All Great Presentations Start With This

Anyone working in health and science communication faces a familiar challenge: how to deliver presentations that actually land. Whether you are giving a webinar, a conference talk, or a TED-style lightning talk, strong presentation skills start long before you open PowerPoint. 

Tracy walks through a TED-style lightning talk built around a failure story and a counterintuitive choice: no slides at all. Katrina shares a moment from a recorded webinar where a story about language and audience targeting landed the opposite way it was meant to. We talk about why “perfect” is a trap in public health communication, how being human can actually build trust, and why now is the time to be brave when you speak.

And finally, we share a practical social media tip you can use today to expand your reach.

Tracy's talk (Episode 16): https://www.buzzsprout.com/2452091/episodes/19211516 

Graphics: https://www.t4cip.org/safer-storage

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This podcast is a project of the Center for Injury Research Translation and Communication (CIRTC). Connect with CIRTC: www.cirtc.org

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Note: all thoughts and opinions shared in this podcast are personal and not representative of any organization.

Transcript

Tracy 0:10

Welcome to Communications Breakdown, where we break down what works and doesn't in health and science communication. I'm Tracy Mehan.

Katrina 0:19

And I'm Katrina Boylan. It's conference season. And if you're like us, we are back to doing some in-person events again, but we're still doing an awful lot of virtual presentations as well. So in this episode, we're going to talk about presentations. We're going to start with one of Tracy's recent talks that was a little unorthodox for the conference, but was received very, very well. And then we're going to talk a little bit about my experience with vulnerability as a presenter. And then we're going to finish up with a practical tip that you can use right now to help boost your reach on social media. So let's go ahead and jump in with your talk, Tracy. Now, again, you recently attended an in-person conference. And we wanted to go back to the moment where you found out that you had been accepted for a talk and start from there to break down how we tend to approach different types of presentation sessions.

Start With Audience And One Goal

Katrina 1:20

So, Tracy, let's start with, you know, you got this email that you're given the talk. Walk us through kind of what this talk was and where that process starts for you.

Tracy 1:31

Yeah. So to set the stage, this was going to be a talk about how we failed when we were creating graphics for our national campaign and what we learned from that experience. And it was meant to be a lightning talk that was supposed to be similar to the TED talk style, a talk that shared a big idea that was only meant to be about eight to 10 minutes. So this was a little different from the type of talk I normally give. But even still, I started thinking about the talk the same way that I do any talk that I do, no matter what style it is.

Katrina 2:08

Yep. As with all of our healthcom projects and practices, we start with the same thing. Who is our audience? And especially in this case, we definitely think about what they are used to in the setting that we're going to be providing this information in.

Tracy 2:25

Yeah. So for this talk, I knew I was going to be talking to researchers who are used to seeing presentations with slides with lots of data on it. And I will say how I build the slides and the way I talk about things during my presentation definitely changes based on who my audience is. So that is something that I always make to find out about before I even start thinking about my presentation. And then after I know who my audience is, the next thing I do is I think about my goal. What do I want people to walk away knowing? What is my one big takeaway? And yes, I said one. I don't start building my talk until I have thought through both of those things first.

Katrina 3:16

Yeah, you know, I know I can personally tell when a presenter has considered things like the audience and main takeaways, or if they've just started, you know, kind of building their talk or their presentation. And because we're in research, it's often based on the structures of their papers. And so as somebody who doesn't always understand the science, it actually makes a big deal. It's a big deal for me when I can tell somebody's stepped back and really thought about who's in that audience. And I really think that considering these things make a huge impact in how your audience receives your message. And so, you know, I think a lot of people also kind of miss that second piece you talked about, which is reinforcing the takeaways or, you know, just even making sure that that the takeaways are clearly defined. I see a lot of presentations where I'm I'm left kind of wondering, like, you know, okay, as we often ask, so what?

