In this lecture we took a look at presentation skills so we could start planning how we wanted to present our project pitches next week
A pitch presentation is a concise persuasive speech or a set of slides, often called a Pitch Deck used to quickly introduce a company, product or idea to an audience. It is typically to secure investment or a client but we will be using it to present our major project idea.
A good presentation comes from preparation and clear communication to the audience. By practicing your pitch presentation it helps reduce your nerves and makes you come across more confident about your subject area. Other techniques to a good presentation are a good, confident posture, maintaining eye contact with the audience and sticking to the time limit.
A good way to also keep audience engagement is ensuring your slides are not content loaded by instead using supporting images or appropriate video or GIFs to illustrate what you are trying to say and using these as a guide for what you want to talk bout rather than reading straight off a slide. Other good practices for this pitch presentation are limiting the use of multiple typefaces as well as keeping typefaces clean and readable and transitions subtle.
When we lay out our slides, the best way to present our information is in short bullet points, ensuring our text is in plain english and spell checked. We can also use quotations to back up and get certain points across to our audience too. Finally you want to ensure that your slide content is aligned such as images and the content on each page starts at the same place so it doesn't bounce around from slide to slide. The preferred size for you whole slide is size 16:9 (1920x1080 / 1280x720) so it fits properly on the board.
When we start off our pitches we can either introduce what we intend to cover in our pitch presentation or we can just jump straight into it. Both approaches have advantages and disadvantages to them such as sometimes it is better to just jump in to keep the audience engaged.
A good way to structure it is presenting your vision, the problem you are wanting to solve, why it needs solved and the solution you are proposing that will solve it.
Another layout for a pitch presentation is Intro, Hook, Line, Sinker: