Organizing an Event? Don't Do This Mistake!

Let me guess. You are either a speaker or even better – an event organizer. If so, read this if you want us collectively to finally do the first step of fixing one of the most frequently seen problems in the world of conferences.

You see, I have presented at numerous events and almost 99% are doing one and the same thing – they send you a PowerPoint template which most of the times they ask you to use for your session(not every conference does that, but most of them do). Now, where’s the problem in that, you may ask? The problem is that the template itself is not created by speakers or a presentation design agency (sorry for advertising it this way, but it’s true), but by people who are either in the PR or in Marketing departments of the company that was involved in helping to make this event possible. And with all my respect to those folks, that does not work or at least I have not seen this approach work up until now. All of this leads to the following – bad designs of the slides that the speakers are using -> bored audience -> not that successful event.

Now, what’s wrong with the template of a typical event. Here are a few points for you. Let me know if you have seen this in the comments!

1. The “template” has just a start, end and sometimes, but only sometimes a transition slide in it…
2. The “template” thus has no predefined slide examples for other typical slide structures – for example showing data in the form of various charts and graphs…
3. The “template” not only does not have such additional example slides, it does not have instructions on how to achieve the example slides(who cares how to achieve it, though, when you don’t have it in first place)…
4. The “template” comes only in 4:3 slide format and not in both 16:9 and 4:3 (that’s is partially OK if the organizers have checked the projectors and neither of those support HD resolution)…
5. The “template” does not have a color palette with suitable colors to be used next to each slide…
6. And more… and more…

So if you are an event organizer and want to make your event better next time and help your speakers deliver even better sessions, think about this blog post. And if you are a speaker who wants to make his presentation in the best possible way, think about this post too and probably share it with the event organizer/manager.

Again – I don’t want you to hire us to create your event template even though we would be happy to, but I am just tired of seeing this problem wherever I go. We just have to start from somewhere…

Cheers!