My classmates and I were recently fortunate enough to get a visit from Andrew Dubois, a business director at Anomaly, and Mike Peditto from 72andSunny. With our Marketing for Good projects beginning to come to a close and our final presentation quickly approaching, Mike and Andrew's visit was an unexpected blessing. They were very charismatic people who were comfortable in front of a deck of slides, and helped us immensely in preparing for these presentations. With our vision for our campaign decks prepared, we were able to sit down with these experienced minds and get all sorts of information and helpful feedback on how to progress and improve our planned presentations.
They began their presentation for us by emphasizing the importance of knowing the material front and back so that it can come naturally, and knowing exactly what you want to say. As business directors, Mike and Andrew knew everything about their projects, and highlighted the best points to touch on for our presentation, which is essentially a recap with all the information we deem important enough to piece together within our 12 minutes on stage. They talked about people, places, things, creativity, and business. We began to use this skeleton as an outline to build our surrounding information into, packing in everything else we wanted to say around that.
This skeleton lead us into their next important piece of information for presenting: Tell a story. Make sure there's an introduction, is interesting, has a climax, and recaps everything we have told them. As they said many times while speaking with us, "Tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them." This idea and importance emphasized on a story was extremely important. It helped my group and I understand that people get bored, lost, and uninterested when spit facts at them and simply tell them what you've been doing. When you add emotion and take them through a story, they pay attention, are intrigued, and want to keep up with the story (as long as the introduction and beginning can captivate the audience enough).
My group and I went on a journey this past semester, getting ideas, executing those ideas, facing problems and successes, and are ending with a boat-load of information and conclusions to share with everyone. Mike and Andrew helped us in their visit by relating our journey to a story, essentially walking the audience through what we have done these past few months, in 12 minutes. This is a small window to pack 3 months into, but telling short and concise story made figuring out how we wanted to say everything, a lot easier. Lastly, they emphasized the importance of confidence and comfort in front of the audience. If we get nervous, they'll just feel uncomfortable, and worst case, just feel bad for us. We have to remain comfortable with both the stage and information, preparing what we want to say, so that it comes naturally as we still walk the audience through our short story. Thank you for all the help Mike and Andrew!
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