You’ve written your content. What now?
You’ve created your draft.
Now it’s time for the crucial final step:
to lay out your slides
design your pitch deck
do a final review
But how can you guarantee your presentation’s maximum impact?
How do you make your pitch look as unique, polished, and professional as your idea is? Your deck is an extension of you and should represent you and your idea to a T.
Follow this simple checklist!
1. Are you telling one story per slide?
To make sure you’re bringing your audience along properly, start implementing this rule: have one main point per slide.
This will ensure you’re not diluting your message, adding details that are tangential, or combining multiple points that confuse your audience on what the MAIN takeaway is.
Don’t be shy about adding more slides to break up your content. If you feel having too many slides is bad, forget that myth! It’s not uncommon for presentations (not fundraising pitch decks, but business, consulting and sales presentations) to have 100+ slides these days. My own pitch deck design webinar has ~80 slides.
2. Are you editing down your content down?
Your slides will be most effective if you use the fewest words needed to tell your story.
Your audience is bombarded with information daily.
To avoid adding to their information fatigue, edit down to the most essential words. Long paragraphs make your audience strain to read everything, thus missing what you’re saying during your talk, and getting stressed if they don’t manage to read everything on your slides.
BEFORE & AFTER:
3. Are you keeping your brand simple?
If you’re not a professional designer, avoid using too many fonts and colors, because it’ll be hard for you to make sure they mesh well together and are used strategically vs. randomly.
For simple, but effective branding:
Colors
2 colors. One main and one with high contrast for emphasizing or highlighting
FONTS (2 fonts max):
same font for headings & body copy or
one for headings & one for body copy
BEFORE & AFTER:
4. Are you adding visual emphasis?
Don’t have your audience guess what the takeaway should be. As we mentioned, they are already bombarded with too much information and data daily.
Make things as easy as possible: you need to be explicit with what the main takeaway of the slide should be.
Visually emphasize:
the main takeaway
the most important sentence
the most important row in a list of rows or
the most important statistic
BEFORE & AFTER:
See The "Practical" Template »
To see the full 7-step checklist, download my FREE guide.