My Innovative Presentation

Logo (c) Jessica Nichols 2009

First up, my group for this subject was great and we really did a fantastic job cultivating this… so thanks to them for tolerating my craziness  in some parts of developing this presentation

I am currently undertaking a subject all about innovation and entrepreneurship and apart from it being my favourite subject,  an integral part of the subject is thinking creatively. I have found that the presentations that get more marks are those that think outside the box. After not getting full marks for the first assignment (don’t get me wrong we went really well), I discovered that they main reason we didn’t go as well was because we didn’t have enough audience interaction – so I aimed to absolutely kill this in the next assignment.

A bit of a backstory to what we had to do – at the start of the semester we had to think of an idea for a new venture and then build a feasibility study around it and deliver a report and presentation. We had control over what we presented, and how we presented, but we did have a list of components which had to be included within the report, and the majority of the components needed to be within the presentation of the report.

Without going into too much detail (as our lecturer loved it and told us we really should consider implementing it, so I don’t want to have someone steal it), we developed a book based service called ‘Textback’. I strategically asked to go first, primarily so we could be the benchmark for the other presentations – and also so we could set up some of the parts of our presentation.

So, how did we make the presentation innovative?

Brand Power

I thought that selling the organisation as a real organisation would be the best way of getting people to think that we were going to implement this. I designed a Textback logo (see top of the screen), as well as a template for the report, presentation and other paraphernalia. Although it seems unoriginal, I only used a colour scheme of black and white, it ended up being most effective way to display the logo – especially with the negative space found between the T and B in the middle. It also cut down the printing costs as we only needed to print in black and white – which is good for my budget!

Sliderocket Sexy

Sliderocket is a fairly well known online presentation developer… to everyone outside of uni… which meant that utilising it would seem extremely innovative to lecturers. I unfortunately shot myself in the foot with this after using it in my other presentations for my business subjects, as a couple of the students saw how awesome using Sliderocket was, and used it as well. But it was disappointing to see that they just utilised it as a regular PowerPoint tool, rather than using the extra functionality Sliderocket provides, such as Flash integration and ability to roll-over data components on graphs. However, I did learn something utilising it this time around – if you sign up to the business trial, you get the executable file functionality, which means you don’t have to sit there caching every page before your presentation.

New Perspective

Most presentations go through all the slides just droning on about all the components. Our team thought that we should sell the idea to the class as potential employees of the organisation – this meant we could go into the technical terms (and therefore fulfill all the techincal components of the report) but at the same time making it fun and interesting – which we felt would not be possible if we set it up as the stereotypical future investor presentation. It also helped support our structure for the presentation, and by making it more of a sell to likeminded people, the team felt that the class could relate to the presentation more.

Movie Maker

We thought a really cool way to start of the presentation would be to have a video – as most teams would probably think it would be too much effort. Instead of making it a one way video, we decided to make it interactive. We started by referencing our lecturer and made jokes about what people did with their first presentation to get them engaged, and then “Morris” – a very straight-dressed guy with a funky moustache, started conversing with one of the students – both were played by the same member in our group, which I think added the extra humour to the video. We filmed Morris’ part in one take – so it looked exactly like a conversation, and included pauses for whenever the student was to speak. I don’t think anyone was expecting anything like this and I don’t think anyone else did anything like this (I had to leave early due to required attendance at another class).

Lottery

This was my favourite part of the presentation. As we were doing a venture based on books – we felt the best way to get people engaged was to give books as prizes! I went to Basement Books near my uni and purchased the most out there books I could find for $1 each – I ended up getting one on the 2007 Weather, White Trash Mom Guide, Desperate Housewives, Shane Warne’s favourite cricketers and a history of the Italian Americans. We wrapped the books up to make sure the titles were kept a secret to the class, but I wrapped each book in a different type of wrapping paper so the team could identify which book was where.

I then developed vouchers (I removed the descriptive text) and I created 5 special vouchers for those who would win the books. Each of the normal vouchers had a unique ID code I generated, as I feel the smaller touches to presentations make it feel more realistic.  I then printed enough of the normal vouchers for the class and then stuck each in a separate envelope. My team and I then went to the class early (another perk of being first to present) and then hid an envelope under every chair in the classroom. We didn’t know which ones had the special winners vouchers, so it was great we could keep it completely random.

At the start of our presentation, I told the class we would be giving away prizes and that they had to listen to the presentation to find out how – this (kind of) lie meant that they would stay engaged during the presentation. At the end, I revealed that everyone needed to look under their seats to find the envelope – which was great surprise to the class.

After finding out those who won, I gave the books away… I got the winners to stand up the front and then gave them books that I thought they would not like -  e.g. giving girls Weather and Shane Warne books and giving the boys books about Desperate Housewives. After telling them all to unwrap them, I don’t know if they were either shocked or embarrassed that they would have to be carrying around these books for the rest of their day at uni.

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I feel the combination of these components made the presentation stand out from the rest, and I guess I’m a bit disappointed I won’t be able to develop another presentation like this, as that was the last assignment of my undergraduate degree. However, at the same time I was extremely thrilled I could have fun with a presentation, which is something I feel other subjects would greatly benefit from.

The presentation was extremely well received by the lecturer as she started joking about the books people won in the next presentation, which is a great sign of the presentations stickiness to those in the room. Although I won’t know my marks for a little while, fingers crossed we go well.