When asked for feedback on the slide decks speakers want to use wit their presentations I've always started with the following advice:
there is to much infromation on it.”
And that advice still stands for using slides in online presentations. However in the online world there is an exception.
Use slides as an activity
In the online presentation setting everybody has a front row seat right in front of their own monitor and there is a lot of distraction all around them. This means that there is a big need and opportunity for different presentation and interaction forms. One of interactive forms can be presenting a slide with a part of the presentation text you would normally say and ask the audience to read it. They can then an use the annotation tools in the web platform you use to mark which part of this text they find most important/ agree with/ want to know more about…
How it worked out
Below you see an example of how a slide that is part of my hand-out slide deck on pitch structure looked after the participants marked on it what they thought would work best for them.
I expected a lot of ticks behind the options they liked best (and some did that) but in the end we discussed mostly how to combine these options based on the arrow pointing to that word. This made the workshop take a different road which matched with the needs of this group.
Don't wait; start experimenting
I encourage you to start experimenting with these ways of giving more control to you audiences and finding new highlights in your own presentations. If you want to find out more options to make your specific presentations more interactive or how to do this in your web tools you can book a quick brainstorm session with Frank on www.pitchcoach.online.