“I still haven’t found what I’m looking for” is a classic U2 song. It’s also how I feel about presentations. It’s rare that I find a public speaker who delivers a slide-show that’s informative, educational, engaging, entertaining, and inspiring. I never thought I’d find what I’m looking for in a rock star.
Bono’s TED talk on poverty has all of the elements that I look for in a great presentation: a provocative theme, humor, well-crafted sentences and rhetorical devices, magnetic delivery, and beautifully designed slides. There’s also one moment in the presentation that especially stands out, providing an excellent example of how to deliver data effectively.
Before I reveal the technique, keep in mind that you cannot reach a person’s head until you’ve touched their heart. You touch hearts through the stories you tell. So here’s the presentation technique that Bono and other great communicators use to present data—always follow a key statistic with a story and a picture that brings the data to life.
Bono began his TED talk by delivering a series of facts that reinforced the headline of his presentation, The Good News On Poverty (like an intriguing blog post or newspaper article, great presentations have thought-provoking titles that summarize the content). Bono said,
“Since the year 2000, since the turn of the millennium, there are eight million more AIDS patients getting life-saving antiretroviral drugs. Malaria: There are eight countries in sub-Saharan Africa that have their death rates cut by 75 percent. For kids under five, child mortality, kids under five, it’s down by 2.65 million a year. That’s a rate of 7,256 children’s lives saved each day. Wow.”
Most average presenters would have stopped there, but Bono is no average speaker. He knows how to connect with his audience on an emotional level. In the very next sentence, Bono expressed his excitement—his passion— about the facts he just delivered.
“Let’s just stop for a second, actually, and think about that. Have you read anything anywhere in the last week that is remotely as important as that number? Wow. Great news. It drives me nuts that most people don’t seem to know this news.”
Bono then added soul to the data by putting a face behind the statistics.
“Seven thousand kids a day. Here’s two of them. This is Michael and Benedicta, and they’re alive thanks in large part to Dr. Patricia Asamoah — she’s amazing — and the Global Fund, which all of you financially support, whether you know it or not. And the Global Fund provides antiretroviral drugs that stop mothers from passing HIV to their kids.”
Bono showed two slides as he delivered the story. The first was a close-up picture of two smiling children, Michael and Benedicta. The second slide displayed a photo of Dr. Asamoah conducting her work in a small African village. Data reinforced Bono’s theme; stories brought it home.
Neuroscience tells us that if you listen to Bono recite numbers you’ll remember about 10 percent of the content if asked to recall it three days later. Add a picture, however, and your retention soars to 65 percent.
You’ll notice that Bono’s slides were created with a presentation design tool calledPrezi. You can watch the video and see the individual slides here. Prezi is a wonderful tool to show the relationship between ideas and concepts. I’ve spoken to Prezi CEO Peter Arvai, who impressed me with his knowledge of communication and his research into spatial memory. He believes that movement can enhance the retention of ideas. As a communication specialist I try to be software agnostic because the vast majority of business presentations are created in PowerPoint, which, as I’ve often said, is a perfectly fine tool as long as the story is told effectively.
An effective business story has a mix of data, charts, and pictures. Most speakers get so enamored of their data that they forget to tell and to show the stories behind the data. Bono’s presentation strikes just the right note.