If your story can’t stand alone and you’re not there to explain it, you risk confusing—and losing—your audience.
How do you tell a story in everyday business communications? If you’re like most people you use that ubiquitous platform to share ideas and information: PowerPoint. It’s not unheard of to throw a few pie charts into a template and call it a report. But if you’re not telling a compelling story, you risk losing your audience. Wrapping your story into a standalone PowerPoint presentation for business audiences can help you connect with audiences, even if it isn’t convenient to meet in person.
How to: Create presentations to get permission from leadership
Using PowerPoint to tell your business story
PowerPoint has become the go-to corporate platform for making new ideas visible, promoting a cause, building consensus, and getting approval to move forward. It’s easier for most people to digest than a lengthy text file. And the author has much more control over what is seen and read. In theory, PowerPoint is a powerful tool for telling any story.
In practice, however, PowerPoint presentations for business often fail to help its authors achieve any of their communication goals. Why? Most people neglect to narrate their slides.
You may have noticed, it’s a common practice for people to create PowerPoint presentations that they never actually mean to present. How often do you open your inbox to find a deck of disjointed slides, with only a vague idea of what the author intended you to learn from or do with them? Or are you guilty of emailing your deck to the masses, hoping for a desired reaction?
If your story can’t stand alone and you’re not there to explain it, you risk confusing—and losing—your audience. You’re less likely to get the buy-in, funding, or other reaction you set out to achieve in the first place. So, craft each slide deck as if you were telling a story. Create a communication that furthers your agenda—even without being there to represent it.
Creating your Standalone PowerPoint Presentation for Business
Here are some suggestions for drafting your standalone PowerPoint deck—or any communication, for that matter—as if it were a story:
1. Start with a script.
This is your strong narrative. It’s what you would say if you were there to present the ideas yourself. Scripting your thoughts as you would say them ensures that you’re unfolding them in a logical order, with a beginning, middle, and end—just like a story. It will enable readers to follow your thoughts like breadcrumbs, without the distraction of wondering where you’re going or what you’re trying to say.
2. Limit each slide to only one idea and one image.
Think of a children’s book or comic strip. These are easy to read because information is pared down to its essence. Chunk your script into a series of big ideas and put one idea on each slide. Don’t worry if it makes your presentation longer. If it’s easy to understand and click through, readers won’t notice the length. They’ll notice the clarity.
3. Make all the slides your own.
Throughout history, storytellers have built on the tales of others to make new stories. (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies anyone?) So it’s not wrong to borrow slides from other presentations—but it’s crucial to edit them carefully to further your narrative. Otherwise, you’re likely to create a fractured narrative that confuses readers.
4. Use concrete examples.
Our world is full of abstract ideas—cloud computing, health insurance, data-driven insights, investment vehicles, and so on. Take a cue from stories and use real-life examples to illustrate your big ideas. Insert a case study, make up a character, or use statistics to ground fuzzy concepts in specifics.
5. Make the ending—and desired action—clear.
What do you want readers to do after perusing your deck? Fund your initiative? Implement your marketing plan? Be more informed in choosing a vendor? Make sure you lead readers to the conclusion you’d like them to arrive at. Just like a good story, when there’s resolution at the end, readers won’t feel as if they’ve wasted their time.
There you have it. Follow these five steps to create a standalone PowerPoint presentation for business that will help your audience will understand and remember.