What images come to mind when you hear the word “hero”? Someone with a lot of muscles working for the good of mankind? A handsome knight? A firefighter? The word has the can-do connotation of a person who is able to succeed in the face of a mighty foe, and does so against all odds.
A hero within a presentation serves a similar function, with a twist. There doesn’t have to be an actual character to represent the force worth rooting for, like a David in the face of Goliath. But it does need to be a person, place, or concept that the audience can support or relate to.
Heroes are crucial to any presentation that tells a story, and effectively helps audiences lean towards a certain side of your argument. They make your tale relatable, carry the presentation through the course of its journey, and can make difficult concepts easier to understand.
How can you create a hero within something as structured as a presentation? Follow these four steps:
Who is this masked man?
Anything can represent the hero of your story. Anything. It could be a thing, like a software solution that will make work scheduling easier. It could be a place, like a hometown you’re trying to raise funding for in order to improve roadways. And of course it could be a person, like a portrait of yourself ten years ago when you first thought up an innovative business idea. The most important thing is to introduce the hero of your story right away in the presentation, using slides of images or a few words to describe them/it.
What makes the hero special?
This is the more complicated or nuanced part of your presentation. There needs to be something that makes the hero stand out, and the story itself unique. In the above examples, a software solution might be the world’s first to ever be built entirely in the cloud. The hometown in need of better roads may have struggled with devastating flash floods, and thus require innovation. And for the tale of yourself in the past, you might have been living unhappily with your parents and working a terrible job until it motivated you to create something unique. Whatever it is, the hero needs to be given detail in order to make the story memorable, and lead to the final outcome.
What are the odds?
We’ve already written a little about the concept of the villain, or the opposing force that challenges your hero and prevents them from immediately succeeding. Within your presentation, be clear about the obstacles that the hero must face. The more difficult and tricky the opposing force may be, the more your audience will be willing to listen to the solution or resolution to these problems.
Take the example of the hometown that experienced flash flooding, and now needs better roads. Once you’ve described the risk of these floods happening again and the families that were affected as they were trapped in their homes, your audience will be much more open to hearing the solutions you have to offer, and signing on the dotted line to donate.
The End.
By the end of your deck, your hero either needs to succeed mightily or be just about to succeed. Why include a cliffhanger? If your call to action requires that the audience act in order for the hero to achieve a victory, then leaving loose ends is perfectly acceptable in the plot of a storyboard. In the case of the hometown in need of better roads, you may leave the final few slides to describe how the city needs the audience in order to succeed.
Presentation heroes don’t have to be perfect, don’t need to be victorious at the end, and don’t have to be people. But they do need to stand for something, which requires clarity and effort on your end as you develop the narrative. Give your audience something to cheer for, and develop your story with a pinch of underdog excitement.
Want to read more about storytelling within a presentation? Check out these articles!
Storytelling Tactics For Presentations: Creating The Right Villain
