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!

Need Content? Train your staff. (Give staff a voice! Part 9 of 10)

Need content?

Ask your staff. Right? They all have stories, they are the experts.

And you already have a content plan, so the topic is set.

So blamo! Ask the staff to create and just wait for it to be done.

Wrong. We have already talked about all of the obstacles and then I shared some ideas on how to remove the barriers. The key will be to build up to the ask. And one of the best ways to build up to the ask is to progressively build skills and as you build the skills ask the participants to practice.

So where do you begin in this training?

With the basics.

Provide information about writing for each medium.

Web - concise, directed, bullets, data, transparent, keywords, audience oriented, purposeful
--read some good articles

Email - stories, links, call to action, news
--read some good articles

Social Media - when training you need to remember that they are all different. You can count on mass publishing for all of your content. You have to continuously show how to adapt content to audiences and the medium.

Facebook - personality, engaging, images, video, humor, questions
--read some good articles

LinkedIn - professional, jobs, volunteers, news, connections, collaboration
--read some good articles

Twitter - timely, replies, frequent, repeats ok, short, humor
--read some good articles

Not sure if you noticed what I did there. I started by talking about training your staff on how to write, but then send you to a bunch of good articles to read for yourself.

That's right, the first training that has to happen is that YOU realize that no matter how long you have been creating content for any medium, you need to take time to train yourself in order to train others. Take time to read articles (or at least scan them) to refresh your thinking, see new trends or pick up tips.

Then take the articles and use them as training tools. Pick the resources or articles that best match your org, your goals or your approach and share them in a central place for all staff. Using an outside source will establish authority and importance. Plus you don't have to do as much work.

Build your trainings around information that people can relate to. Don't get buried in showing them the steps.

An important note about training staff. Most of the time staff don't want the training until they are already in the middle of the process. They get started and realize they need some help. Make sure your trainings can be accessed at any time. Create cheat sheets, recordings, a list of resources, etc.

So finally, here is the key to all of this. Training staff for digital content needs to be approachable, regular, ongoing, focused on voice\style\approach and fun!

Is LinkedIn a weak spot in your social networking chain?

So a while back Beth Kanter asked me to write a "resource rich" post about how to use LinkedIn and I have been trying to come up with something very clever to say. But I just realized that I dont need clever when direct and simple will work better.

We are all spending time building our personal networks and at work we may spend time building our organization's network, but are we spending anytime growing our own career and brand as many like to call it (like Dan Schwabel in Me 2.0 or many other bloggers)?

LinkedIn is a professional network with a low entry point of time commitment, clean interface with a clear purpose of helping you be successful in your career or business.

Lets face it, at one point or another all of us will be looking for a job, looking to hire someone or trying to make a business connection, so why wait until the need smacks you in the face, get LinkedIn. So build your professional network now.

Here are some creative ways I would suggest using LinkedIn.

Who Is Steve Heye?

View more OpenOffice presentations from Steve Heye.

• Install the Slideshare or Google presentation app and create a powerpoint that shows who you are
• Install the box.net files and upload some samples of work you are allowed to share
• Post your volunteer experience
• Keep in touch with your orgs staff alumni (create a group)
• Make sure someone checks your company's profile to add details and information about your organization

And beyond that, if you work for a nonprofit, job recruiting can be even tougher. So you need to take advantage of every opportunity to share who works at your organization and why they love it. You should encourage all of your staff at your nonprofit to join LinkedIn in my opinion. Many people have a Facebook or other personal socialnetworking page, but how many have something to represent themselves professionally ? Do your staff even understand the difference? As nonprofits dont we have some sort of duty to equip our staff to grow their career, even if they leave our organization? (see my powerpoint on this)

OK, so that was too many random thoughts, here is the direct portion followed by some AWESOME resources:

Dan Schwabel in the book Me 2.0 offers this advice for Linked In.

1. Craft your profile (my thoughts=Spend time filling in all areas and think through how you want to be seen. Pick a focus for who you are, dont try to list everything.)

2. Start and expand your network (my thoughts= use the tools to find colleagues from past jobs, import your contacts from your email, join some groups, look at your friends list of contacts to recruit more. Then spend time setting up groups and organize your contacts. Then everytime you go to an event or meet people, connect with them on LinkedIn.)

3. Control your Google results

4. Ask for Advice (my thoughts= Dont just ask for advice, be a giver, answer some questions.)

5. Get Recommendations (my thoughts= Recommed other people. Dont just spam and ask everyone to recommend you, ask people who will take the time to post a well written, thoughtful recommendation. And maybe seek out those people who are influential.)

6. Search Jobs

Here are some great resources:

1. Great collection of article post from Aleesa Brauer for job seekers
   
2. Good post from Guy Kawasaki on using LinkedIn on ways to use it better
3. A comprehensive set of resources gathered by iig insights group
4. Mashable talks about getting the most from LinkedIn (how can you not mention Mashable?)
5. Few more links on my delicious

What I see missing from all of these is how to use this as a nonprofit to fight for a cause, but I think that is the point here. We have to balance which tools we use to promote ourselves, our organization and our cause. Maybe this isnt the best place to promote a cause, but it might be good to find AWESOME staff or stay connected with other professionals as individuals and orgs.