Slide Design And Cutting Words

Tracy 4:18

Yeah, I got the opportunity to get training to do TED talks. And honestly, it completely shifted the way I think about presenting in general. And I actually do that for all of my talks, not just TED talks. And it really does matter when you start with what do I want people to know versus what do I want to tell you? It makes a huge difference. Right. So for this talk, I knew my goal was that I wanted to combat a commonly held misperception among researchers about how they talk about their research when they're talking to the audience that is affected by their findings. And I didn't have any data. What I had was a story about an experience, which is a little unusual for this audience. And I coupled that with my personal style because I do things a little bit differently, I think, from most people and how I build my presentations. I tend to start with a deck and I put a bunch of words on a slide. And then the first thing I do is try and figure out how to cut the number of words down sometimes to nothing if I can. It's all about the visuals to me and what is the goal of that slide. I think literally about the goals of every single slide, as well as the whole presentation. And it's important for me to do that because if you just have a bunch of words on a slide, think about what your audience is doing while you're presenting. They're reading the words on the slide, they're not actually listening to you. So, in general, I tend to use more visuals and less words than a lot of people. And I'm trying to think about how I can visually show the concept while I'm telling the story with my slides. But for this one, I was actually really struggling with it. I couldn't think about visuals that supported what I was trying to say. And I felt like I was forcing things. And, you know, like I said, I was just struggling. And so that's when I pulled you in to talk through this with me so I could kind of process with someone else what is this looking like? How can I do this?

Katrina 6:33

Yeah. So for the listeners, I also got to go through this TED style training, but kind of from the other side. Um, I was I was assisting with the coaching side. And so Tracy and I did work together on her talk. I've worked with others, and so I learned it from the other side. I've never actually delivered one. And so when Tracy came and said, Hey, I found out what this talk was, and this is my topic, and you know, kind of here's what I'm thinking. I do think this is one that it was a great opportunity to take a little bit of a risk. You know, you told me I think that there were going to be several other presenters on the stage. You had a limited amount of time. And again, what were the visuals that were gonna help tell this story in a way that kept the focus on the story? You know, most people would have just put the graphics on the slide. You were talking about graphics, so you'll show the graphics. But as we talked about, it wasn't actually about the graphics, it was about what you learned, how it was learned and how it was fixed. And so if the slides showed the graphics, if the visuals um were distracting in a way, people will get stuck on what the graphics actually said and what they looked like, and not hear you talk about the lessons that you had learned from actually creating them.

Choosing A Bold No Slides Format

Tracy 7:58

Yeah, and it was after talking with you that I decided to kind of make a bold decision and do a talk with no slides. Because, like you said, I didn't want them focusing on what was on the screen behind me. I wanted them to really listen to what I was saying. So I started building the presentation with a story because I knew that many people in the audience aren't used to hearing presentations that start that way. But I wanted to really draw them in, right? So I made sure that the story was something that they could actually see themselves in. And then I left it as a cliffhanger so I could use that to draw them in, set the stage for them listening to how the story would unfold. And I knew it worked because I could see heads nodding in the audience. And at one point there was an audible gasp from the audience. And I had people coming up to me for the rest of the conference telling me how much my talk impacted them. And even weeks later, having people tell me they were still thinking about the talk and what they learned from it. So it worked. Um,

Guideposts That Keep People With You

Tracy 9:17

But I had some things that I had to do to build a successful talk in that way with no slides, right? So I wanted to make sure that when I was building my talk, I was really clear with the audience what I wanted them to learn, even from the beginning. So I told the story, and then right after that, I told them what I wanted them to learn and then walked them through how we learned that through this process, right? And then I told them again at the end. In fact, it was the very last thing I said. And I even gave them a cue to listen by saying, I hope that after hearing this talk today, you will learn dot, dot, dot, right?

