In PR and wider business, PowerPoint is unavoidable. Whether It’s in new business pitches, internal and client reports, or public speeches, your PowerPoint skills can really make you stand out…or let you down. With this in mind – and given some designers charge £100 a page for their services – why don’t employers spend more time upskilling their teams with PowerPoint training?
Let’s face it. We’ve all sat through crap PowerPoint presentations. Poor PowerPoint presentations have lost agencies new business, and cost individuals their interview. Our decks reflect our creativity and care – or lack of it.
I had an epiphany a few years ago. There were some grumblings about the quality of an internal presentation I had given. The reason it wasn’t that great was because – like many people – I’d only ever been self-taught at PowerPoint. I’ve worked with a number of agencies of various sizes and no one had ever shown me. It’s a common story.
From there on in, I decided to get good at PowerPoint. I had no choice, as PowerPoint is essential in PR – especially given I’d be speaking in public an awful lot. I took courses, went to more conferences, taking note of the good – and the bad – along the way.
I’m sure many of you have experimented with Prezi and Keynote, and they may be your preferred presentation platform, but I’ve gravitated back to PowerPoint – it’s pretty ubiquitous – and used it in to good effect since, keynoting twice for Econsultancy Digital Cream Singapore and training for the likes of ClickZ, BrightonSEO, and the PRCA.
For this reason, I’ve been running hands-on PowerPoint training sessions for PR agencies, which covers not only what content needs to go into new business, internal reports and public speeches, but also the story arc, psychological factors that keep audiences engaged and – of course – the many practical functions that can really bring a PowerPoint deck to life.
Have a look at the video and, if PowerPoint training is something you need at your agency, do please get in touch.