A lot of people like to start with their PowerPoint presentation using a rough draft. This happens millions of times all over the world in many major corporations, organisations, and other government entities. Unfortunately, that pretty much guarantees that the presentation will be a disaster.
Nobody can create a PowerPoint presentation for someone out of thin air unless they know the following: your goals for the speech, and what you want from your audience members. This can be concrete goals or very very abstract ones but that is the first thing the slide creator must know. They also need to know the handful of the most important ideas that you are trying to convey through this presentation which will motivate your audience to do whatever you want them to do. The next thing they need to know is what stories you are going to tell them which involve real life problems with real solutions and real customers, clients, and prospects.
In my professional opinion, only then can they even attempt to start creating a PowerPoint presentation for you. So please keep this in mind that you cannot just start accumulating data and ask someone to create a slide deck for you or you can create one for anyone else if you are trying to be helpful.
I so agree that a presenter shouldn’t hand off a presentation to someone else to create from scratch. That’s why I work on presentations WITH the presenter and I start by asking what the goal is and who the audience is. It’s more time for the presenter to work with me, but the results are much better.
Well said Ellen. Thanks for stopping by!