Katrina 9:56

Yeah. And actually, that's not even that's something that applies to every presentation, not just ones with no slides. I mean, I can remember working with a researcher years ago, um, who's a data scientist who was working on a novel um kind of algorithm or pipeline. I can't remember the exact terminology, I'll be honest, but it was some type of novel data analysis for the field. And so he had given this presentation to his team and it just wasn't landing quite right. And so they asked him to kind of work on it. And so I asked them to, you know, give me the talk. And when he finished, I realized the reason it wasn't landing was because his takeaway message was novel enough that people didn't know what to do with the information as he gave it along the way. And so by putting the takeaways up front, he gave the audience a destination like you did. You know, where are we going with this? He didn't give them the answers yet, but he gave them the destination. And so as he moved through the methods and the data and the analysis, et cetera, you know, they knew where they were going. And so they could understand his data and his message more effectively.

Tracy 11:07

Yeah. And I guess to model what we're saying, right? What we hope that you take away from this is when you're building your presentations, you have to think about how your audience is going to experience what it is you're trying to say. So you need to start by thinking about your audience and who they are, where they're going to be listening to your presentation, the environment, you know, all those types of things. And then you need to give them guideposts along the way. And you need to be really clear for yourself what is it that you're trying to get them to understand and help them understand that through the process. And if you know that up front, it makes building your presentation so much easier and more effective. Yep. I also want to mention here that it is important to know yourself as a presenter. Not everyone would feel comfortable doing the talk the way that I did. I had several people tell me I never could do a talk with no slides. That would be so scary. And that style, it's not right for every audience. It's not right for every message, and it's not right for every presenter. So I'm not saying do talks with no slides. I'm saying do the talk that is right for yourself as a presenter and for your audience. Uh, most of the time, you are gonna need slides. You are you are gonna need visuals to tell your story, and honestly, even to signify that you fit in because that's the style that you need to do to present, right? This case it worked for me because I'm senior enough. And the goal of these lightning presentations was to think differently. So I modeled thinking differently, but that's not always the case for every presentation. So, again, really is all about knowing the goals of the talk, who the audience is, where you fit into that audience, and what you want people to walk away knowing. And then you build around those things.

Katrina 13:00

Yeah, that's that's a great point. And so, you know, I think like many of you, when we talked about this, I was curious about what did the finished product actually sound like? Um, you know, I wasn't at this conference, so I wasn't in your audience, I didn't know. So we talked a lot about whether or not to include a recording of your talk so that listeners could hear how it all came together. However, the theme of this episode, the takeaways for this episode, are about how we think about building presentations, not about the substance of your talk itself. And so that's still a really great, important lesson, especially for those of us in health comm. But we decided to not include it here because it doesn't actually fit with um where the kind of theme of this episode was going. So what we decided to do instead was we have released this as a separate episode that you can go and listen to after you finish this one. Um, and that is available now.

Tracy 14:06

And now I'm guessing that some of our listeners are also gonna be like some of the people in the audience that heard this talk live. And even though I say it's not about the graphics, you're gonna want to see the graphics. So we will put a link in the show notes to where you can look at the graphics if you want to.

