6.4.2.Identify presentation skills and practices
Now that you have been introduced to a few presentation tips, you can pause for a moment to consider what you are learning. In this self-reflection, you will explore examples of great presentations to help you develop your own ideas about how to design and deliver presentations. Then, you will consider your thoughts about what makes a good presentation and respond to brief questions.
This self-reflection will help you develop insights into your own learning and prepare you to apply your knowledge of presentation best practices to your own presentations. As you answer questions—and come up with questions of your own—you will refine your understanding and reinforce your learning. You’ve done the hard work, so make sure to get the most out of it: This reflection will help your knowledge stick!
Next, you can consider a few exemplary presentations. Before you get started, review the quick recap of the McCandless method. Then check out the examples below of spoken presentations and slide deck presentations and consider what makes a presentation effective.
The McCandless Method
As you look at examples in the next section of this activity, ask yourself: How do these presentations use the McCandless method?
As a refresher, the McCandless method is a set of guidelines for presentations. It suggests that you start with broad, general ideas and then work your way into the details.
The steps of the McCandless method include:
- Introduce the graphic by name
- Answer obvious questions before they’re asked
- State the insight of your graphic
- Call out data to support that insight
- Tell your audience why it matters
Examples of great spoken presentations
TED Talks are short, spoken messages with important ideas. Take some time to watch the three TED talks linked below, which were carefully selected as model examples of great presentations. As you watch the videos, ask yourself how they each show characteristics of an effective presentation:
- The 3 bones of networking
- Grit: The power of passion and perseverance
- Looking for a job? Highlight your ability, not your experience
Examples of great slide deck presentations
Click on the following links to see excellent examples of slide deck presentations. As you view each deck, ask yourself which characteristics of the slide deck make the presentation so effective.
- Demystifying value: The importance of lifetime value (make a copy or download from the file below)
Demystifying Value Presentation
Consider each of the TED Talks and slide decks from the list above:
- Which presentation was your favorite?
- Which three characteristics made that presentation your favorite? Why?
Now, write 2-3 sentences (40-60 words) in response to each of these questions. Type your response in the text box below.
Explain: Great work reinforcing your learning with a thoughtful self-reflection! A good reflection on this topic would describe which presentation was your favorite, why it was your favorite, and how it uses best practices from the McCandless method.
As you learn more about how to craft effective presentations, you will get better at identifying why they are effective. Earlier, you learned about the McCandless method and how to bring your presentation from general ideas to specific information. Now, you will be able to identify examples of this in real presentations. Going forward, you can apply the principles you’ve learned to create your own great presentations as a data analyst.
Use this guide to help make your presentation stand out as you tell your data story. Follow the recommended tips and slide sequence in this guide for a presentation that will truly impress your audience.
You can also download this guide as a PDF, so you can reference it in the future:
Sharing your data findings in presentations _ Tips and Tricks.pdf
Use the following tips and sample layout to build your own presentation.
Tip 1: Know your flow
Just like in any good story, a data story must have a good plot (theme and flow), good dialogue (talking points), and a great ending or big reveal (results and conclusions). One flow could be an overview of what was analyzed followed by resulting trends and potential areas for further exploration.
In order to develop the right flow for your presentation, keep your audience in mind. Ask yourself these two questions to help you define the overall flow and build out your presentation.
Who is my audience?
- If your intended audience is executives, board members, directors, or other C-level (C-Suite) executives, your storytelling should be kept at a high level. This audience will want to hear about your story but might not have time to hear the entire story. Executives tend to focus on endings that encourage improving, correcting, or inventing things. Keep your presentation brief and spend most of your time on your results and recommendations. Refer to an upcoming topic in this reading—Tip 3: end with your recommendations.
- If your intended audience is stakeholders and managers, they might have more time to learn about how you performed your analysis and they might ask more data-specific questions. Be prepared with talking points about the aspects of your analysis that led you to your final results and conclusions.
- If your intended audience is other analysts and individual contributors, you will have the most freedom—and perhaps the most time—to go more deeply into the data, processes, and results.
What is the purpose of my presentation?
- If the goal of your presentation is to request or recommend something at the end, like a sales pitch, you can have each slide work toward the recommendations at the end.
- If the goal of your presentation is to focus on the results of your analysis, each slide can help mark the path to the results. Be sure to include plenty of breadcrumbs (views of the data analysis steps) to demonstrate the path you took with the data.
- If the goal of your presentation is to provide a report on the data analysis, your slides should clearly summarize your data and key findings. In this case, it is alright to let the data be the star or speak for itself.
