By Marc Fest, founder, The Message House
Marc Fest
Offering concrete takeaways is one of the most important things to accomplish in a presentation, talk or workshop. A lack of true “news you can use” is a common way for public speakers to fail. That’s true especially for presentations that aim to impart information to improve lives or work.
I recently tried out a new approach to better communicate the key takeaways of a Message House Workshop that I conducted for a group of approx. 60 non-profit executives in Jacksonville, FL.
Afterwards, the conference organizer told me that participants rated the workshop an average 4.9 out of a possible 5.
Here’s what I did: At the beginning of my talk I showed a bright red “Key Takeaway” stamp added to the top left corner of a slide. I said that whenever I was going to talk about something especially important, the audience would see that stamp.
Then I said that immediately after the conference everyone would also be able to download a one-pager with all key-takeaways at www.KeyTakeaways.org. I emphasized that this was a Web address exclusively set up to link to the key takeaways from the workshop and that it would work as a forwarding shortcut to a page on the Message House Web site.
At the end of the workshop, I again showed the same Web address, but added a bulleted list of content that would be available on that page.
I believe that it’s not just important to offer concrete takeaways. It also matters to make them easily accessible, and to package and to brand them. You want to make it abundantly clear that you care about making the event as useful as possible to your audience. I think using what I call a “phrase domain” like “keytakeaways.org” drives that point home even more powerfully than using a less evocative address like messagehouse.org/keytakeaways.
As you might have guessed by now, I’m a big believer in phrase domains because they are so communicable; I even show off photos of my dog Zeus at www.seemydog.com (or maintain a shortcut address to information about the Message House Workshop at www.TheWorkshop.cc).
If you are a presenter, I recommend you buy an easy-to-remember Web address (ourtakeaways.org is still available as I write this; but you can also use something like “ourkeypoints.org”, etc. – be creative!) to use during your presentation.
Your audience will love it.
Watch the video below to learn more about the Message House Workshop:
[vimeo id=”60087231″]