“They want the Teddy Bear, not the stuffing”.

So what does that mean exactly?? No, it’s not a German translation of an old Steiff company slogan — it’s about putting your audience first and thinking about how to be an effective communicator. It doesn’t have to be a TED talk viewed by millions; any time we speak to a group it’s a chance to hone our communication skills and craft a story that puts our message clearly in minds of our audience.

Our guide and personal Obi-Wan for this excellent session was Ruth Milligan, founder of Articulation executive communication coaching and organizer of TEDxColumbus.

Ruth knows a thing or two about how to communicate with an audience and shared a lot of wisdom with a packed house at Rev1.

Ruth’s slides are available below (most of the videos she showed are included as links in the slides):

The big takeaways:

• Make sure your presentation has a clear “Why?”
• Boil down your presentation to one idea (if you truly have multiple ideas, you have multiple presentations)
• Limit yourself to three supporting points
• Kill the bullet points!

The talks that Ruth mentioned were:

Casey Brown – know your worth
Chip Kidd – designing books
Eli Pariser – beware filter bubbles
Sam King – infectious diseases
Yiem Sunbhanich – data is the new seat belt

Articulation’s YouTube channel (including the short videos from the talk).

Join us next month on September 12th when Katie Sasso from the Columbus Collaboratory will talk about experimental design and machine learning.

Also don’t forget about the Market Research Exchange’s Fall Conference downtown at the Columbus library on September 21st!