Effective Strategies for Managing Visual Content in Conference Presentations
- John Moore
- 6 days ago
- 8 min read
Visual aids help presentations stick in people's minds by repeating the messages in a different way, and slides can effectively reinforce a presentation's message by making complex information easier to understand, improving audience engagement, and enhancing retention of key points.
As a conference organiser, you will have to manage visual content from a variety of presenters, Therefore, it is essential to adopt best practice approaches to ensure a smooth process.
Most corporate presentations use slides to emphasise the message coming from the stage, and these days, Microsoft PowerPoint is so commonplace, most presenters will prepare their own slides.
However, as conference organiser, if you decided to ask each presenter to supply their own laptop or computer to run their presentations on, the risks of a technical calamity are very high indeed.
Will your presenter be bringing a Mac or a PC, will it need HDMI or display port, or require a multiport hub. Will there be compatibility issues with different resolutions and frame rates, and what works with your projector and what doesn’t. Then of course you have to factor in user competence in troubleshooting these issues.
All this will, at best, result in an awkward pause between presenters whilst laptops are swapped over on stage, or at worst an embarrassing and very public onstage technical failure.
To combat this, best practice is to use a dedicated ‘show machine’ to play out all your slide content.
If your Audio Visual support team provide it, it will be a robust PC or high specification laptop with enough firepower to comfortably run any presentation.
Connected to it will be a professional grade presentation clicker, with a simple to use remote control and capability to work at distances of up to 300 feet between the stage and the Show machine.
Of course there might be a moment when the presenter accidentally forgets to move to the next slide… it’s actually a surprisingly regular occurrence at the end of a presentation, for the speaker to leave the stage with their last slide still showing on the screen.
When this happens, your technical team can simply move forward to the next slide manually.. either using the keyboard or mouse on the Show machine, or with a second remote for the presentation clicker.
One Deck to rule them all
It is also not ideal to use a different set of files for each speaker. Whilst it sounds like a sensible approach, its actually quite a complicated way of running your event, and relies on enough time between presenters to change to the next speakers presentation. Sometimes that can be done during a Q&A session, so there would be plenty of time, but for a quick changeover it increases the risk of the wrong slides or no slides coming up on the screen.
Double decking, which is having two PowerPoint machines, one for the first, third and fifth presenter, and the other showing the slides of the second, fourth and sixth presenter, is an approach that can be used, but change management is an absolute nightmare so it is really to be avoided.
You also have the problem of quality control. Slide decks from individual presenters can be created on different formats: Perhaps the screen size chosen doesn’t match the screen you are using to project, and then of course there is consistent branding. The size, position and consistency of your brand logo is important. If every presenter uses a different colour scheme, or slide theme, it can make your entire event look a bit amateur, and thrown together.
To get over these challenges, without a doubt, best practice is to prepare a master deck for all presenters so you only have one completed and checked file for the entire event, all consistently themed and branded throughout.
If you have several sessions throughout your event, the file size can get unmanageable, so it’s not a bad idea to create a single slide deck for each session, and then you can swap files during breaks.
File names
One other reason why a deck for each presenter is a bad idea is the human capacity to invent a perfectly sensible file naming convention that everyone then ignores.
You might choose to send very specific instructions out, perhaps using the session title, or the presenters name?
Either works, as long as the agenda or run of show given to the tech team follows the same convention… and of course there are no undocumented changes to the planned program, but be warned, you will still get 2 or 3 that either didn’t read the instructions, or worse, chose to ignore them.
Of course there is revision control. Imagine how much fun it can be when the new revision sent to you has the exact same filename as the previous version. Or the presenters idea of revision control is just to type the word FINAL at the end, and then when yet another revision is made to the final version, you get FINAL-FINAL.
File transfer
If you have a presenter whose been making changes and comes to site with his presentation still on his laptop you need to be ready to manage this. Thankfully, any Audio Visual technician worth his wages will have a variety of USB thumb drives in his tool bag, even if you don't.
Of course there are some large blue chip corporates who disable the USB socket of all their company laptops for IT security. This presents a challenge if anyone wants to transfer a presentation, so be aware of it, and dont get caught out.
Does it have to be PowerPoint
There are alternatives. The most common being Apple Keynote, which integrates with the iLife application, Google slides included in the Google Workspace package and OpenOffice Impress, all of which are essentially direct substitutes for PPT.
