It’s often said that a golfer’s favorite word is “mulligan.” If you’re not familiar, that’s when you hit a dreadful shot, usually into a forest or a lake, and simply drop a second ball at your feet and proclaim, “that one didn’t count.” You then hit again and go on your merry way, happy to have had a chance to re-write a bit of history.
In PowerPoint parlance, our mulligan is the makeover – that fantastic and fantastical opportunity to press Pause and create an alternate reality. That horrible slide with eight long-winded bullets and a postage-stamp photo? Take a mulligan!
On June 21, I host a free webinar, Marvelous Makeovers, in which I will take slides submitted to me this week and show you how to apply universal principles that will make your own slides sparkle. Makeover seminars are consistently the most popular sessions at the annual Presentation Summit, but what exactly is a presentation makeover? Is it just slapping a bit of lipstick on a pig of a slide deck and declaring it a winner? In fact, there are many forms of makeovers, and they might all be on display across this 90 minutes:
Message: Well-intended content creators often lose sight of the story they mean to tell.
Structure: If the foundation of your presentation is flawed (like trying to create slides that serve as visuals and as handouts), you will be swimming upstream the whole time.
Slide design: The classic case of “who created this sludge and how can we fix it?”
After: Mulligan! cleaner text, strong visual focus, engaging headline.
PowerPoint technique: Most users of the software are undertrained and rarely go below the surface of PowerPoint’s feature set. That can have a profound effect on how they build their slides.
Delivery: A well-designed presentation both relies on and encourages presenters to be at the top of their games.
So let’s talk makeovers on June 21. Better yet, let’s make you over: send your under-performing slides to makeovers@betterpresenting.com by June 19 and we might use them during the hour. That’s a $1,500 value that you’d get gratis.
This is a free webinar, open to all. Register here.