Are your presentations persuasive?

The ability to make a good presentation is a key skill for fraud examiners looking to advance their careers. How you convey your ideas is important. Here are some practical ways to present your thoughts, and it’s not just about putting together a visually appealing PowerPoint. 

As fraud examiners, we’re often expected to do more than just comb through balance sheets, review evidence or interview witnesses. Like most professions, fraud examination includes an element of presentation, ranging from pitching your services to prospective clients, providing anti-fraud training to colleagues or revealing the results of an investigation. Whether you’re presenting to management, board members, clients, conference audiences, or district attorneys, your persuasion strategy starts with knowing the outcome you want to achieve. What do you want the audience to do, feel, believe or decide? And how do you get started?

Let’s first address the elephant in the room: PowerPoint design. We’ve all struggled with creating presentations using PowerPoint or some other visual presentation tool. Without some foreknowledge about information design, the results are usually terrible. The problem is most begin with PowerPoint when it should be the final touch to any presentation that’s designed to move an audience to take some action. When you understand your goals for the presentation, you can work backwards with content development, finishing with how to visually convey key concepts using PowerPoint or a similar presentation tool.

When tasked with developing a presentation, most people spend more time looking for a pleasing PowerPoint template than planning the content path and how to lead audiences to it.

If you’re reluctant to surrender your thinking that it’s all about the PowerPoint, consider these important statistics about presentations. (See “19 Powerful Presentation Stats to Transform Talks in 2019,” by Alexa Harrison, Duarte.)

• Ninety percent of people believe that a strong narrative in a presentation is critical for audience engagement.
• Fifty-five percent of people say a great story is primarily what holds their focus during a presentation.
• Forty-six percent of presenters feel that the hardest part of creating a successful presentation is crafting a compelling story.
• Sixty-four percent of people believe that a flexible presentation with two-way interaction is more engaging than a linear presentation.
• Presentations with visual aids are 43% more persuasive than the same presentations without visuals.

Clearly, PowerPoint slides alone won’t make a persuasive presentation — or even an interesting one.

Six keys to great PowerPoint design

Here are six easy and simple keys to great PowerPoint (information) design:

1. Make slides glanceable. Audiences should be able to grasp the message of a slide within three seconds.
2. Use limited text. That means no bullet lists. It can be done when you invest time and effort into creating one key message per slide. Don’t use more than 15 words, total (and try to use fewer).
3. Incorporate lots of white space or contrasting background color. White space, or a contrasting background color, is a design element. It’s like a picture frame around a masterpiece. It directs the attention to the most important element: the painting within the frame.
4. Use large typefaces (e.g., sans serif) for headlines. You want to design for the people in the back of the room or hall for in-person events. Large headline fonts help align the relative detail of other information on the slide. Stick with standard fonts that are easy to read at smaller sizes.
5. Think “billboard design” when it comes to PowerPoint slides. Billboards are big on graphics, large (but brief) headlines, and contrasting/complementary colors because they are designed to be read in three seconds as you drive by them.
6. Don’t use cheesy stock photos or clip art. Nothing says boring and uninteresting like gratuitous graphics that don’t complement the slide content. Subscribe to one of the many royalty-free image sites such as Pond5, Shutterstock and iStock to add relevant interest.

The key to influence

People aren’t drawn to the best products or ideas; they are drawn to the ones they can understand quickly and with ease. The same is true of presentations. You can’t blame the audience if they’re bored. As Dr. Paul Homoly writes in his book by the same title, “Just because you’re an expert doesn’t make you interesting.” (See “Just Because You’re an Expert Doesn’t Make You Interesting,” by Dr. Paul Homoly, Annotation Press, 2012, Enumclaw, Washington.)

Every presenter faces competing distractions internal to individuals in the audience. Some have higher-priority issues competing for cognitive attention: an upcoming vacation, a family illness, financial stress and so on. Your presentation must address issues important to them and be compelling.

Figure 1. How the psychology of information design can influence presentations. Source: Donn LeVie Jr. STRATEGIES, LLC.

Figure 1 above shows how the psychology of information design attempts to address the many ways people process sensory input. The more of these variables your presentation can take into consideration, the greater the probability of audiences responding positively to your call to action. Group and individual participation exercises throughout the presentation also help maintain audience focus.

Storytelling: Connecting with your audience

One of the most important elements of any presentation that’s designed to move people to a decision is to craft a strategy for hooking the audience. Relevant, believable stories are essential to helping the audience feel your words, visualize ideas and facilitate breakthroughs. Stories that are simple and specific are also more persuasive, and persuasiveness leads to greater acceptance. Before any audience buys into your presentation, they first have to buy you, and stories help close that audience-presenter gap.

Bret Hood, CFE, adjunct professor of corporate governance and ethics at the University of Virginia, knows how to quickly pull in an audience and prime their engagement by opening presentations with questions. This technique allows individual audience members to insert themselves into the overall narrative as they contemplate their response.

