Hey y’all. I have led hundreds of webinars, virtual workshops, sessions for clients all around the world just in the last year. Tens of thousands of people. I’ve learned lots of ways to not lead a webinar well. In this blog, I’m gonna answer a frequently asked question which is “How to present a webinar without using PowerPoint slides?”
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In all of the hundreds of presentations that I just described, this is the amount of PowerPoint slides that I’ve used across any presentations at all. In this blog there are couple of ways that I’ve done that to make those webinars and workshops really engaging even without that visual element. In this Blog, I’m gonna share my number 1 tool or tip to lead really engaging virtual workshops or webinars by using 0 PowerPoint slides. Which, in theory, by the end of this blog, will actually save you a lot of time because you won’t have to prep a PowerPoint slide. It actually takes a lot of time. To move these pixels around and get the font right and the text and whatever. If you can just ditch that, you can save yourself quite a mountain of time.
Here it is. In lieu of PowerPoint slides- because you want to have visuals, right. The brain is wired to take visual and experiential data and log it into long-term memory. You do not want to only speak in a webinar. You don’t want to only have audio, you want to have visuals. The tip and tool that I use in high-stake presentations, meaning for me, high stakes means there’s gonna be a lot of people there. They’re gonna be deciding whether this was valuable or not etc. I spend the time to design and layout an analog agenda. That’s what we’re gonna unpack.
Analog Agenda
This idea of creating an analog agenda. What do I mean by that? Well, a PowerPoint in general is actually software created by a company called Microsoft that holds information in a small box. You can put text in it, and you can animate things, and you can. But it’s fundamentally designed in this linear fashion to go from rectangle to rectangle to rectangle. What I do is lay out a bunch of objects, or images, or questions in analog format. I got a bunch of objects laid around my desk that means something to my agenda. Let me make this concrete, let me just give you an example of the cuff.
I literally grabbed 3 objects that were laying around the space. Just live in the moment, I’m gonna share how I would visually use them to help frame-up the context and purpose of my webinar or virtual workshop as opposed to a slide that says, “Today’s purpose is…” in language. Because the brain is actually wired to take that language and encode it in the short-term memory and then let it leave. What I might do is hold this up and say, “Hey, to help frame our time today and get our context all together, I would love for all the breakouts that we’re gonna do today or all the conversations we’re gonna have or everything that you type in the chat to be maximumly authentic. What I mean by that is like this might be a heart, but this is a fake heart. This is a real heart, right. This is a little bit more authentic.
I would love the things that you share and say in this webinar, be they in the chat, whether they’re your questions, or things you share in breakouts etc., I would love for them to be true. I would love for them to not- for you to not feel like you have to put on some fake mask to be some sort of way, I’d love for you to just speak as if you’re telling the truth”.
It’s by far the best way to create a conversation that matter is to shift from this element over to this element. “That’s my ask but what’s our purpose and what’s our intention? For the last year, we’ve been socially distancing from other people. Our intention here is to be connected. Our intention is to- for me, whether it’s in the chat or in a breakout room, for you to connect with one other person on this call who you previously haven’t met, and to learn something valuable from them.” You see how I just used in kind of a quick way, 3 objects, this way live, off the cuff, didn’t do a lot of prep for that, probably could be a little bit more coherent. But, just use 3 objects to help prep and kind of frame-up and get this party started. So for you, for your content, what that might look like is if you’ve got 7 main points you’re gonna be sharing, you might share an image or an object, and just literally go on a scavenger hunt around your house to find this stuff. You don’t need to like go on Amazon and buy 7 things. Find 7 objects that somehow relate or represent the main points or main ideas that you’re talking about and believe it or not, people’s brains will actually be more likely to remember all 7 of those things than if you put them 1 at a time on PowerPoint slides and then show the review slide of all 7 of them at the end. Your review at the end, in 90 seconds if you want it to be, could be boom, boom, boom. And you can just go through those 7 items. Now for me, I’ve got a- this deck of cards that I use called “We! Connect Cards” that has questions on 1 side and this other deck called “We! Engage Cards” that has pictures and quotes. It’s a really great tool to insert visuals if you don’t have a bunch of random stuff lying around your house. This deck in particular is an amazing way to help frame-up where you’re going with both quotes and images.