I was an internal evaluator at a 300-person human services organization. Being an internal evaluator means your “clients” are your coworkers who work down the hall from you. You talk to each other about their data all the time. You build strong relationships.

You also build friendships, and with these friendships come candid conversations and brutal honesty about data. Some of these people loved data. Most were ambivalent about data. Others, like W.Q., hated data. He had no problem telling me how evaluation was a big fat waste of his time.

One day in 2011, W.Q. burst into my office. I braced myself for another rant against data. I put on my game face. I mentally rehearsed how I would listen, take a breath, and calmly explain how using evaluation results as one piece of the decision making process would lead to better programs and better youth and better communities and puppies and rainbows.
I had tried to win over W.Q. with one-page snapshots, dashboards, participatory data analysis, oral presentations, you name it. I wasn’t giving up. But I was running out of ideas.

“PULL UP YOUTUBE!” W.Q. demanded. “YOU HAVE TO WATCH THIS!” he shouted. Oh no, my heart sank. Was our organization smeared in the news? Did we lose funding from a major donor? It was worse than I thought.
I wasn’t fast enough. I remember W.Q. grabbing the keyboard. He pulled up this video:

“ANN YOU HAVE TO MAKE THIS!!” he continued shouting during the video. “IT’S DATA VISUALIZATION!! I HAVE TO SEE MY PROGRAM’S DATA LIKE THIS!! CAN YOU IMAGINE MAKING THIS!! I HAVE TO SEE MY PROGRAM’S DATA LIKE THIS!! WHEN CAN YOU HAVE THIS READY!! I’LL DO ANYTHING IT TAKES TO HELP MAKE THIS!! ANYTHING!!”

I had no idea how to make much beyond a bar chart, let alone create animated videos. But data visualization had just changed W.Q.’s outlook on data. I had to give it a try.

What is Storyboarding?

Garr Reynolds calls it building your slides. Stephanie Evergreen calls it the slow reveal. Jon Schwabish calls it layering. Cole Nussbaumer calls it animation.

One of my best friends is an animator. As an homage to her animation prowess, I call it storyboarding.

I don’t care what you call it. Someday we’ll just call it good presenting.

Storyboarding in Action: One Example

Okay spoiler alert, I haven’t reached Hans Rosling’s level (yet!), but I like to humor myself and keep trying anyway.

I use storyboarding all the time: to start in-person presentations or webinars with a bang, to carefully explain complicated diagrams and visualizations, and to slowly uncover new bits of information and guide my audience to the chart’s “aha!” moment.

Here’s one example that I created for the Data Visualization and Reporting’s Topical Interest Group, which was published  last month. The old way: showing your entire chart, and talking over it, even though you know people are reading and interpreting one part of the chart while you’re explaining another part, but you don’t know how to present charts any differently. The new way: presenting one piece of the chart at a time, piecemeal, to allow for maximum understanding, knowledge retention, and ultimately use.

Storyboarding in Four Easy Steps

I’ve gotten lots of questions about how much this special software costs (it’s just Excel, PowerPoint, and Screencast-o-matic) and how much I paid someone to make this (it took about 5 hours of my own time, which includes outlining to getting access to the data to analysis to charting to recording). Follow this step-by-step rundown and start making these videos yourself.

Step 1. Outline your presentation’s content

99% of the time my brain is extremely linear and I outline outline outline before I design reports or presentations. But 1% of the time I outline very little, turn my brain off, and just see what happens. Give yourself permission to be creative and you might surprise yourself with how easy this is.

Here’s the extent of my outlining for this video. I knew I’d have three sections or chunks of content, probably some type of timeline showing milestones in the group’s development, followed by quick demographic stats, followed by a work plan or logic model depicting our goals for the next year.

After analyzing the data, I decided to focus almost exclusively on demographic characteristics, plus a short introduction.

