Make Your Presentations Evergreen

If you’re a manager, you’ll find a lot of your job is giving presentations. Status presentations. Market presentations. Project presentations. Analysis presentations. Proposal presentations. Training presentations. Presentations to those above you. Presentations to your colleagues. To clients. To your team. Presentations everywhere! 

It takes a lot of work to develop that much. If you present, you know how much time and effort goes into a good presentation. If you’re going to put in that much effort, you want to get the most out of it. 

Some presentations, like status presentations, are very much about a specific moment in time. Those must be created from scratch, and when they’re done, they’re done. 

But other presentations—sales, analysis, proposals, training—can be reused. You can give them again in their entirety. Or you can use them as the starting point for other presentations further on down the line. 

If your presentations rely on slides (and we can talk about that decision in a future podcast), you can carefully design them to be sneakily reusable.

Sales, analysis, proposals, and training presentations can be reused. Or you can use them as the starting point for other presentations further on down the line.

Use a Consistent Look-and-Feel for All Your Presentations

Give all your presentations a consistent look and feel. That means color scheme, font choice, and layout. Most presentation software provides templates for different slides, so everything within a presentation goes together. Then when you change or add a slide, you don’t need to worry about formatting it. The formatting magically matches the rest of the presentation.

Don’t just stop at one presentation; do them all. Choose the same theme for everything. The same colors, fonts, and layouts—for all your presentations. This way, you can easily cut and paste slides from one presentation to another. You won’t need to reformat them or tweak them to get them to match. They’ll already match. So combining material from multiple presentations will be a snap.

Develop Your Presentation in Modules

There’s no reason to stop at copying single slides between presentations. Sometimes presentations share entire topics. For example, one of my favorite productivity techniques is Speed dating your tasks. Speed-dating belongs in my both Work Less and Do More speech, and my How to Beat Procrastination speech.

Do this by thinking of reusability from the moment you create the model. Don’t include client names, dates, or anything that would tie the module to one presentation. Then reuse it in a new presentation, lickity-split. Just copy-and-paste it, lock, stock, and barrel. 

You can even create title screens for each module, which makes it easy to add to any presentation that has separate sections.

Personalize as Little as Possible

Don’t personalize your presentations for your audience. Don’t put your client’s name in the headers and footers of presentations. I used to put a client’s name on the footer of every slide, which meant more customization to reuse any part of a presentation.

Audiences do like to feel special, though. So customize your title screen out the wazoo. Put the client’s name, the name of the event where you’re presenting, and a subtitle that mentions the CEO of their company as the most brilliant, amazing, insightful, competent leader in all of human history. They’ll be so dazzled by the title screen that they won’t even notice the absence of their CEO’s name from the rest of the deck.

Choose General Examples

Some presentations need to use company-specific information. If you’re presenting to your zombie army on the conditions at the front, that’s not a presentation you’re going to reuse. Pretty much everything you say will be specific to the situation.

But it’s different for sales presentations, training, classes, and customer presentations. Those may be totally reusable, or comprised of modules that are reusable.

For those, when choosing examples, choose timeless examples that aren’t specific to any client or time period. Imagine giving a presentation on how to be a better leader. If you say “Bill Gates is a great example of a prominent technology CEO,” your example will get dated now that Bill’s mainly a philanthropist. So make up an example. “Consider Ashley Moneybags, a prominent technology CEO. Ashley’s fictional, and combines the traits that we know make a good technology CEO…” 

You can give exactly the same presentation, but using Ashley as an example that will always work. You’ll find that audiences will go right along with fictional examples as long as they have the relevant information.

Avoid Topical News Stories

In the same vein, avoid using topical news stories if you can. News has a way of changing. Today’s gigantic success story is tomorrow’s scandal of corruption and deception. This is especially true in business and politics, where fortunes come and go overnight. 

One day, you’re holding up ImaginaryCo as an example of a company led by ethical values. Then the news breaks that ImaginaryCo just helped topple a foreign government in order to get more favorable tax policies. Oops. That presentation on “Lessons on Doing Good from ImaginaryCo” just changed from an ethical roadmap to a handbook for Machiavellian propaganda.

It’s not a coincidence that my podcast examples often use imaginary characters working in a slightly surreal plant store. My fictional examples can be honed to show off exactly the point I’m trying to make. The examples are vivid enough to be memorable. And they’re not tied to any real place or people. So years from now, the tips and examples will be as relevant as they are now.

Don’t Use Specific Dates

Speaking of years, any time your presentation includes a date, you’ve dated your presentation. If your copyright says 2002, your audience might believe they’re getting a tired, stale presentation. But if you give exactly the same presentation and the copyright date is this year, they’ll think you’ve descended directly from Mount Olympus to pass on the nectar of the gods.

Some presentation software lets you insert a dynamic date field into a presentation. That field will always display as the current date or year. If your software can do this, make your copyright date be a date field, instead of plain, unchanging text.

Communicating is a huge part of a manager’s job. The more audiences you have, the greater the chances you can reuse some of your material between audiences. Give your slides and presentations a consistent style and you can easily reuse slides and modules. Keep your examples specific, but generic, and avoid anything that will tie the presentation to a specific date. Pretty soon, you’ll be able to mix and match existing material to get a head start on anything you need to present.

I’m Stever Robbins. If you need to clear the clutter in your office, home, or life, check out get it done groups to learn how Get-it-Done Groups can help you restore order and regain control. 

Work Less, Do More, and have a Great Life!

Presentation image courtesy of Shutterstock.