Nonprofits Live Recap: Great Presentations

Great presentation skills always come handy whether you're offering an educational training, making a keynote speech, or bringing new funders aboard. In our ongoing mission to provide technology information and resources to nonprofit organizations and libraries, TechSoup’s latest Nonprofits Live (NPLive) explored advice and resources for creating great presentations.

The live interactive, educational online event featured guest speakers Kivi Leroux Miller, speaker, writer and president of the Nonprofit Marketing Guide; Nat Robinson, vice president for business development at SlideRocket; and Rik Panganiban, a nonprofit organizer and educator with more than 15 years using digital media to increase public engagement on global issues and the current manager of the Nonprofit Commons community in Second Life.

Presentations for Webinars

Leroux Miller kicked off the discussion by offering advice focused on online presentations. Leroux Miller’s first and most compelling piece of advice is to think of developing webinars similar to producing a radio show. Webinars can greatly benefit from developing a “run of show” which in radio is a script designed to outline the order and amount of timing for items to be discussed within a program. Leroux Miller strongly suggests that webinar presenters practice beforehand to get a better sense of timing since presenting live generally takes longer than one might think and because something is likely to go wrong, which will help presenters keep moving forward.

The final tip Leroux Miller shared acknowledges the reality that online audiences are inclined to multitask during webinars so presenters should keep their tone conversational to keep their audience engaged and consider using a webcam or live polling for interactivity. 

Make Presentations Social

NPLive’s second guest speaker was Nat Robinson, vice president for business development at SlideRocket, an online software tool for creating and measuring presentations. Robinson’s advice centered on three trends that are changing the nature of presentations. The first tip is to make presentations social; a useful means of doing this is to use Twitter for live communications with your audience as is increasingly popular during presentations.

Presenters who are interested in embedding a live Twitter stream into their slides can do so with SlideRocket. SlideRocket also allows for collaboration, another trend Robinson identifies in the creation of presentations. For example, co-workers can update or add slides and users can share a library of images, video, and other content for presentations – benefiting from their group’s collective knowledge. Finally, as technology continues to evolve, Robinson advises organizations to consider mobile since a lot of presentation-viewing and sharing is beginning to occur outside office walls, a format also supported by SlideRocket.

Ask and Share with Your Audience

Rik Panganiban, community manager of TechSoup’s Nonprofits in Second Life online community, rounded out the lineup of speakers by offering tips gleaned from his experience giving presentations in mixed reality environments – advice that can also be used in the offline world. Presenting in mixed reality environments typically means presenting both to a real, live audience and online audience at the same time.

Panganiban, like Leroux Miller, suggests involving your audience early on. Some ways to do this include asking your audience a question and having members share their responses, asking audience members for real-life case studies or even live brainstorming. The second tip Panganiban offers is to build toward something. Audiences will be more inclined to stay engaged if there is some payoff at the end.

Panganiban also offers the unorthodox advice to presenters to “do something strange” such as letting the audience guide the direction of the presentation or starting in the middle. He concludes by advising presenters to share themselves with their audience to build a connection during presentations.

Additional Resources

NPLive concluded with a question and answer session during which Leroux Miller, Robinson, and Panganiban offered more useful advice for great presentations. To access that advice, a recording of this edition of Nonprofits Live can be found here. Questions that were not covered during the session are always welcome in the TechSoup forums or in the comments below. And finally, additional presentation resources, both articles and tools, can be found here:

• How to Deliver a Bad Presentation
• How to Design a Bad Presentation
• Visual Presentations Made Easy
• TechSoup Presentation Products