for Your Firm By Brenda Benham

HOW TO USE PRESENTATIONS TO STAND OUT AND GET MORE CLIENTS FOR YOUR FIRM

By Brenda Benham

Would you like your audience to see you as the expert you are? Would you like presentations to bring new clients to your firm? If you answered “yes” to either of those questions, you want to make sure that your presentations include slides that are supportive, effective and visible.

For most of my legal career, every presentation I gave included a slide deck with slides that contained all the important information I wanted to share. My slides were nothing but enormous amounts of text. In 2014, I learned the brain science of how people learn and remember. Putting all the information on my slides was completely counterproductive to my goals of sharing information that people would retain. My audiences were completely disengaged.

To keep an audience engaged, to give presentations that are memorable, and to have the audience thinking of your firm when they need help, you must have supportive, effective and visible slides.

SUPPORTIVE SLIDES The purpose of your slides is to support you as the presenter and enhance your presentation, not distract from it. There are several ways that slides can become distracting. Slides as Speaking Notes Some presenters feel they need to use their slides as speaking notes. They are afraid that if what they are saying is not on their slides, they will not remember what to say.

There are several reasons this is counterproductive.

First, if you are doing an in-person presentation and reading what is on the slide, you may well have your back to the audience. You definitely will not be connecting with your audience if you are not looking at them.

Second, your audience may well be reading ahead. If you have complete sentences on your slides that include everything you are saying, your audience will be reading it, likely faster than you are saying it. Once you audience is reading, they are not listening to you.

Do you remember reading bedtime stories to your children or having bedtime stories read to you? We read stories to children to help them fall asleep. You do not want your audience falling asleep as you read to them. Slides as Handouts Other presenters think their audience needs their key points on their slides so audience members will remember those points. Essentially these presenters are using their slides as handouts.

That is also counterproductive.

Handouts may well be necessary, but your slides are not there to be your handouts.

Bullets have the same problem of your audience reading ahead. Your audience will almost certainly read faster than you will discuss the bullet points on your slide. If that is happening, they will be reading and thinking about a later point than the one you are discussing. Once that happens, your audience is unlikely to be listening to you.

In addition, if what you are saying is not related to the bullets on your screen, the brains of your audience members will be trying to figure out what is going on, what are the differences, and why there are differences between what you are saying and what is on the slides. If your audience’s brains are doing that, they are not taking in your important information. Brain Science: Overloading Limited Working Memory John Sweller’s “cognitive load theory”1 talks about the limits on working memory.

Working memory is where everything goes in your brain in whatever way it comes in, whether through your eyes, your ears, your nose, etc. Working memory is a limited resource and you do not want to fill it up with irrelevant stuff. Sweller talks about limiting the how you are presenting so that there is room in your audience’s limited working memory for the what you are presenting. The what you are presenting is the important information you are there to share.

If information does not make it into working memory, it will never end up in long-term memory.

If you have too much text or too many bullets on screen that may well overwhelm your audience’s limited working memory. If that happens, your audience will not take in what you are saying and will not remember your key information.

Tool: Put Important Information in a Handout Often your audience needs detailed information, particularly if you are talking to your peers. That does not mean your key information should be on your slides. Instead, you have two options.

One is to put your important information in a handout that you hand out after you speak. If that is what you decide to do, let your audience know near the beginning of your presentation that this detailed handout will be coming after your finish your presentation.

The second option is to create a fillable handout that has blanks for your audience to fill in with some or all of your important information while you speak. This will engage your audience, particularly if they are kinesthetic learners.2 You can always provide the filled-in handout after your presentation.

EFFECTIVE SLIDES The second question is whether your slides are effective. As indicated above, the purpose of your slides is to support your presentation. If you overwhelm your audience with text and data, your slides will not be effective. This is counterproductive. Brain Science: Too Much Text or Data and No Images Richard E. Mayer’s book, MultiMedia Learning, 3 sets out 12 principles that enhance learning. His work is based on John Sweller’s “cognitive load theory”, discussed above. The following three principles relate directly to my approach to slides.

Mayer’s “Multimedia Principle” says “people learn better from words and pictures than from words alone”.

His “Modality Principle” says “people learn better from graphics and narrations than from animation and on-screen text”.

