For our July event we had a great turn-out to see Valerie Kroll from Search Discovery teach us about effective presentations. As part of a Search Discovery caravan down from Cleveland for the evening, Valerie presented a consistent strategy on getting the attention of stakeholders to drive action from test results.

The context of this strategy was A/B testing, but the larger points on presentation were totally relevant for any kind of presentation. No matter what kind of results you’re showing we were reminded:

• To focus on the key results from the perspective of your audience.
• Even a “failed” project can be an opportunity to learn important things.
• It’s possible to boil down the results even more than you might think! A two slide presentation can be enough, and after all you are the real conveyor of content, not the slides.

Maybe it’s new to you, or maybe you think you’ve heard this stuff before — but focusing your presentation down to the simplest and clearest version of the results is one of the consistently most difficult (and important) part of our jobs.

A consistent methodology for both the creation of a testing hypothesis and the presentation of results before you start actually running anything can be crucial, but is also a lot of work. Valerie showed us a very useful template for presenting results, and has been kind enough to share her hard work by making the PowerPoint templates available at the Search Discovery site here.

Valerie has also made here slides available!

Please join us next month at Rev1 again for more on testing when Melanie Bowles from InfoTrust will present on building an experimentation strategy.