Video Killed the PowerPoint Star

PowerPoint Best Practices in the Age of Video Presentations

As consultants, we generally recommend that clients avoid PowerPoint for short-list interviews. However, in this new world of social distancing where we meet, present, interview, and train via virtual platforms, we have reached a truce of necessity with this oft-maligned tool. PowerPoint is taking a stronger role in how we help selectors visualize content—and we believe it should—but with the right amount of strategy and restraint.

Without the social and visual cues of an in-person presentation, it is even more important to find effective ways to connect with and engage your audience. PowerPoint can be a highly effective tool, if used appropriately. In this new environment, more than ever, we have to resist the urge to revert back to bad PowerPoint decks with endless bullets, unreadable copy, and complex animations. We can use PowerPoint well for presentations, interviews, classes, and meetings, we just need to think about our slide decks more strategically.

Screen Size Matters

Your audience members, like you, are most likely working from home with a laptop and a monitor (two if they are lucky!) We are no longer designing slides to project on a large screen in front of an audience seated 10 feet away. We need to think about how content will look on a personal screen.

Font size can be slightly smaller, since we are closer to a higher-quality display, but it still needs to be readable on smaller monitors, laptops, and tablets. Always test your presentation for readability on a variety of screen sizes and display qualities.

Density is always an issue with slides. Keep to a few key words and bullets, use one full-bleed image per slide, and keep diagrams simple. Even though the audience may be looking primarily at the slides, you also want them to hear you. As always, the slides should support rather than overwhelm what you are saying.

Font colors are also important. High-contrast colors work best, but test a variety of color combinations. For example, we have found that yellow highlighting on a light background is not effective via video.

Control the View

There are many, many different ways to view speakers and content across the different online platforms, and each user can choose their own settings. That said, don’t be afraid to control your audience’s view. Take a few minutes at the beginning of your presentation to direct your audience to adjust their software for optimal viewing of your slides. For example, you can designate a small area at the upper right corner of the screen and use “speaker view” to show the speaker over the slide. Create a slide that shows exactly how the audience’s screen should look and verify that everyone has the same view. Keep in mind that whatever view you choose will also drive the design of your slides to avoid overlapping with content.

Keep It Simple, But Interesting

Your slide deck needs to capture attention in an environment where it is far too easy to become distracted. At in-person presentations, it would be rude for your audience to look at their phone or have someone’s large German shepherd wander into the room. Over video, these things can happen and can draw attention away from your presentation.

As consultants, we are used to working with our clients to do more with fewer slides, but with the need to keep your audience’s eyes on the screen, a video environment demands that we do less with more slides. Use additional slides to show more images, go into more detail, or show more examples to keep things interesting and moving as a speaker talks through their topic.

In the case of a complex topic, use multiple slides to walk through detailed segments of a process diagram or zoom-in on a specific area of a site plan or aerial photo. Deconstruct an organizational chart or project timeline. Include key words, differentiators, and messaging that you want your audience to hear and remember.

Your first inclination may be to add animations to slides to keep them visually interesting. Conceptually, this works well, however use a series of single, static slides to create movement, rather than adding animation, fades, and other fancy PowerPoint features. This may be considered old school, but in this more complex presentation environment, it can also reduce risk. It allows the deck to be exported and displayed as a PDF, in the case of a technology failure. It also keeps the audience focused on content rather than moving objects.

Finally, remember that your slide deck may become your leave-behind, so design it wisely. For in-person interviews, we are used to creating a variety of leave-behind materials ranging from placemats to marketing booklets and handouts—all beautifully designed and printed on the nicest 32lb paper stock. The new reality is that the slide deck may be the only item we create that lives on after the interview. Adding photos of your team and slides that clearly state your team’s differentiators may help selectors remember the best parts of your presentation and your team’s value propositions.

Create Smooth Transitions

Over video, it is much more difficult to appear seamless and avoid talking over each other. This means that it is even more important to know your content and practice it with your team.

Start with a detailed outline for the presentation that notes main points for each speaker and their slides. As individual speakers develop their content, each should develop “conversational markers” that act as cues for slide and speaker transitions, including lean-ins. If everyone on your team is listening for those conversational markers, they will know what is coming, when to speak, and when to advance the slides. This avoids speaking over each other and wasting time with verbal transitions, such as “John will now talk about design” and “next slide, please.” It requires a commitment to focused practice, but your team will appear much more prepared and coordinated.

Including transitional slides is another technique to cue both your team and the audience through transitions in your presentation. Between each main topic or speaker, insert a slide that punctuates the transition. The slide could be a simple image, a short tagline heading, and/or a headshot of the speaker along with their name and role. An intentional pause while the transitional slide is shown will allow both speaker and audience to orient.

Vitally important to a smooth presentation is the person running the slide deck. This could be anyone on the team, but they must be intimately familiar with the presentation’s content and conversational markers, PowerPoint technology, and the video software. They need to rehearse with the team until everything runs smoothly.

Minimize Technology Glitches

Based on our recent experience, we’ve learned a few things to help avoid technology issues while using PowerPoint during a short-list presentation via video:

• The person running the slide show must have an excellent Internet connection. The ultimate quality of the video will fall on each audience member’s connection, but the source connection should be as good as possible.

• Compress presentation files as much as possible and run them off of your local drive rather than a remote server. If using video clips, test different ways of running them through your PowerPoint slides. You may find that using a local file embedded into the slide works better than a linked YouTube video or vice versa.  

• Test everything on the equipment you will be using for the actual presentation to avoid software incompatibilities, font availability issues, and other last-minute issues. Set PowerPoint to embed fonts and export a copy of your slide show to PDF to avoid panics.

• Have a backup person designated and ready to run the slide show with everything pre-loaded on their system. Make sure the backup person rehearses with the team a few times.

• Consider sending an advance PDF copy of your slide deck to your audience. A PDF can be printed and used for note taking, act as a back-up in case of technology issues, and becomes a leave-behind for decision-makers.

Think Beyond the Slide

In any venue, your content and messaging should always be the driver for your visuals. You don’t want to become enamored of PowerPoint’s fancy features and try to fit your content into bells and whistles. At the same time, you have a literal small window to make a big impact and PowerPoint may be your primary visual tool. Look for creative ways to engage the audience through your slide deck.

If it helps communicate your message, use PowerPoint’s laser pointer to lead the audience through a diagram. Use Zoom’s live drawing tools to show campus connections to the project site or outline programmatic massing. Embed short videos of live sketching, virtual model fly-throughs, or aerial drone flyovers, and use these as relevant backdrops for speakers. There are so many ways to make your presentation more than just a slide show.

Practice Still Makes Perfect

The most important thing is to practice and become comfortable with whatever tools you plan to use. Practice with your team, practice using the technology, and have your backup plan ready.

With strategy, creativity, and intention, we can still be the stars of our presentations as we learn to master this virtual world.