Talk Tip: Make Slides Work For You
Q: I’m presenting to our Board and am horrible with slides. Should I hire someone?
If you’ve been asked to present to your board, it’s because you have something compelling to say. You don’t have to be a graphic artist to create a clean deck. Focus on structure to make your slides enhance your point:
Start at the end
Board members want to make decisions quickly. Use your agenda and executive summary pages to tell them, briefly and precisely, what problem they’re helping to solve in terms of their role in solving it. This is not the time to be general, or make them guess about what they’re there to do. Nor do you need whiz-bang graphics to do it.
You can always expect lots of questions. Success means board members ask you clarifying questions about the subject matter so they can make reasoned decisions, not questions that are really second-guessing your points.
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Use headlines
Most boards have rules requiring board members to pre-read documents, so your slide deck is due anywhere from a day to a week before the board meeting — and without you there to explain it. Make it easy for board members to follow your points by telling your story in the slide headers. They should be able to flip through the deck and see the storyline just by looking at the headers.
Be consistent
Your slides don’t have to be fancy, but they should be clean. By this, I mean things like using the same fonts and color schemes throughout your slides. Sweat the small stuff, like whether all your slide headlines are in the same font size and color, or if your footers are all the same. If you use an image, make sure it’s not pixelated or stretched. All images and text can be grouped into simple blocks, and don’t use font sizes that will make anyone squint or, worse, ignore your text.
This all sounds simple but is too often overlooked, resulting in a messy first impression. You wouldn’t write a resume with mis-matched fonts, layouts that vary from job to job, and a headshot that’s squished so it’s square rather than rectangle. A slide deck is a more complex document, but the same basic rules apply.
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