webinars are so powerful.)

Provide a digital copy of the presentation. The format and feel can remain the same but pack it full of links to case studies, articles and videos. You might even want to consider offering it as a podcast or self-paced video.

3. PowerPoint is not the Holy Grail

Microsoft PowerPoint has become the standard for presentations far and wide. Rather than attempt to sell you on why you shouldn’t use it, I’d like to introduce you to some alternatives I’ve used effectively.

OpenOffice Presenter:

Think of it as an application with a similar look and feel to MS PowerPoint but at 10% of the cost. I enjoyed the ability to open PowerPoint presentations without jumping through hoops. I especially liked the ability to create a presentation in OpenOffice Presenter and save it as a PowerPoint presentation. Lastly, I was pleased to not have to re-learn shortcut keys as they all translated from MS PowerPoint to OpenOffice Presenter.

Prezi:

Prezi is not a MS PowerPoint wannabe. MS PowerPoint is designed for a linear conversation. Rarely does a conversational presentation happen linearly. Prezi was designed for the non-linear presentation. I’ve used it in environments where the audience is looking for a brain-dump of information but is unsure what they want to cover first or where they want to end up.

MindMeister:

Mindmeister is a brainstorming application otherwise known as a mind map. Using MindMeister as a presentation tool can be a stretch for the linear thinker or for less conversational presentations. There are no secrets when using it. The audience can see your intentions and thought process. I enjoy this style of presenting, however this platform is not for the meek. If your presentation is less about volleying ideas and more about communicating a precise path, don’t’ use MindMeister.