How to Organize Your Presentation Effectively

To some extent, organization is the foundation of modern society. With nearly seven billion people on the planet, systems and processes must be organized. Without it, chaos would reign free. Thus, your ability to organize is critical to function as a modern day humanoid, and likewise it’s essential to giving an effective presentation. Here are some tips on how to streamline and organize an upcoming presentation. Never underestimate the power of a simple organizational flow. It’ll do wonders for the effectiveness of your presentation.

Establish Objectives

Begin the process of organizing your presentation by laying out all of the content you want to include. Now read through it again, carefully, and see what connections you uncover. See what fits with what, and hopefully, objectives or sections will naturally emerge from a detailed read-through of your content.

Don’t shy away from using straightforward objectives such as “Trends. Opportunities. Advantages,” or something like “Before. After. Implications.” Your audience will appreciate a clearly established flow, an upfront organization that they can follow with ease throughout the presentation. It’s infinitely easier for your audience to be engaged with your content if they have a reference as to what will be covered throughout the presentation.

Create Context  

Here at Ethos3, we champion the story. We think the inclusion of a story is an essential component to a great presentation. We liken presenters to storytellers, but sometimes it’s difficult to see how a story would work for a particular presentation– a venture capitalist presentation, for example. But it’s important to note that while we mean story in the traditional sense, i.e. “Meet Bob. He’s a lawyer here. And he works here,” we also mean story in a non-conventional sense, sans characters, that simply establishes context around the content of the presentation.

So if your content revolves around the financial crisis, for example, it’s important to include a backstory, perhaps, of before and after the crisis, how things are different, how the business has changed, etc. Regardless of the topic, it’s imperative to include a story that reveals the context around what you will discuss in the presentation.

Full Circle

This little nugget of advice is very English 101: End where you began. There is such power in allowing your presentation to come full circle in the end. It reinforces everything you’ve just discussed, and it gives you the chance to remind the audience of the points you covered. Ending abruptly is counterintuitive to the point of a presentation in the first place. You are imparting important information to your audience, and a final review and tie-in to the beginning of your presentation fortifies the point. Coming full circle is essentially packaging a neat takeaway for your audience. Make sure you tie everything up neatly in the end. Your organization will be complete, and solidified, once you’ve done so.

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