Step 2. Design your “final” chart(s) first

I got the datasets from AEA, ran some quick analyses, and started designing my charts. For example, here’s my final line chart:

Bar chart after bar chart after bar chart puts everyone to sleep, so I added variety.

• A word cloud shows the various specialty areas of the professional groups discussed.
• A line chart shows membership patterns over time, and in relation to one another. (Notice the direct labeling and inclusion of contextual data which are guidelines included in the Data Visualization Checklist.)
• A pie chart shows a gender breakdown of members. (Pie charts are perfectly fine when categories are nominal and you’ve only got 2-3 categories. If you disagree, say so and let’s have some fun hashing it out.)
• A horizontal bar chart/histogram to show ranges of educational degrees attained. (These categories are ordinal, so I intentionally arranged the bars to display Bachelor’s to Master’s to Doctorate degrees from left to right.)
• A circle chart/area chart to show the countries represented. (Charts that display differences through a shape’s area–this circle chart–are obviously less exact than charts that display differences through length–like a bar chart. I cared more about people generally come from these different countries and less about 0.0001% more people come from country x compared to country y.)
• A horizontal bar chart to show where members are employed. (These categories are nominal, so I intentionally arranged the bars from greatest to least.)

Rather than using Excel’s default color scheme, I purposefully matched my charts to the American Evaluation Association’s logo, and then used my action color (burgundy) to draw attention to findings of my choice.

Step 3. Break each final chart into 2+ separate slides

Later in the process, I listed out the remaining to-do items and I sketched how I’d storyboard the line chart. I estimated that I’d need 5 slides to explain that pattern: to show the axes, then to show all the lines in gray, then to focus on distinct pieces with burgundy, etc. In the final version, I decided to use 8 slides.

Once you’ve got a final chart and a rough idea of the pattern you might want to emphasize, you’re just playing around and seeing what works as you divide the content and speaking points from the final slide into multiple separate slides. I wish I could pretend that it’s a perfectly linear process but it’s not; you might have to try a few variations until you get it right. The good news: You’re not making tons of charts from scratch. You’re just making a copy of your final line chart, pasting it into a new slide, and then using your burgundy action color to draw attention to the line of your choosing.

My 3-minute video contains 33 total slides: 1 for the word cloud, 8 for the line chart, 1 for the pie chart, 1 for the vertical bar chart/histogram, 5 for the circle chart, and 5 for the horizontal bar chart, plus some contextual slides at the beginning and end to set the stage. I used 8 slides for the line chart because I wanted to compare the Data Visualization and Reporting group to two others, and adding contextual data takes more time. The pie chart simply showed a gender breakdown so I spent almost zero time on it.

The circle chart is less conventional/more complicated, so I devoted extra time and slides to making sure the audience had a chance to digest the information. In hindsight I would’ve allotted more time to the pie chart (gender) and vertical bar chart (highest degree attained), but then again these findings were extremely obvious, and I didn’t want to risk losing my audience’s attention on something so uninteresting.

Step 4. Go live! Present your slides in person, via webinar, or record them

In the past I used Articulate (formerly Screenr) for storyboarding recordings and data analysis tutorials. Pros: It’s free and extremely easy to use. Cons: Recordings must be under 5 minutes in length, recordings are slightly grainy, and recordings are automatically saved to Screenr’s public library (so don’t record anything private for your clients because it will be shared with the rest of the internet too).

I currently use Screencast-o-matic. There’s a free version and a pro version ($15/year). The pro version is also extremely easy to use, I can record longer videos, and when I’m finished recording the file is available to me–and no one else–as a MP4 file. I can choose to publish my video file to YouTube later on, or send the findings directly to my client through email or Dropbox.

Here’s how it works: Log in to Screencast-o-matic; open up your PowerPoint file; press “start recording;” select the portion of the screen you want to record (your PowerPoint slides, duh); press “record;” talk through your slides; stop the recording; listen to yourself and have a good laugh; try it again until you get it right. The Screencast-o-matic folks also made a screencast (what else?) to walk you through the screencast process. It’s really that easy.

