The question “How much time do I need?”  comes up alot in the context of preparing for a webinar.  What tends to happen is the presenter has a slide deck in hand and they wait until the week before to really start considering the audience needs and reviewing the content.  It’s not until the webinar practice session a few days before the presentation that they see what others are presenting and get any feedback on their slides.  Due to time constraints, there is only time for slides corrections.  So how much time should you spend on presentation creation?

Presentation authority Nancy Duarte, author of the book Slideology and principal at Duarte Design (clients include Apple, Cisco, and Al Gore among many others),  puts it this way;

“The amount of time required to develop a presentation is directly proportional to how high the stakes are.”

Duarte goes on to provide this guidance:

• 6-20 Hours Research & collect input from the web, colleagues, and the industry
• 1 hour Build an audience-needs map
• 2 hours Generate ideas via sticky notes
• 1 hour Organize the ideas
• 1 hour Have colleagues critique or collaborate around the impact the ideas will have on the audience
• 2 hours Sketch a structure and/or a storyboard
• 20-60 hours Build the slides in a presentation application
• 3 hours Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse (in the shower, on the treadmill, or during your commute)

Total Time: 36-90 hours

At first glance this may sound like too much time, but when we started tracking our own content development time for new presentations we found this to be fairly accurate. When you already have a presentation, tailoring it for a specific audience will eliminate some of the up-front time, and in many cases you will be able to re-use slides/slide layout with only minor modifications.  Still, you will be looking at 30 hours to put together a quality presentation and be comfortable with its delivery.

Tags: create a presentation, create a webinar, effective presentations, LinkedIn, PowerPoint, practice, storytelling, time, web seminar, Webcasts, webinar, webinars.

A conversational approach helps on so many levels – new or related insights are often shared during a conversation,  there is more presenter energy, and audio interest is heightened from hearing multiple voices.

But it can’t be just an after-thought – you really should design it in to your presentation.  What do I mean?

We recently produced an audio webinar with a large group of presenters. To break up the slide presentations,  two of the presenters carried on a dialogue between them.  In concept this was great, but in practice it didn’t always work so well.

Why?  Rather than discussing a point in more detail and having a natural dialogue, one of the presenters was asking questions that so obviously pointed to the upcoming slide (and upcoming bullet point) in the deck that it clearly had to be rehearsed.  This defeated the naturalness and authenticity they were striving to achieve.

The fix? Make sure your accompanying slides are visual rather than text heavy.

This gives the presenters freedom to cover the points in any order or manner they wish.  The speakers can always use the original slides to remember the key points they want to discuss, and provide them as part of a hand-out after the event.

The feeling then becomes more like a discussion or interview and breaks up the longer webinar presentation.

Bill

Tags: audio webinar, authenticity, conversations, web seminar, webinars.