Jonathan Waddingham

Tag: presentations

  • On presentation skills

    Our lovely People Team (don’t call them HR) have recently started an internal learning curriculum where anyone in the office can offer to give a talk on any topic and anyone else can sign up to attend. There’s a wide range of learning on offer, from meditation and mindfulness to Excel training and intros to html and CSS. The topics are both broad and niche, if that’s technically possible. I offered to do one on presentation skills as it’s something I’m good at, I enjoy doing training and it’s something I know most people don’t like. So these are my top tips…

    My top 5 presentation tips

    1. Choose your words carefully

    You set the tone of your talk through the words you use on your slides. Be as concise as possible and choose interesting words over dull ones. It may sound obvious, but also get someone else to proof read for spelling or grammatical errors. If you’re presenting to grammar or spelling pedants, you lose them as soon as they spot a typo.

    2. Never reveal more than one line of text

    A common mistake people make is to fill slides with text. This just means half your audience will read the slides and not listen to you. And you can compound this by reading each line out, which just makes a presentation feel like someone’s reading a blog post out loud. Which is dull. Try to focus on one point at a time and bring your audience with you. Use the *appear* animation in powerpoint to stack points and reveal them one at a time.

    3. Remember the rule of three

    For this I’ll just quote wikipedia (albeit a wikipedia entry that needs a citation):

    The rule of Three is a writing principle that suggests that things that come in threes are inherently funnier, more satisfying, or more effective than other numbers of things

    4. Interact with your audience

    Make eye contact. Look around the room. Ask questions. Sitting for an hour listening to someone talk can be dull if you don’t feel like they’re engaging with you. The old “stand up if you have/do/think/believe something” trick is a good one to use. Getting people to stand up stimulates them, makes them active instead of passive and is a common way to engage with an audience.

    5. Speak slower than normal

    This is one I struggle with, and one I notice a lot of others do too. And it’s hard, as you’re usually nervous before giving a talk and the adrenaline kicks in. But when you speak quickly, it’s hard for people to catch up. Put slides in your deck to linger over and help you pause. Especially if it’s an important point. Take deep breaths as a way to slow down, and walk around if you can.

    6. Check out my slides 😉

    As I spent a long time coming up with some slides – I mean, they had to be good if I’m supposed to be the trainer! – I thought I may as well share them and see if anyone else has any good tips to add. Obviously the slides don’t mean as much without my commentary, but I’ve done a bit of editing to make it easier to follow on slideshare. And that’s another top tip – if you’re sharing slides online, do a version of the slides with more explanations so they make sense without a spoken commentary. It has lost all my fancy fonts though, so try to pretend that it looks a little bit prettier than arial… :/

    I delivered the training as a two part course, where the second part was getting people to present on something they knew about to make them feel comfortable about presenting. And the selection of presentations delivered was awesome – from the story of the F1 season so far, a guide to winter cycling and how to survive a zombie apocalypse – and it was great to see the guys take my advice on board and be much more confident presenters. Training win!

    The funny thing about putting this talk together was that I realised I often didn’t take my own advice and it made me work a bit harder on putting more structure to my talks and thinking more about the delivery. I even nabbed some slide templates from my presentation skills talk for an external talk, and you can see the before and after versions on my previous blog post.

    My fave presentation tips from others

    As for inspiration, my favourite blog post on giving presentations is probably on the Bolt Peter site – I’ve definitely taken a lot from it and I think it’s the single most useful thing anyone could read about presenting. I also found this TED talk on the structure of storytelling really compelling, but I’ve yet to manage to shoehorn in something as exciting as the iPhone launch into anything I’ve presented. Yet…

     

  • On social, mobile and awards

    Over the last few months I’ve given a few talks, mainly on the themes of social and mobile (with the notable exception of an awards ceremony). I’ve been talking about this theme (read: going on about it) for a while, but it’s been good to pull together a couple of presentations and a blog post to sum up my thoughts. Maybe I can start talking about something else soon instead…

    Going mobile, being social

    Anyway, here are the slides from the IoF Convention this Summer where I talked about going mobile and being social alongside Lynn Sutton from Facebook:

     

    And if they don’t make that much sense without a commentary, I also did an interview with Ravinol from Be Inspired Films on the topic:

    Growing your audience with mobile and social

    I also gave a similar  talk at the IoF iFundraising conference in September, trying to focus on more practical steps that charities could take on board. I blogged about these the IoF site and the JG blog as 6 tips for growing your audience on mobile and social, and the slides are below:

     

    During the day I gave a short interview to Rebecca from charity digital news, where I was thinking more about what I’d do if I was a smaller charity trying to take my advice. Read that over here.