Lessons Learned

Don’t overuse this technique or you’ll spoil its effectiveness. If your full presentation, webinar, or video contains 10 charts, select 1-3 charts to storyboard. You might storyboard one chart at the beginning to grab your audience’s attention, a second chart in the middle if it’s really detailed or complicated, and a third chart at the end to finish with a bang.

I wrote this post with two specific communications formats in mind: 1) video recordings and 2) lecture-style in-person presentations. You’ll need to adapt this technique slightly for webinars, conversational in-person meetings, and slidedocs.

Storyboarding Adaptations for Webinars

No matter how fast your/your audience’s internet connection is, there will always be a lag time between slides when giving a webinar. (Which is why I use 3 computers to help judge this lag time). The implication here is that you can’t switch slides too quickly. A 1-second transition might work in your in-person presentation, but I allot at least 10 seconds per slide in webinars. The line chart, for example, might be displayed in just 2 or 3 separate slides rather than 8, and I’d also speak through the content much slower and take pauses or long breaths between each slide.

Storyboarding During In-Person Conversational Meetings

There’s nothing worse than being interrupted in the middle of storyboarding. It breaks your rhythm. Worse, everyone’s sitting there, ready to have a casual discussion, and you look like a formal, over-rehearsed fool. Hey my powerpoint is more important than your learning,  stop your meaningful discussion and watch me. Don’t rely on this technique when the “presentation” is going to be more of a discussion. Instead, storyboard a tiny piece of the introduction–just 15-30 seconds of content, maybe 3 slides–when you need to catch their attention and can be sure that you won’t be interrupted. After that, allow the meeting to flow freely.

Storyboarding Applied to Slidedocs

Slidedoc strategies are similar: Using the same layout and alignment on multiple slides looks like “animation” as your client reads your slides at his or her own desk. You’ll just need more text since you won’t have a voice recording. For a quick slidedoc example, check out last summer’s dot plot tutorial.

It’s really that easy folks. Go try it yourself and let me know how it goes.

Back in 2014, I tweeted this image of Johanna Morariu and I getting ready to give a webinar. I jokingly referred to our conference room’s careful setup as our Webinar Command Center.

Welcome to our webinar command center! Logic model training w/ @j_morariu & @GrantStation in T minus 2 minutes. pic.twitter.com/KDcMUZ78bN
— Ann K. Emery (@AnnKEmery) February 26, 2014

A bunch of people have asked how we set up our Webinar Command Center.

Here’s how to structure your physical space to ensure that your mind is free to give the best webinar possible.

Three Laptops

Yes. Three. Each laptop serves a unique purpose.

Laptop #1

Laptop #1 is for viewing your slides and speaking points through PowerPoint’s presentation mode. We make the images really small and make our speaking points really large.

Laptop #2

Laptop #2 is the “live” webinar laptop, which is registered for the webinar in the Presenter role. This laptop gets a special treat, the blue ethernet cord, to ensure the fastest connection possible. In a two-presenter setting, we assign one person to advance the slides and another person to monitor the chat box. In a one-presenter setting, I advance the slides and stop at regular intervals (every 10 minutes or so) to monitor the chat box and address questions that are coming in.

Laptop #3

This is the secret sauce!

Laptop #3 is registered for the webinar in a Participant role. We “watch” the webinar from the participant’s point of view from the corner of our eyes. We’re constantly glancing at this screen to check for technological glitches (blank screens, frozen screens) and slow slide transitions (fluctuating internet connection speeds). Sometimes we notice lag times of 2-3 seconds between slides, so we stop and take a breath as we’re waiting for the new slide to load on Laptop #3.

If your organization is hosting its own webinar, it’s easy to register yourself as a participant with a fake name. If another organization is hosting the webinar (i.e., you’re a guest speaker on a webinar that someone else has set up), just ask the host to set up a fake participant registration for you. It’s easy for the organizer to set up, and guarantees a higher-quality webinar for everyone.

