More convincing than the British government. We are editing the slides of the closed briefing on the “Skripal case” while we are going in a taxi

On March 29, Kommersant published a presentation that representatives of foreign embassies received at a closed briefing at the British Embassy in Moscow on March 22 on the “Skripal case”. It was she, according to the US Ambassador to Russia John Huntsman, prompted the British allies in solidarity to send Russian diplomats.

The purpose of the presentation, it would seem, was achieved with success. The audience listened to the speaker, agreed with the theses and unanimously took concrete actions – the mission to send Russian delegates was successful.

I do not know about you, but I, speaking to a fairly large audience, usually do not have the authority of the British government to immediately incline listeners to specific actions (for this, slides are not needed). On the contrary: in practice, I have to focus the audience’s attention to myself, only supporting the presentation with a clear argument or illustration on the slides.

I think you, too. Classics of the genre: you go in a taxi and an hour before the meeting, you realize that with such a presentation, you are waiting for failure. We need quick and productive solutions in the express mode. On the example of the British slides on the “Skripal case” I will show how to make the presentation more convincing, when the political weight does not solve the situation.

Format

First, the presentation was created for reading from a printout or a screen, and not for a presentation. Performing with such slides means losing your audience’s attention in a couple of minutes (if they are not, of course, scared). The audience reads faster than the speaker says, so they quickly become bored, but just then someone wrote in Facebook and …

Well nothing. We do not have time, we gave the presentation in the form of prints – they read it. By the way, in this case it is possible to speak without slides, which is cool: do not connect the projector and worry that fonts will go.

Structure

In the structure of the presentation, I find it difficult to understand – I first encountered her theme. It is necessary to download the main idea of ​​the slide to the brain at the start: if it is understandable and everyone agrees with it, then you can scroll to the next slide. Therefore (unexpectedly) we add the essence such as headings to the presentation and place the key theses in them. It seems necessary to put these:

• What happened Sergei Skripal, his daughter Yulia Skripal, and UK policeman Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey remain in hospital
• How is this considered ? First offensive use of a nerve agent in Europe since the Second World War. Without doubt Russia is responsible
• What a poison such a Novichok interferes with the normal functioning of the nervous system. If untreated, it will cause death by asphyxiation or cardiac arrest.
• What to do with this We will deter Russian malign activity

Style

Calibri – a font not worthy of the government of Great Britain. But we are in a taxi, there’s no time to look for new fonts, so for simplicity we put AutoTo replace fonts in PowerPoint everywhere in Times New Roman (a Sherlock screensaver starts to sound in your head).

Slides

On the slide with the timing there is a map. It is context-related to the event, but it does not illustrate any of the timing items, so we safely fire it on a separate slide (remember that making a new slide is for free). If you suddenly make a presentation in the Savings Bank and you set the condition “No more than five slides,” you can cheat and use the slide with the card as a handout.

Turn the events along the flow of time from left to right, quickly find in Google photos of institutions and it turns out this way:

Perhaps these illustrations make you feel threatened, but they only cause me pain. God is with them with pixels, but they do not illustrate exactly anything. If illustrations do not illustrate – we fire.

In the title, we already have the main idea, so everyone understood everything. It remains only to pack a quote person (on the hierarchy, it does not fit into the bullet list) – and it’s ready:

 

After

Further we show that all this is only a link of a long chain. In general, according to logic – this is also a timeline, but we do not have time – we just make it easier:

After

There was the main slide with the answer to the question “What to do now with this”, which did not even have a clear call to action. At the express stage of the structure, we did it, left to remove the pictures for decoration and to diversify the icons with Noun Project , while we stand in the traffic jam on the entrance.

Done!

After

As well as the last time , we included persuasiveness, using super simple actions, deduced the key idea into the headline and removed all obstacles to understanding the essence in the form of unnecessary picture-skeletons. The rest is aesthetics.

Use simple and effective solutions in your presentations!