A couple of weeks ago I had the honor of teaching and learning at the American Evaluation Association (AEA) Summer Evaluation Institute in Atlanta, GA. I taught a course entitled “It’s Not the Plan, It’s the Planning: Strategies for Evaluation Plans and Planning.” I’ll write about that course another day.

On Sunday June 2, I had the pleasure of taking a full-day pre-institute course from information designer Stephanie Evergreen, called Presenting Data Effectively.

Stephanie is to presentation design what Stacey and Clinton are to fashion (if you’re missing the analogy, click here). She’s the “What NOT to Present” guru. Show up with bad PowerPoint design and she will teach you “the rules.” 

Here are just a few of the key take-aways for slides:

  • Slides are visual supports for the speaker. The speaker is the conveyor of information.
  • People can read 7 times faster than people can speak. We can’t read AND listen well at the same time.
  • We can get in the way of people understanding when we read aloud while they are reading to themselves.
  • Fonts have personalities (who knew?).
  • Logos, if used, do NOT need to go on every slide. It is sufficient to limit them to the first and last slide, and put them on the handout.
  • ONE idea per slide (see Seth Godin’s Atomic Development concept).

What NOT to Present

I brought my own course slides to Stephanie’s workshop for some potential updating. Fortunately, I’d been following Stephanie’s work all along, so my slides were in pretty good shape. There was still much to learn, though!

Here’s a simple illustration of some key points.

Now, this is more like it! Thanks Stephanie!

No bullets

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