Vulnerability When A Story Lands Wrong

Katrina 14:23

All right. So switching gears away from this process a little, um, I did want to talk about something that you did touch on a little bit um here at the end about presentation style and that some people were saying, you know, oh, you know, I could never do that. And it was a risk to do that, and it required a sense, uh, an element of vulnerability. You know, it really does take guts to try something that you knew others wouldn't be doing. But, you know, as we just discussed, there were many good reasons to take that risk with this talk and this audience and this topic, but you know, it's not always the right choice and it might not always pay off in this way. And so the reason I wanted to bring this up is because I am much newer to presenting than Tracy. And so she talked about that, that she's seasoned and that this is something that she's comfortable with. She's had training in. I don't. And I'm not super confident about presenting yet. And because this is a skill I'm still trying to develop, I am uh finding out there are a lot of ways that you can feel, you know, stupid or silly or just realize something didn't land the way you intended. And that is tough to confront when, you know, my professional reputation is is on the line. And so this came up recently in a webinar that I did that was much more traditional than what Tracy was talking about, you know, plenty of slides, but as we do with everything, we try to we do try to take as many words off as we can and make it very visual. So lots of images. And what happened is I told a story that I thought was illustrating how powerful language can be in signaling that a message is for you or for an audience. And so I talked about how um I remember I was driving down the road and I saw a billboard in Spanish. And I knew I wasn't in the audience because I don't speak Spanish. But the way I told it, someone in the audience thought I was saying it was bad that I wasn't the target audience. And that's actually the opposite of what I was trying to say. Um fortunately, I was able to address the comment, you know, she made a comment um in the chat box, and I was able to clear it up that what I was trying to illustrate was how powerful this signifier was, and that we needed more culturally competent translation to be effective messengers, but it didn't come across that way. And so I felt terrible, I'll be honest. Um, not only because I I just never want to suggest that we shouldn't be trying to reach everyone in meaningful ways, but also because, you know, I I kind of blew it on a professional webinar um that was being recorded. And so I guess, you know, my point here is that we both we both are taking some risks with what we're doing in our um in our health comm practices. And, you know, whenever we're doing any type of presentation or communication, we're putting ourselves out there and we're taking risks and we might blow it. And it's it's not going to be perfect, but you know, it gives us a chance to again recognize that we're all human and gives us a chance to learn and grow.

Being Human And Being Brave

Tracy 17:38

Yeah, I I personally think it's okay for us to be human, and not even okay, I think it's great for us to be human. I think for many in the spaces that we're in, you you feel like you have to be perfect, and that adds a lot of fear, right? And we aren't always gonna get everything perfect, and I think that's okay. Uh, even for the talk that I was talking about here, I still had to use notes. I had no slides, but I still had to use notes, right? And I practiced it a lot, and despite that, my delivery still wasn't perfect. And I will be honest, I am definitely my own worst critic. I hear every single mistake that I make. I stumbled over a few words, I had to read parts of it more than I wanted to, but it still had an impact, and my audience either didn't notice the stumbles or maybe they noticed them and felt like it made me more human because I got a lot of great feedback, right? So I think it's okay for us to be human, and I think being vulnerable can help us connect with our audiences even better, in my opinion. I let me add, I think it kind of goes along with a theme I've been thinking a lot about this year. I think in public health communications, now is the time for us to be brave. So be brave in your communications. We're there with you.

Katrina 19:08

Yep, I love that. So all right.

Juice Reach With Early Engagement

Katrina 19:12

Well, before we go, we did promise a practical tip to help juice your social media reach. And that tip is to make sure that you are liking, commenting, and engaging with your own posts. I know that I used to think it was kind of um shameless self-promotion, I suppose, to do that. But the way the algorithm works now, your content is going to be buried if you don't. So when you post, your content doesn't go out to everyone who follows you, it goes out to a portion of your followers. And then if that content does well, the algorithm pushes it out to more people, including people who don't follow you. And so that early engagement tells the algorithm that it's good content, and thus your content will show up on more feeds. Now, there's a couple of ways that you can implement this tactic. I know I will often uh keep hashtags out of like a caption or something and make that the first comment because the algorithm really likes comments. And so I will go in and drop those hashtags in as the first comment. And then I will also try to engage with that post from any account that I have access to. Now we do run several programs, and so we have access to a couple of different channels and handles. And I will also do this from my personal account because all of that early engagement, again, helps tell the algorithm that this is engaging content and that's what they're after, and they'll push it out to more people. So I'm happy to report that I actually mentioned this tip and the very same webinar I was just talking about. And one of the participants reached out to me a month later to report that she had tried this tip out and saw some results. And so she said that with the about the same number of posts as the month before, her views and impressions had really jumped on all platforms. Facebook was up 40%, X was up 50%, LinkedIn was up 210%. So if you are managing social media accounts, make sure you're engaging as much as possible with your own posts so that you can juice that algorithm and get as much reach as you can.

Tracy 21:30

Definitely all about the engagement, right? Yep. All right. Well, that's it for today. Thank you for listening. Make sure you subscribe to our channel and we'll see you next time.