Notepad

Physical notepads are critical for two-presenter webinars.

Since you’ll often be on camera, you can’t just whisper to each other.

And you’ll have several laptops already, so it’s hard to type notes to each other without getting distracted by what’s on screen. And nobody wants to hear your click click click typing noise as they’re trying to deliver or listen to a webinar.

That’s where physical notepads come in and save the day!

Here’s the notepad that Johanna and I used during a recent webinar.

We troubleshoot about pacing, timing, technological glitches, and questions that come in through the chat box. As you can see, most of our notes are related to pacing: encouraging each other to speed up during boring sections or slow down when the slides are advancing slower than normal.

Notepads are also crucial when you’re presenting solo: to jot down participant questions that you need to remember to address later in the webinar (“during Q&A – elaborate on Maria’s question re: strategies for using data for org learning”) and to reflect on what you’ll need to adjust for future webinars (“this section moved too slow; need to cut down content”).

Pacing Schedule

Our pacing schedule, written on large paper, is the secret weapon in our webinar success. You can see it in the background of the image I tweeted.

I’ve given at least a hundred live webinars over the past few years, and I still create pacing schedules for every single one. Here’s how I create the schedule.

First, Make a Broad Outline of the Webinar’s Content

In the weeks or months leading up to the webinar, outline your content. I just use Google docs so that I can add ideas from work, from home, or from my cell phone as I’m riding the train into work (via the Google Drive app).

Think about the big buckets of content. What are the three, four, or five major sections that you’ll include in the webinar?

Second, Decide How Long Each Webinar Segment Should Last

A major step in outlining is to allocate time to each section.

I ask myself, “How much time does this particular story, example, or resource really deserve? 30 seconds, 1 minute, 5 minutes?”

I practice explaining the content aloud and time myself with my cell phone’s stopwatch feature. I need to know exactly how long each story takes so that I don’t overemphasize boring sections or under-emphasize the most useful sections. By the time I give a webinar, I’ve practiced each section 3-5 times (or, sometimes 10, if my initial time estimates were way off).

And of course you’ll want to allocate time for participant activities and questions, but that’s a different post.

Notice how the introduction only gets 5 minutes, max. The most boring part of your webinar is the background information about you and your organization.

Give people the meat of the presentation (the information they paid to learn) as soon as possible, or you’ll lose your audience (and get awful survey ratings). In our 2014 webinar, we knew we would purposefully begin the webinar 1-2 minutes late. Then, the hosting organization would welcome the participants and introduce their own organization. Once the webinar was handed off to us, we still needed to introduce our organization… and ourselves… and the agenda… and the learning objectives for the webinar. We spent those 90 seconds very carefully.

Third, Design Your Webinar Slides

When your outline and time allocations are 90 percent finished, then you can start working on your slides.

One of the biggest mistakes I see from presentation novices is that they design their slides too early in the process.

The most beautiful slides in the world won’t make up for poorly-planned content.

I’ve shared slides design tips in a few different blog posts. Here are a few of my favorite slide design tips.

Introduce Your Main Points Early

This was one of the first slides from a recent presentation about data placemats. Veena Pankaj and I wrote an article about this process a couple years ago, so if you want to nerd-out, you can read more here.

My speaking points went like this: “I’m going to teach you a three-step process. Here’s what the process looks like at a glance. First, you analyze the data and design placemats. Second, you facilitate an interpretation meeting with a few key stakeholders. And finally, you go back to your office and use stakeholder feedback to produce the final deliverable, like a report or slideshow.”

Make a Divider Slide for Each Section

Next, make one divider slide per main topic. In this presentation, I made one divider slide for each of the three steps that I was teaching about: Analyze Data and Design Placemats, Facilitate an Interpretation Meeting, and Produce the Final Report or Slideshow.

