Getting back to the Soft Skills - Presentation Skills

I count myself lucky to have landed in my job at NetSuite (now part of Oracle). I get to do some amazing work with nonprofits and spend some time thinking about how we can assist small nonprofits with their operations and financials. So awesome. But another great part is the resources available. I recently got to spend a couple days at a Soft Skills training and learned a bunch of things. So I thought I would take a bit of time to share a few things from this training and other things I have learned along the way that are relevant to anyone who needs to do a presentation.

Get comfortable with the content

Death by PowerPoint is no joke. If you don't know your content well enough to present it without reading a script or reading from the slides. If you know your content, it allows you to be natural in your presentation and have some fun with it. So practice it.

Have a plan.

Building your slide deck is not a plan in my experience.  All you are doing is planning what you are going to say and when. This would work great if your style is just to present the material and allow for questions, which for some scenarios is the only choice.  But I find it useful to create a training design, this allows me to think through the flow and objectives for each part, not just the content.

Here is what I typically use, I create a sample in a Google Doc. Beth Kanter has a good post on learning design! (Beth is wicked smart and rocks at presenting, by the way)

Pick your style for the presentation.

I think the biggest mistakes I have made when presenting is trying to do it all in one session: tell a story, run a workshop, present, interactive exercises, humor, entertainment, high level learning, detailed deep dive, etc.  I think the ones which worked best were the simple ones. I picked one hook for my session and stuck with it all the way. One theme and one approach with a clear message. You can mix a couple of these styles in, but it has to make sense with the topic and flow. How many times have you been in a session and the group activity felt forced or the story seemed to be a stretch or they spent the whole time entertaining but you never seemed to get to the content?

Techy or technical presentation?
Peter Campbell has an awesome post on how to handle this!

Practice
Yeah, I think I already mentioned practice, but practice should be repeated. And this is even more key when you have a team or a panel. Don't just wing it, unless that is the style of your presentation. But if winging is the style, make that clear in the description. However, even with a wing it interview style session, you still have to plan the time by topic, questions you will ask, prep the panel and do a dry run of the flow. So yeah, I go back to my original statement, you have to practice.

Random tips from the training I attended:

Tell, Show, Tell

Tell what you are going to show, Show it, Tell them what you showed.   Basically this goes to recency and primacy.  People remember what was repeated and what was said most recently.

Rule of 3 

Things told in chunks of 3 are easier to remember.  Read this article about it.

Limbic and Stories

There is a connection between memory and emotions (limbic system), stories are a great way to make this happen. Read this article as an example.  But there are many ways to bring emotion into your presentation, pick ones that match the plan and style you picked earlier, don't force it.

Well anyway, that is all the time I have for this post.  There is so much more you can do, but thought I would share.

Here is my list of links for you to read more:

https://del.icio.us/sheye/presentations 

And finally I hope to see you at #17NTC, if you don't know what that is or want to connect with me there, read my post!

NTEN Tech Leadership Academy and what I learned already.

While I have been working on my transition from Steve Heye to just "the Steve," I have been too busy to post to my blog.  So instead I am just going to share some of the things I have learned while preparing for the upcoming Tech Leadership Academy from NTEN. I'm presenting with John Merritt, but I have already learned a few things without the event even happening yet, just imagine once it does happen.



Incredible training op from NTEN - Technology Leadership Academy! This is a free training for smaller orgs, but it is so much more than just a training.  They have assembled some of the best trainers, well plus me, to cover the spectrum of technology topics.

Apply before July 30 right here! http://www.nten.org/techacademy

Part of what they will be covering in the Academy above is a great diagram that is in a slideshow from the awesome Holly Ross . The slide shows an adapted, simplified version of the IT Alignment stages that I refer to a lot. But they have added some arrows indicating that as alignment increases the technology brings additional service to the mission.  I like the simplicity of it.

But then she also a second diagram (but it looks like she is borrowing it from Save the Children) of a IT Strategy pyramid that talks about how to progress forward in these IT Alignment stages. This diagram helps illustrate that only one of the levels is solely focused on tech tools, the foundation.

The second level requires examining your operations and tech. The third level is not just business steps, it is how you deliver your programs, serve your constituents, meet your mission with tech.

The top of the triangle is all about what you do differently, this requires not just thinking about how you deliver services, but how you can leverage technology to completely change your whole organization, add a new service or completely redefine the way you meet your mission leveraging technology.

To see the full presentation that Holly created you can visit SlideShare at: http://www.slideshare.net/nten_hross/let-a-thousand-tech-flowers-bloom

Thanks for inviting me to participate Holly, looking forward to it!

IT/Fin Dev Relationship, ONTC slides, NTEN guest blog

I have been pretty busy at work and at home but found a smidgen of time to do a few little things to possible help the greater good or inspire some thoughts.  So I thought I would share those here, in case both of my readers were interested.

First, John Merritt and I had a great time presenting during the Online Nonprofit Technology Conference for NTEN. We broke down our thoughts about how to approach IT Alignment based on a typical org chart.  After all an org chart does tell you a lot about how IT is viewed in your org. As we went through the slides we took turns sharing examples of how we approached each part of the org, plus highlighted successes and failures in those efforts.  Thanks to the awesome staff at NTEN for including us!  So here is that presentation:

IT Alignment (org chart style)

View more presentations from Steve Heye.

But that's not all folks.

NTEN Blog Guest Post!

I was also invited to write a guest post for the NTEN blog, how cool is that!?!? They gave me free reign on topic but set a word limit.  Lucky for them I was a little focused that day and didnt end up talking about flying monkeys improve air quality or how lightsabres are awesome hedge clippers. Rather I stayed on topic and talked about IT Alignment, but I did completely ignore their suggested word limit!  CLICK HERE TO READ THIS AMAZING POST! (ok over did it there)

IT Guy to Fundraisers: Partner With Us


I was asked by Fundraising Success to write an article based on my planned participation in the ONTC.  So I decided to have a little fun with the friendly people over in Financial Development.  They can be so serious about raising all that money and stuff. Well anyway, you can read that article by clicking here, no maybe here, no wait here.


I will get back to the 11 part series next week, but at this rate I wont even finish this year.