How To Make Your Data-Heavy Presentations More Digestible (And Interesting)

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It happens regularly. A client or friend will complain that their presentations are dreadful, tedious, painful. In fact, a friend of mine called yesterday and told me her (rather frequent) presentations are so boring, she’s putting even herself to sleep. It was a 911 call, she needed help with her 411.

Let me take a moment to share more about her situation because it’s not uncommon: She’s super smart, very personable and is in an external-facing position within a high-profile organization. While she’s personable, she’s also inherently an introvert. She recognizes that she’s having trouble making her very dense, data-heavy presentations interesting and meaningful. Any of this sound familiar?

TMI (too much information) is a crisis in conference rooms across the country. It’s usually discussed in terms of presenters who don’t know when to stop, can’t stop, and just go on and on, sharing way too much, often irrelevant, info. Or it’s prevalent among speakers who want to sound smart and so they wax intellectual, sharing everything they know on the topic and more. It’s not unheard of that smart, mostly introverted professionals (think: engineers, techies, scientists) get sucked down the rabbit hole of TMI.

But what if TMI is necessary? What if the audience needs the dense data? What if all that information is critically important -- to a decision that needs to be made, to the outcome of a project or to a client’s brand or reputation?

Sometimes, information -- even dense data -- has to have a seat at the table. It needs to be presented. It’s relevant. In those cases, the presenter faces the seemingly monumental task of making the presentation, and all its information, compelling. And that’s where the breakdown occurs. Is it even possible to make tons of info or data interesting and memorable?

Yes, of course it is. Here are three tips that can help immensely to keep yourself and your audience awake:

Packaging

Data and information are great, but when there’s too much, they can overwhelm an audience. Information needs to be grouped, chunked and organized into logical sections. It cannot be served up as a running narrative, where the presenter strings a series of data points together as if making a paper chain. The paper chain approach assumes the audience will be able to draw their own conclusions. They won’t. They’ll simply see a series of data points.

Easy remedy: Look at the data or info you need to present. There are probably logical categories or sections under which they fall. Organize your information by category or section so that it’s in support of a point, even if the point is just a summary of the importance of that grouping of information. Open and close each section with the point, offering context and meaning before they see the information and after. In other words, draw the conclusions for your audience.

Visuals

It’s become almost de rigueur to moan about PowerPoint presentations. However, most people are visual learners and need the visual reinforcement that slides provide. The issue is not PowerPoint itself, but the quality of what’s on the slides and whether or not they’re user-friendly for the audience.

We could talk all day about specifics of good visuals, but let’s address two that have the most impact and are easiest to fix:

1. Slide headings should answer why, not what (i.e., why this slide is important, why you need to see this).

To the extent possible, you want to alert your audience to the slide’s takeaway in the heading. So, for instance, rather than a revenue comparison slide that says “Year Over Year Revenue Comparison,” consider a heading that says “Revenue Increased 12% Over Last Year.”

2. Keep slides simple and clean.

Viewers prefer image slides over text slides. Make sure images such as charts and graphs are well marked and readable. Also, keep image slides free of additional text. If you’re tempted to include bullet points on a slide that already has a photo, graph or bar chart on it, think again. Those bullet points probably belong in your notes as reminders of what you want to say about the slide.

Prompts And Cues

Not all information is created equally. There is definitely a pecking order. But your audience won’t know the crucial from the cursory unless you tell them.

Give prompts and cues. Call it out and let your audience know when you’re presenting data that are vitally important or statistically significant. Likewise, let them know when the information is less essential. Guide them, tell them what they need to take notes on and what they can look at with a more casual eye. This invites your audience to be “in the know” with you and goes a long way toward preventing them from feeling overwhelmed.

I live by a “cut to the chase” ethos and am typically a huge advocate for brevity. But I’m also a realist and pragmatist. I know it’s not always possible to be brief. Some presentations are critical opportunities for the sharing of vital information that multiple people need to know. In those situations, then, presenters would do themselves and their audiences a solid to heed the advice above.

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https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2018/08/30/how-to-make-your-data-heavy-presentations-more-digestible-and-interesting/