June 15, 2006 | Read Time: 3 minutes
A new study shows that few presentations for nonprofit causes make a positive impression
Nonprofit officials are so focused on educating the public that they frequently resort to boring, data-saturated presentations that fail to connect with their audiences emotionally, according to a Los Angeles consultant who has conducted a survey of how charity leaders view the presentations they and their peers make.
Andy Goodman — in his book Why Bad Presentations Happen to Good Causes and How to Ensure They Won’t Happen to Yours — says nonprofit officials often overestimate their effectiveness as presenters.
An online survey he commissioned last year of 2,501 nonprofit leaders found that while 49 percent of respondents said they believed they delivered good presentations, 82 percent said they were not seeing good presentations from others.
Mr. Goodman, who specializes in helping public-interest groups, foundations, and businesses communicate more effectively, believes this kind of “I’m okay, you stink” perspective indicates that many presenters have yet to consider that their presentations may not be as good as they think.
The book, which was paid for by 10 foundations, cites three main reasons for poor quality in presentations: lack of preparation, low expectations about what it takes to be effective, and denial about how a presentation has been received.
Mr. Goodman found that while 46 percent of respondents believe their own presentations include good visual elements, for example, only 19 percent said they saw good visuals in presentations they attended. The majority agreed that visual elements are one of the most important components of a presentation. Fifty-seven percent of survey respondents said they learn something valuable from presentations with good visual elements.
In a chapter titled “PowerPoint Is Your Friend,” Mr. Goodman offers this basic tip for maximizing the use of images in presentations: Show the pictures and say the words. “In general, presentations are so text heavy that if presenters just started to incorporate more images and gave more information verbally, that would be a huge step in the right direction,” he says.
Research shows that people retain more information when they see an image and hear a narrated explanation, instead of having to read the explanation themselves while viewing the image, the book says.
For additional visual enhancement, Mr. Goodman suggests that presenters opt for a colored background instead of PowerPoint’s default white background, thus creating more eye-catching slides.
Furthermore, simply including a logo on each slide isn’t an effective way to visually convey an organization’s identity, he says. Instead, he recommends using pictures with strong emotional appeal and colors and accents that complement the nature of the material presented, as a way to distinguish a presentation from information other nonprofit groups provide.
“Just like an artist needs a colorful palate to work with, images should be part of our language, too,” says Mr. Goodman. “We are so trained to communicate with words that we don’t spend the time to capture and record images, and build an image library that reflects the work that we’re doing.”
For presenters who may not be familiar with PowerPoint’s capabilities, Mr. Goodman suggests enlisting the help of others who have more experience with the software program. However, presenters still need to understand how the approach works. “Presenters don’t take enough time to prepare,” he says. “They consider presenting something that they do when they’re not doing their job. If you can have assistance, that’s great, but you shouldn’t be kicking it to someone else just because you don’t have time.”