Tip 2: Prepare talking points and limit text on slides
As you create each slide in your presentation, prepare talking points (also called speaker notes) on what you will say.
Don’t forget that you will be talking at the same time that your audience is reading your slides. If your slides start becoming more like documents, you should rethink what you will say so that you can remove some text from the slides. Make it easy for your audience to skim read the slides while still paying attention to what you are saying. In general, follow the five-second rule. Your audience should not be spending more than five seconds reading any block of text on a slide.
Knowing exactly what you will say when explaining each slide throughout your presentation also creates a natural flow to your story. Talking points help you avoid awkward pauses between topics. Slides that summarize data can also be repetitive (and boring). If you prepare a variety of interesting talking points about the data, you can keep your audience alert and paying attention to the data and its analysis.
Tip 3: End with your recommendations
When climbing a mountain, getting to the top is the goal. Making recommendations at the end of your presentation is like getting to the mountaintop.
- Use one slide for your recommendations at the end. Be clear and concise.
- If you are recommending that something be done, provide next steps and describe what you would consider a successful outcome.
Tip 4: Allow enough time for the presentation and questions
Assume that everyone in your audience is busy. Keep your presentation on topic and as short as possible by:
- Being aware of your timing. This applies to the total number of slides and the time you spend on each slide.
- Presenting your data efficiently. Make sure that every slide tells a unique and important part of your data story. If a slide isn’t that unique, you might think about combining the information on that slide with another slide.
- Saving enough time for questions at the end or allowing enough time to answer questions throughout your presentation.
In this section, we will describe how to put everything together in a sample slide deck layout.
First slide: Agenda Provide a high-level bulleted list of the topics you will cover and the amount of time you will spend on each. Every company’s norms are different, but in general, most presentations run from 30 minutes to an hour at most. Here is an example of a 30-minute agenda:
- Introductions (4 minutes)
- Project overview and goals (5 minutes)
- Data and analysis (10 minutes)
- Recommendations (3 minutes)
- Actionable steps (3 minutes)
- Questions (5 minutes)
Second slide: Purpose
Everyone might not be familiar with your project or know why it is important. They didn’t spend the last couple of weeks thinking about the analysis and results of your project like you did. This slide summarizes the purpose of the project and why it is important to the business for your audience.
Here is an example of a purpose statement:
Service center consolidation is an important cost savings initiative. The aim of this project was to determine the impact of service center consolidation on customer response times.
Third slide: Data/analysis First, It really is possible to tell your data story in a single slide if you summarize the key things about your data and analysis. You may have supporting slides with additional data or information in an appendix at the end of the presentation.
But, if you choose to tell your story using more than one slide, keep the following in mind:
- Slides typically have a logical order (beginning, middle, and end) to fully build the story.
- Each slide should logically introduce the slide that follows it. Visual cues from the slides or verbal cues from your talking points should let the audience know when you will go on to the next slide.
- Remember not to use too much text on the slides. When in doubt, refer back to the second tip on preparing talking points and limiting the text on slides.
- The high-level information that people read from the slides shouldn’t be the same as the information you provide in your talking points. There should be a nice balance between the two to tell a good story. You don’t want to simply read or say the words on the slides.
For extra visuals on the slides, use animations. For example, you can:
- Fade in one bullet point at a time as you discuss each on a slide.
- Only display the visual that is relevant to what you are talking about (fade out non-relevant visuals).
- Use arrows or callouts to point to a specific area of a visual that you are using.
Fourth slide: Recommendations
If you have been telling your story well in the previous slides, the recommendations will be obvious to your audience. This is when you might get a lot of questions about how your data supports your recommendations. Be ready to communicate how your data backs up your conclusion or recommendations in different ways. Having multiple words to state the same thing also helps if someone is having difficulty with one particular explanation.
Fifth slide: Call to action
Sometimes the call to action can be combined with the recommendations slide. If there are multiple actions or activities recommended, a separate slide is best.
Recall our example of a purpose statement:
Service center consolidation is an important cost savings initiative. The aim of this project was to determine the impact of service center consolidation on customer response times.
Suppose the data analysis showed that service center consolidation negatively impacted customer response times. A call to action might be to examine if processes need to change to bring customer response times back to what they were before the consolidation.
After you present to your audience, think about how you told your data story and how you can get feedback for improvement. Consider asking your manager or another data analyst for candid thoughts about your storytelling and presentation overall. Feedback is great to help you improve. When you have to write a brand new data story (or a sequel to the one you already told), you will be ready to impress your audience even more!
