Being asked to deliver a presentation is enough to give some people shaky knees.
But what about when you are asked to write a presentation for someone else to deliver?
Of course, you don’t face the sometimes daunting task of delivering the presentation to an audience, but finding the right words for your CEO, boss or colleague to say, brings its own unique pressures and challenges.
The last thing you want to do is provide someone with something mediocre to deliver.
So how can you write a presentation for your speaker which ensures they sound credible and authentic and enables them to get the key message across successfully?
Here are seven tips from our presentation skills training courses:
Get to know the speaker
This is absolutely crucial.
A presentation which sounds like it has been prepared by someone else is a good way of ensuring the audience will lose interest and switch-off altogether.
To avoid this pitfall the presentation needs to be scripted in the speaker’s voice and this means spending time with them and getting to know them a little. If you, or they, are pressed for time, this could be as simple as observing them in a meeting, where you will pick up certain words and phrases that they tend to use and get a feel for any language, for example slang, which they definitely would not use.
The closer the presentation is to the language they use every day the more comfortable they will be when it comes to delivery.
Include personal stories
On our presentation skills training courses we stress the importance of ensuring the main message is memorable.
The best way to do this is to make those messages human through anecdotes, stories and examples. And often the strongest anecdotes are those which are personal to the speaker.
This means that you are going to need to interview your speaker, or at the very least ask them for some personal stories.
These anecdotes need to be relevant and relatable as well as something the speaker is willing to share to a wider audience. The best ones take the audience on a journey. So, if your presentation is about a new financial product, you could say something like: “When we were sitting down to figure out how we could make this product we knew we wanted it to be easy for people to understand and simple to explain. I used to go home and try and explain elements of the service to my kids. They’re seven and ten and unsurprisingly have no previous experience of pensions and investments, so were a perfect audience for me and really helped me to know what we were saying was easy to comprehend.”
Understand the audience
There is a big difference between delivering a presentation to an internal audience, at an annual meeting for example, and speaking to a room of strangers or external clients.
If they already know the audience, or at least some of them, a more informal approach may be beneficial to the presentation.
Knowing exactly who the speaker will be talking to will also help you make better decisions about the tone to adopt and which stories and anecdotes should be used.
Simplify the content
Chances are if you are writing a presentation for someone else they are likely to have a more senior position in the organisation.
And the danger with this is some writers will have a natural tendency to overcomplicate things.
The key is to keep the presentation, its structure and the vocabulary simple so that your speaker does not struggle with the delivery and the audience can follow what is being said.
Don’t try and get across too many messages - most people will only remember one or two key points so make sure that these come through clearly.
Ditch the jargon
We said earlier that you should get to know the speaker and try to incorporate the language they use in the presentation.
There is, however, one exception – jargon. If your speaker tends to use a lot of jargon or corporate speak in their day-to-day office language you need to keep it out of the presentation.
The best presentations use simple, everyday language which everyone can understand.
Even when presenting to peers jargon should be avoided.
As Albert Einstein once said: “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”
Encourage your speaker to take ownership
Once you have drafted the presentation and you have followed the advice outlined above, encourage your speaker to further personalise the content.
No matter how well you have got to know them or how many personal anecdotes you have included, there will undoubtedly still be some small tweaks which can make the content more personal and give it more heart.
This should not be a time consuming task and the more personal the presentation, the more relaxed they will be when they come to deliver it.
Rehearse and fine tune
Your speaker cannot afford to deliver the presentation for the first time at the speaking event. Ask them to deliver the presentation to you and assess whether it sounds natural or whether it feels like they are reading prepared material.
The more familiar they become with the content the better their delivery will be for the real thing.
Identify what you want to achieve from the presentation
What’s your ‘call to action’? Do you want people to be motivated to do something after the presentation or perhaps think differently about something? Maybe you want to educate or entertain them?
Whatever it is you need to identify this at the start before putting pen to paper or tapping the keyboard.
Identify your business and personal brand
How do you want them to feel about the presenter and your business? What is the personal and business brand values that you’re trying to reinforce? How will your presentation make people feel?
As the poet Maya Angelou said: “People will forget what you said. People will forget what you did. But people will never forget how you made them feel.”
Media First are media and communications training specialists with over 30 years of experience. We have a team of trainers, each with decades of experience working as journalists, presenters, communications coaches and media trainers.
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