p2i Week: Kate Haley Goldman on Using p2i Outside of AEA

I’m Kate Haley Goldman, and I’m the co-owner of Audience Viewpoints Consulting. We work with informal science and arts and cultural institutions.

Last year, I applied p2i Design principles to a presentation I gave at the Visitor Studies Association conference. It was the best way to showcase my content for several reasons. First, it fit my topic – Nimble Evaluation, which focused on the overlap between design thinking and rapid iteration. Second, I was trained in the academic-style approach to reporting but that clashed with the key approaches of the technology developers I work with. My developer friends found our reports and presentations too dense, too dull, and non-actionable. My academic colleagues were concerned that without graphs and extensive background, our complex work would be taken out of context and watered down. The p2i approach to presenting helped bridge these ideas.

While I’d made similar presentations within the tech field for years, I hadn’t tried it with researchers and evaluators. Nonetheless, I took a leap and employed the lessons from the Potent Presentations Initiative and my graphic designer friends and presented slides in their style when I talked about Nimble Evaluation at the VSA conference.  No graphs, few words, mostly pictures. Full-bleed color pictures help the audience deepen their connection to the context and the lack of bullets allow them to focus on the speaker.

Rad Resource: Since then I’ve moved the majority of my presentations to this style. I’ve also discovered the p2i Rad Resources, which give not only examples of how to present in this more effective manner, but they do so in ways that academic, data-driven evaluators can appreciate. In particular, I’d like to draw attention to the Design webinar session hosted by Stephanie Evergreen, which can be found on the p2i homepage.

Because Stephanie offers the rationale for the design choices made, you can not only make more effective presentations but understand why they are effective. You’ll still need the same amount of preparation time (or perhaps even more) for your slides, as fewer words on the screen forces you to be an organized and engaging speaker. We’ve found the Rad Resources at p2i help support and reinforce better speaking in all our presentations, at conferences and elsewhere.

The American Evaluation Association is celebrating p2i Week with AEA members who have used our Potent Presentations Initiative. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from members who have used p2i strategies in their presentations. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.