Presentation Tips

To help everyone in the network with future workshops or presentations, here are some suggestions to make workshops run more smoothly.

• Use the co-facilitators worksheet to help you when you’re trying to organize something long distance with other facilitators.

• Give yourselves some time together before the workshop starts.  For example, you might all arrive the night before so you can have the evening or the morning to go over each person’s responsibilities and needs before participants arrive.

• Don’t forget to give participants a written agenda.  It helps them budget their attention spans and gives them one more example they can use when they decide to put on their own workshops.

• Make sure to include a session focused on leading participants through the materials they are given.

• Ask participants if they have a particular “behavioral” question or problem they would like addressed. After presenting each section, revisit each question and discuss if and how the information just presented is relevant to each question.

• We realize it’s hard to give someone else’s PowerPoint/Talk. We want to emphasize that we don’t expect anyone to present the slides exactly as they appear on the disk or in the handouts.  Our thought was that by providing all these materials in electronic and hardcopy format we would make it easier for you to create presentations that were uniquely your own.  We included multiple examples of studies and data that all support one point so that you could choose those that work best for you.  Don’t feel that you have to include all of them when you make your own presentations.  Feel free to put them in a different order and to add points and examples from your own experience.

• The hard copy of the slides in the notebook match the slides on the BEHAVE Presentation Resources CD.  If you change the slides significantly, you may want to provide a hard copy of your presentation and include them in the notebook and burn your presentations on CD for your participants in your state.

• If a slide has you stumped during your presentation, feel free to go to the notes.  We know this is a lot of information. Going to the notes not only helps you remember the details of a study or examples but also reminds participants that notes are available for each slide.