Earlier in this course, you practiced creating, giving, and evaluating your own presentation for the Hands-on Activity: Presenting practice . Now, you’ll complete an entry in your learning log revisiting that presentation and reflecting on how much your presentation skills have developed so far. By the time you complete this activity, you will have more experience presenting, evaluating, and receiving and applying presentation feedback. This will help you prepare for future presentations as a data analyst.
For the hands-on activity, you recorded yourself presenting a data visualization dashboard that you created. You then evaluated your work. Now that you have more knowledge and practice under your belt, it’s time to try again!
- Re-record your presentation with the information you’ve learned during this course. Keep it as concise as possible so you can compare it to your previous version.
- Share the presentation with someone you know who might not be familiar with data analysis. Keep them in mind while you record your presentation, as it should be as simple and accessible as possible.
- Ask them for their feedback. Did they find it engaging? Did they truly understand the concept that you explained?
- If it would be helpful to receive feedback in a formal way, print out the checklist you used last time (provided below) and give it to your audience.
**Presentation Evaluation Checklist:
- Do I use an attention-grabbing opening?
- Do I start with broad ideas and later talk about specific details?
- Do I speak in short sentences?
- Do I pause for five seconds after showing a data visualization?
- Do I pause intentionally at certain points?
- Do I keep the pitch of my sentences level?
- Do I stand still and move with purpose?
- Do I have good posture?
- Do I look at my audience (or camera) while speaking?
- Do I keep my message concise?
- Do I end by explaining to my audience why the data analysis matters?
Now, do the same for your slide deck:
- Do I include a good title and subtitle that describe what I’m about to present?
- Do I include the date of my presentation or the date when my slideshow was last updated?
- Does my font size let the audience easily read my slides?
- Do I showcase what business metrics I used?
- Do I include effective visuals (like charts and graphs)?
Once you have finished revising, recording, and sharing your presentation again, you’ll have a chance to reflect on your experience in the learning log template linked below.
Access your learning log
To use the template for this course item, click the link below and select “Use Template.”
Link to learning log template: Evaluate your presentation
OR
If you don’t have a Google account, you can download the template directly from the attachment below.
Learning Log Template_ Evaluate your presentation
Now that you’ve finished rerecording your presentation and receiving feedback, take a moment to reflect on the process you just completed. In your learning log template, write 2-3 sentences (40-60 words) in response to each question below:
- What was your experience recording this presentation?
- How does this presentation experience differ from the last one you recorded? How does it differ from other presentations you delivered in the past?
- Did the feedback you received help you understand which skills you improved on? Did it help you realize which skills you still need to work on?
When you’ve finished your entry in the learning log template, make sure to save the document so your response is somewhere accessible. This will help you continue applying data analysis to your everyday life. You will also be able to track your progress and growth as a data analyst.
Presentations are a crucial part of communicating about your data effectively. By practicing presentation skills in advance, you can become comfortable with public speaking and master an integral part of the data analyst role.
One way to practice presenting is to learn from your past experiences. Think about a presentation you gave in the past. This might be a formal presentation in a professional setting or an experience from your personal life, such as a toast at a wedding. Reflect on how that presentation went and consider the following questions:
- What went well during your presentation? Based on what you’ve learned about giving presentations, which tips do you already practice?
- In what areas do you want to improve your presentation skills?
- What presentation skills do you want to learn more about? In what areas do you want to improve?
Submit 3-5 sentences (150-200 words) responding to these questions. Then, visit the discussion forum to read what others have written, and respond to at least two posts with your own thoughts.
Which techniques can be helpful to prevent nerves before a presentation? Select all that apply.
- Channel your excitement
- Speak quickly so you don't run out of time
- Prepare materials beforehand
- Describe each graph in-depth
Explain: It’s helpful to channel your excitement to keep from getting nervous about a presentation. Preparing materials beforehand can keep you from forgetting your material, which may alleviate nerves.
Which technique can make it easier to keep your body calm before a presentation?
A. Starting with broad ideas
B. Applying the five second rule
C. Preparing material beforehand
D. Practicing breathing exercises
The correct answer is D. Practicing breathing exercises. Explain: Practicing breathing exercises can make it easier to keep your body calm before a presentation.
Which practices are helpful for keeping an audience focused on your presentation? Select all that apply.
- Be mindful of nervous habits
- Build in international pauses
- Make constant gestures
- Make eye contact
Explain: The practices that help keep an audience focused include making eye contact, reducing nervous habits, and pausing intentionally.