    The JG Awards

    By far and away the most fun speaking gig I get to do is the JG Awards. This year was our fifth event and my fifth year MC-ing, so it feels like an old friend I only get to speak to once a year. It was another amazing night, full of incredible stories and possibly a few dodgy puns too.  Here’s the video just in case you want to see my gaffe of starting to read the announcers script instead of mine when first getting to the stage – I promise I wasn’t just saying hello to the laydeeez….

     

    http://new.livestream.com/accounts/864795/events/3394360/videos/63103806/player?autoPlay=false&height=360&mute=false&width=640

  • On innovations in digital fundraising

    Today I gave a presentation  to a bunch of young charity sector professionals who are part of the Charity works scheme. If you’ve never heard of it, it’s the UK charity sector’s graduate scheme and is a great thing. Check them out (and then come back here).

    As part of their training, they regularly come together to hear from various people in the sector about various things, and I was flattered to be put in touch with them by Lucy Gower (that’s @LucyInnovation to you and I) as someone who could talk about innovation in digital fundraising. Given the context was for people who perhaps haven’t had much exposure to fundraising generally, I wanted to go back to basics before showing the new shiny stuff. As basically, the new and shiny stuff is just a new way of doing the old tricks that have worked for years. In summary, it’s always about storytelling, it’s just the form of the storytelling that changes.

    Personally, I found it quite interesting to reflect on this and what I thought was innovative, and what I believe to be the big (technology) trends that digital fundraising needs to be aware of. Funnily enough, one of my starting points was Mark Phillip’s excellent collection of old charity ads on Pinterest. They are just really, really good, and point to what *good* fundraising is about, be it digital or analogue or whatever.

    So for me, the most innovative things in digital fundraising aren’t really that innovative, in a way. They just stay true to the basics of fundraising – telling a good story – and they use the opportunities new tech and digital give us to tell those stories in different, ever more engaging ways. Which is hardly a groundbreaking insight, and one I first spoke about four years ago…

    As part of trying to get people to think about how they would tell their charity’s story, I took a couple of the old ads and tried to imagine how they might look if shared on Twitter. It was fun, if surprisingly hard, to take those ads and think about how they would be communicated in 140 characters. But I’d recommend it as an exercise in thinking about how to craft an elevator pitch, and is quite like a piece of advice from the head of brand at Facebook that’s stayed with me for a while – when building an app or campaign, start from the point of view of what gets shared in the newsfeed, given that’s where most people will come across your campaign (depending on the type of campaign, obviously). I’d highly recommend you read their advice.

    Hopefully the cohort who saw my talk will now think more about how they can tell their charity’s story too – be it in 140 characters, 6 seconds or over the course of a longer, integrated campaign. Ultimately, that’s what it’s about for me.

    Have a look at the slides below:

     

  • My year (of presentations) in numbers

    I’ve not blogged much here in 2010, or even on the JG blog much since I moved jobs. And the reason is that the time I’d normally spend blogging, I’ve spent writing presentations – an awful lot of them. So it’s been interesting (to me at least, as a numbers person) to check my calendar and see how many talks and slides I’ve presented this year – to be honest, I’m quite proud of how much I’ve done. And interestingly enough, Seth Godin’s latest post is about writing about what you shipped this year, so it seems like I’m in decent company in looking back and sharing.

    In 2010 I’ve spoken at 25 events or conferences as a speaker or panellist, presenting a total of 744 powerpoint slides to around 1,800 people. The 14 slidedecks I’ve shared on slideshare have had more than 16,500 views (20,000 if I include some fundraising tips I pulled together for our community team). In that time, I’ve also written 29 blog posts for JG, although only a couple for my Fundraising blog, which appears to have been the main casualty of all that speaking.

    Facebook Developer Garage London. Jonathan Waddingham

    (here’s me seemingly trying to eat a microphone at the Facebook developer garage in October – it appears to be the “best” photo of me speaking this year)

    Looking back at those numbers, it seems like one event every other week is quite a lot for someone who has a day-to-day job too and isn’t a professional speaker.  Still, I do really enjoy presenting and those interesting conversations you have with people at conferences during the breaks, so it doesn’t feel too much like work at all. Even when I do a lot of the work in my own time, I do love getting up and talking about things I’m passionate about (and I’m very bad at saying no too).

    Incidentally, the most popular (by numbers) presentation I gave this year was at the IoF National Convention in July: Discover the secrets of online fundraisers.

    As for enjoyment, probably the most fun speaking gig I did in 2010 was MC-ing the first ever JustGiving awards – it was an amazing night filled with meeting inspirational people and hearing the most heart-warming stories – I’m already looking forward to MC-ing it again next year.

    But aside from the JG awards, I will be speaking at as few conferences as possible next year to give myself (and the charity conference circuit) a rest from my dodgy puns and endless ‘amusingly’ captioned flickr photos. Unless, of course, you need anyone to talk about a certain fundraising website’s new set of APIs…