His “Redundancy Principle” says “people learn better from graphics and narration than from graphics, narration and on-screen text”.

Put another way, people would remember more if you had just spoken and had an image on the screen. They will remember less if you spoke with no slides, if you did not speak and just provided slides with animation and text, or if you spoke and had slides with images and on-screen text. I recommend slightly more than just an image, since I think it helps to have a title on each slide and it is fine to have up to three very short bullets. This approach works really well and people still remember the key information. In Real Life I actually saw this in real life. In January 2016, I was at the office where I used to work at the B.C. Securities Commission. There were a number of us

in a boardroom watching a presentation from Ontario on crowdfunding. The presenter talked about the rules in British Columbia and got the rules completely backwards. He said the crowdfunding exemption in British Columbia could be used only by a group that was not entitled to use that exemption.

At the end of the presentation, I commented to my colleagues on how weird it was to see someone get the law completely backward. All but one of them agreed it was weird. That person said “No, no. He got it right”. We went back and forth a few times and then the person said “I know what happened. I was reading his slide. I didn’t hear a word he said”.

There is no point presenting if your audience does not hear what you are saying. Tools

Include an image and title on every slide Your audience will remember more if every slide has an image and title. You need to think about what the best image is to support your presentation. Do not pull images off a search engine, like Google. Many of those images are subject to copyright protection. Instead, use a free image site like Pexels4 or Unsplash.5

Alternatively, you can seek help from an expert.

Include no more than three bullets per slide of one to three words Your audience will remember more, the less text you have on your slide. However, sometimes you will need to include at least a few, very short bullets. I recommend including no more than three bullets per slide, between one to three words.

Using bullets in this way will help you stay organized without reading your presentation and will provide your audience with guide posts for where you are going.

If you do not need bullets, do not use them. Just an image and title are fine. If you do need them, really cut back on how much text is in each bullet and how many bullets are on each slide.

Have your bullets animated and slide in one by one Even with just three very short bullets, you do not want all of them on the screen at the beginning. You do not want your audience distracted by later points you will be discussing. You should add animation to your bullets.

I recommend choosing a simple animation like float, wipe or appear. Try out a few and see which one you prefer. Make sure you keep the same animation throughout your slide deck. You do not want to distract your audience by having some bullets float in, others wipe, and still others appear.

If you are not familiar with animation and need help, reach out to an expert.

VISIBLE SLIDES Some people create slides where the text is so small that your audience members cannot see the text at all or really have to squint to see the text. Indeed, you may have heard people apologizing for the fact that the slide is unreadable. There is absolutely no point in putting up an unreadable slide.

Sometimes presenters put graphs on their slides. Extremely simple graphs can be effective in conveying information. However, often graphs have unreadable information.

If graphs have unreadable information or text slanting sideways on the screen, your audience will be desperately trying to read what is included in the graph. Do not force your audience to try to figure out what is on the slide.

This is counterproductive.

As above, if audience members are squinting to see the text on your screen or to decipher things on a graph, they will not be listening to you. Slides with text in small fonts will simply distract the audience. The audience will not remember your key information.

The size of the text on your slides matters. It needs to be easily visible to those at the back of the room, when you are presenting in person, and to those with visual challenges, when you are presenting online. Tool: 15-Step Test I created this 15-step test so you can check if the text on your slides is big enough.

To do this test, pick the slide that has the most text on it. Walk back from your screen at least 15 steps then turn around and face the slide. Can you read the text easily or not? If not, you need to increase the font size until it is easily readable and likely also remove some of the text from your slide.

If you take the information from this article and apply it to the slides in your next presentation, you will give a much better presentation because you will be using the brain science of how people learn and remember. Presentations that are memorable and engaging lead to people thinking of your firm when they need legal support.

ENDNOTES

1. John Sweller, “Cognitive Load During Problem Solving: Effects on Learning (1988) 12:2 Cognitive Science 257–85. 2. Houghton University, “Kinesthetic Learning Style”, online: <www.houghton.edu/current-students/center -for-student-success/academic-support-and-accessi

bility-services/study-advisement/general-studyinformation/kinesthetic-learning-style/>. 3. Richard E Mayer, Multimedia Learning, 2nd ed (2009). 4. Online: <www.pexels.com>. 5. Online: <www.unsplash.com>.