“Blending your presentation objectives with open-ended questions such as, ‘Have you ever faced a difficult situation?’ or ‘Has this ever happened to you?’ will prompt audiences to recall a personal experience,” he says.

“Once that happens, you’re in a position to leverage that freshly recalled experience and tie it into the presentation message. Such an approach will increase not only participant retention, but also the likelihood that the learning concept will be applied after the presentation or course.”

The big mistake many experts make is showing complex PowerPoint slides, such as Excel spreadsheets or large, labeled graphics minimized at an unreadable resolution. Wrap stories around facts and numbers for the emotional connection. Don’t make the audience do the hard work with statistics and spreadsheets; instead, tie them up in a story they will remember.

Figure 2. Virtual Presentation Technology Options. Source: Donn LeVie Jr. STRATEGIES, LLC.

Use examples, concepts and applications

Stories must be relevant to the theme or content in presentations. One idea is to create content blocks. A content block consists of a concept, followed by a story that illustrates the concept, and then an application that is meaningful to the audience. Here’s an example:

• Concept — Characteristics of an organization with a fraud prevention program and controls.
• Story — Example/story that shares insight into fraud prevention programs in the workplace.
• Application — “Here’s how a fraud prevention program can lower losses in your organization …”

For example, in a presentation with three important, related points to communicate to the audience, three connected concept-story-application blocks followed by a call to action will help lead them to what you want them to do next: Sign up for a complementary risk assessment, adopt a new fraud mitigation policy or approve a budget increase.

Body language, gestures and movement in live environments

Stepping away from the lectern while presenting is a sign of a well-prepared and experienced presenter. There are five ways audiences assign meaning to you as a presenter or speaker:

1. Body positions and purposeful movement.
2. Hand gestures and facial expressions.
3. Tone of voice and eye movement.
4. Emotions and feelings you evoke.
5. How well you control the room (moving away from the lectern, for example).

Using physical movement as a presenter communicates your real and perceived authority to audiences. In fact, effective presenters understand that every presentation or speech is a performance to some degree; it’s a slight exaggeration of your normal persona.

Stories with emotional elements work great with physical movement. For example, being “taken aback” about a story element should have you moving backward from the audience to add drama to the story. In contrast, “facing fear” or “accepting a challenge” should have you moving forward toward the audience.

Stories with a past-present-future element require movement from the audience perspective. Because we read from left to right in the Western world, the “past” element of your story should have you positioned on the left side of the platform or room (the audience’s left); the “present” element will have you move toward the center; and the “future” element will have you moving toward the right side of the platform or room.

Similar to the past-present-future movement are hand gestures when illustrating “left-to-right” (and vice-versa) movement. Your gestures will always be from the audience perspective, which means moving your hand gestures from their left to their right (and vice-versa). It sounds confusing, but if your words aren’t aligned with your body language or movement, it can create cognitive dissonance with some audience members. The last thing you want is to confuse the audience — even for a couple of seconds. That’s long enough for some to become disengaged.

The least popular TED Talks speakers use an average of 272 hand gestures; the most popular speakers use an average of 465 hand gestures. (See “60 Hand Gestures You Should Be Using and Their Meaning,” Scienceofpeople.com.) Gestures, like movement, are visual punctuation; use a variety of them, but with intent.

Movement in virtual environments

As a presenter in typical virtual environments, you’ll likely use more facial expressions and perhaps some hand gestures if you’re sitting at a desk using a webcam. If that’s the case, minimize other body movement. The key to engaging others in a virtual environment is to look at the camera lens when presenting and not at the individual images on the screen.

Tools for delivering great virtual presentations

The two most important tools you can have for delivering great virtual presentations are a good-quality external microphone and a high-definition (HD) webcam. Built-in laptop microphones, and even external webcam mics, can make you sound like you’re speaking from inside a bathroom because they pick up sound from all directions  — including the hum of the laptop fan. Laptop webcam video resolution isn’t as high quality as an external USB HD webcam that hangs off the top of the monitor.

Being an effective communicator is one of the most important skills a fraud examiner can have — or develop, with some training and practice. Consider signing up for my ACFE course Influential and Persuasive Presentation Techniques for a deeper dive on the techniques I’ve described here. While giving professional presentations might seem daunting, with the right preparation, a basic knowledge of information design, and some familiarity with persuasion language, you can hit it out of the park. Start with the end in mind and embrace the idea that speaking, teaching and presenting are never about you; it’s always about what your audience wants and needs.

Donn LeVie Jr., CFE, is a Fraud Magazine staff writer, speaker, author, leadership influence consultant, and executive coach. He leads corporate programs on leadership influence and several virtual strategic mentoring programs for executive leaders and high-performing professionals. Contact him at donn@donleviejrstrategies.com.