Design Your Body Slides

You might need 5, 10, or 20 body slides depending on your presentation’s length, audience, purpose, etc. Don’t shy away from having a large number of slides! In a typical 60-minute webinar, I might have 60 slides. In a half-day or full-day workshop, I often have hundreds of slides. I break up the content into tiny slices and place one slice of information on each slide. Below, I advise you to have “a” graph, photo, diagram, or quote per slide (not multiple graphs, photos, etc. per slide).

Alternate Your Colors by Section

This is a great way to help your webinar attendees follow along with your key points. You simply introduce the ~three topics early… and then choose a different color for each of those topics (blue, green, and fuschia)… and then make the headers and footers of each slide in a different color.

Stop Using Bullet Points Altogether

And when it comes to designing the individual body slides…

That advice about “only using three bullet points per slide” is outdated. I suggest using zero bullet points! See how I transform bullet points into visuals in this blog post.

You can replace your bullet points with graphs or with photographs. See how I selected photographs to match my speaking points in this blog post.

Fourth, Write Your Detailed Webinar Schedule on Large Paper

Okay, back to tips about the webinar’s physical set-up.

On the day of the webinar, write your final pacing schedule on large paper.

We star the sections that are most important (in this example, the logic model components and the awesome FAQs, which went into advanced-level logic model details). This is where we pause frequently to address questions coming in through the chat box, elaborate on our stories and examples, and go off-script to make the tone more conversational and interesting to listen to. These starred sections contain valuable takeaway lessons and can’t be rushed. In contrast, we also remind ourselves when to rush through less-crucial information with notes on our pacing schedule like “hurry here!” During these sections, we rarely stop to address chat box questions in the moment, although we certainly answer these questions at the end when we have extra time.

Then, tape the pacing schedule somewhere extremely visible.

We often tape the schedule onto the window that’s directly across from our chairs so that we can glance up every few minutes and make sure we’re on track. Why large paper? 8.5 x 11 papers will get lost in the clutter on your table, no matter how clean your desk is.

Additional Tools

Here are some additional objects that I have handy during webinars.

Landline Phone

Notice how the phone is located between the two presenters’ chairs so that it picks up both voices equally.

Smart Phone

As a backup for the occasional landline fail.

Water

Filled only halfway. Otherwise I get nervous and gulp it down.

Everyone who’s co-presented conference presentations or webinars with me knows that I get ridiculously thirsty after speaking for 60 or 90 minutes straight. Give yourself just enough water to soothe your dry throat, but not so much that you mindlessly drink more than you need. (You can’t run to the bathroom in the middle of your own webinar.)

Avoid coffee! The best way to sabotage yourself is to throw unnecessary caffeine on your adrenaline rush and nerves.

Chapstick

For the dry lips. My throat and lips get so dry after talking nonstop for the duration of a webinar.

Printed Slides

In case Laptop #1 explodes.

What’s Not in the Room

Garr Reynolds discusses how we need to be fully present when speaking with our audience.

Remove all the clutter from your desk–your purse, wallet, extra notepads, project work, etc.

Better yet, lead your webinar from an empty conference room.

A simple, well-designed physical space will give you the mental space to focus all your energy and attention on your audience.

Additional Webinar Workspaces Submitted by Readers Like You

Karen Matthes from the University of Minnesota Extension writes, “Ann, I love the photo of your webinar setup! It is much cleaner than mine but here is a photo of my command center that I’ve shared in my ‘Intro to WebEx’ training workshops. I use this slide to stress the importance of being prepared during a webinar. Having a second monitor is really helpful. I use our conference room computer as my second monitor.”

Do you notice some of the same objects? Karen also uses two screens, a laptop plus a second monitor that’s mounted on the wall. She’s got her laptop connected to the magical blue ethernet cord. She’s got her beverages of choice ready to go. And her cell phone for back-up audio. And her notepad. And her printed presentation materials. And you’ve gotta love IT Goldy, presumably there for moral support. Everything on her desk serves a purpose. Great work, Karen!