Presentation Coaching - Lessons Learned

Julie, Sarah A, Lynn and I coached Sandy Bernier for her presentation at the Annual Tobacco Control Legislative Breakfast.  After Sandy’s presentation she sent an email saying that it was a ‘SLAM DUNK!’.  We framed this presentation coaching experience as shared learning so that we could evaluate how much time it takes, what resources were used and how valuable the sessions were for the client. 

There was an intake call, a content coaching session, a visual coaching session and a debrief interview with Sandy.

Before Slide:

After Slide: 

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Lessons Learned from the intake call:

We used a shortened charter – (Start with Goal, What is Success?, and Scope to determine deliverables). Our charter is mapped out in this google document ‘Presentation Learning Plan’.

Julie and I decided to ask Lynn our data visualization guru to assist with the visual coaching session and Sarah our visual AND talking points guru to join us for the content coaching and visual coaching sessions.  (This is one way to use the experts at the Clearinghouse without exhausting our resources by inviting them to all the meetings).  In the future we could even look into building capacity and work with our partners at Health First and DPH, for example. 

We also found that it was super helpful to have 2 staff on each call, one facilitator and one evaluator.

We propagated the chart below with Sandy.  She was asked to think about her audience when deciding how to deliver her message.  (Note Sandy's readiness scale in regards to knowing her audience was relatively high in that she delivers a presentation at this meeting every year.) 

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Lessons Learned from Content Coaching Session:

Before our second meeting with Sandy (content coaching session), she sent us an outline with her 3 keys points. 

1. Tobacco use is still a major public health issue

2. It is a winnable battle

3. It is a wise and worthy investment

We encouraged her to (1) Open with a common ground as the audience was diverse on the issues;  (2) Less is More (there was a list of 7 points that we encouraged down to 3-5), and (3) to add story into ‘it's a winnable battle’ (the new york story).   

Julie loved that we didn’t tell Sandy exactly what to do or change, we coached, thus she felt ownership over her presentation.  Julie also encouraged Sandy to open with a personal story and end with motivating emotions like Hope and Pride vs Fear and Shame. 

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Lessons Learned from visual coaching session:

We sometimes want to help so much that saying that this is out of our scope is difficult (Lynn spent more time than we originally allotted with Sandy helping augment her slides).  Thank you Lynn!!

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Lessons Learned from interview with Sandy (The in depth questions/responses are found in Presentation Coaching):

From past experiences giving presentations she had never stayed on her message as much as with this learning experience.  She said it felt challenging at first, she had to pull back and not give too much information, it was difficult to stick to her key points, but rewarding.

We piloted a google document for her to use, but she had difficulty assessing it at work, and thus primarily used the Outline. 

When asked what would you do differently for future presentations? 

‘less is more, use the chart, and stick to my 3 key points’

Less is more looks like this.... 

Before Slide:

After Slide:

For More Before/ After Slides (I saved the ppt's as gdoc's)

Sandy's Top Tips that resonated with her after her learning experience: 

• Cater your messages to your target audience
• Use 2 powerful examples vs 5 
• Keep it simple
• ‘Telling a story through the presentation didn’t leave me caught up in stats and convincing people’ - The powerpoint tells the story

Additional Wows:

She noticed that no one was ‘multitasking’ in fact many people were nodding there heads!

Her evaluation follow up survey indicated that 70.8% of the participants strongly agreed that 'the current adult smoking rates in the five counties presented in Sandy's 'Winnable Battle' Presentation

made it clear we need to continue our efforts in tobacco prevention'  

Bonus: What level of Kirkpatrick's Evaluation is this?!

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Lessons Learned for future presentation coaching:

• Email Questions for a pre-intake call assessment (for our list of questions see ‘Presentation Learning Plan’)
• We gave Sandy homework for each session (filling out document for key points she wanted her audience will take away as well assess her audience, sending us content)
• Request content be shared at least 2 days before the meetings so that staff at the Clearinghouse has time to review and critique.  
• Sandy also took ownership in planning sessions (saved us time, and allowed her to map her 'due date' to her guideposts for goal setting)
• Request before and after slides