Slide Handouts - a quick guide

I have always felt that slide presentation handouts were a bad idea. Your intentions might be good, but as the saying goes, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions." The idea is a good one: you want your audience to follow along. You want to make sure that they take down some notes because your information is THAT important.

However, disaster soon ensues because here is what usually happens: you hand out your presentation, and I read through it in about 2 minutes while you are still on your first slide. I then become bored with your presentation because I have already read through it. Am I a bad person for doing this? Probably, but it is what 95% of your audience is doing.

So, what to do? You want to give a presentation people will pay attention to, but you also want to give them something that will make sense when they are going through it on their own. You need to do two things:

1) Create a presentation, that as David S. Rose in Presentation Zen Design states is "completely incapable of standing by themselves." When you keep this in mind, you will hopefully avoid putting too much text and graphs in your presentation and give a presentation that people will listen to.

2) Prepare a 2nd presentation that you can leave behind AFTER you give your presentation. This 'deck' that you leave behind can include all of the important information that you covered in your speech, but you didn't have written down. It should be similar in style and structure as your delivered presentation, but with more information on it that they can look at.

The important part is that people listen to your speech - which they won't if you put everything into your presentation. It doesn't take much extra work, but it will lead to much bigger results.

The following images is an example. A client of mine wanted to explain what Querencia was. He originally had it written out word for word what he was going to say on his slide (which had a bad background color on it as well). We changed his presentation on this slide to have an image that supports what he was going to say and then created a deck that he would then handout that had the information on it. This way people would stay focused on him instead of reading the text on the screen - yet they would be able to take the deck home with them and still understand what was said.