If you want to avoid the sort of ‘death by PowerPoint’ that we have all seen a million times over, there are interesting offerings from Canva, Prezi, and Adobe Express, not to mention the alternative Microsoft 365 Products, Sway, and One Note, all of which can be made to look quite different to PowerPoint, albeit within the parameters of still just being visual aids on a large screen supporting a live presenter.
However, the challenge is the requirement to collate everything onto one single machine, and only PowerPoint has the unrivalled popularity to allow a standardised platform that pretty much everyone has access to.
Of course your AV Production team will be more than happy to accommodate the alternatives, as long as they have plenty of time to get the right technology plugged in and ready for your show.
Using Video
Adding a video into PowerPoint is quite a simple thing to do, and using PowerPoints playback video options, you can have it launch from a single click, leaving the presenter in total control. However, high quality videos use a lot of computer memory, and on slower computers that can mean poor playback quality. If you have a high definition video that lasts more than a couple of minutes, it’s probably best to leave those files out of PowerPoint, and send them separately.
Your AV team will chose to either ‘Run VT’ off a separate machine, or add it into the PowerPoint presentation themselves. The processing power of a dedicated Show Machine using a state of the art graphics card should crunch through any video content seamlessly, but you can leave that decision up the production team.
One thing you should definitely avoid is using hyperlinks to YouTube videos, or other online live content. Anything is possible if you speak to your Tech team in advance, but unless they have provisioned for it before the event, there is no guarantee links will work live.
We are all so used to being connected ‘online’ that we make the assumption that everything will just work, but equipment set up specifically for a single event, and in a venue with a network that might have unpredictable security restrictions, firewalls to pass through or even user account details to enter, it's safer to resist the urge to use any links to live content, not just video.
When it goes wrong
PowerPoint is a very stable bit of software, and when run on a decent machine, it really doesn’t crash very often. However the human beings on stage will easily make up for that stability, and present you with an unexpected challenge that you have to rise to.
Having the wrong slides on the screen for the wrong presenter for instance, or a presenter leaving the stage only half way through their deck because they ran out of time, or as mentioned earlier, walking off without moving off their final slide. Pretty much anytime the wrong slide is on the screen for any reason, you need to be able to change it without escaping from presentation mode and waggling your mouse about in front of a live audience
AV productions teams will always use a vision mixer to switch between sources that can be sent to the main screen, and all professional mixers have the capability of storing a captured image of a slide.
The holding slide, or safety slide is, more often than not, the first slide of the master deck. The one that has the name of the event on it. Your production team will save this into the vision mixer, and then put it on the main screen whenever changes need to be made to the PowerPoint deck that’s currently showing.
For instance, the holding slide can be left on throughout the lunch break, allowing presenters to check through and edit the next sessions slide deck without any of that activity been seen on the main screen.
Using notes
When you are standing on a stage with the big screen behind you, it’s a natural human reaction to turn around to look at the screen to check that what is showing on your slide matches the subject you are talking about.
To avoid having to turn around, its commonplace for a screen to be set up in front of the stage, often referred to as a ‘comfort’ monitor,
Most commonly, you just have the same image as is displaying on the screen – but some clients like instead to show PowerPoints ‘presenter view’ which displays the live, or current slide, the next slide and the slide notes as well.
It is perfect for script bullet points, and keeping track of where you are within a presentation, but do not expect to be able to use PowerPoint notes as a full blown teleprompter. Teleprompters, often universally known by the most popular brand of prompting systems, Autocue, have the ability to scroll at varying speeds and can store an almost infinite length of script.
PowerPoint notes on the other hand is very limited in terms of number of lines of text and can't be scrolled easily during a live presentation.
Ring in the changes
You will need to have the capability to make changes. Errors are spotted, facts are rechecked, and the latest figures come out, often during rehearsals. Slide decks will change, right up to the last minute. Fighting against it is like King Canute ordering the tide to stop rising.
Of course, there has to be a cut off for people emailing completely new versions of presentations, and that should be pre-event, or at the absolute latest, by the time the final show deck has been successfully compiled.
Once the Show Machine is plugged in, and its content is up on the main screen, it is time to switch to making changes locally. Make them on the show machine, with the Technician who is managing the PowerPoint, and then save those changes onto the final deck.
In summary
There is a lot to think about, but if you take a methodical approach it's not insurmountable.
Assume that at least some of your presenters will not follow the instructions you give them, and almost all will need to make last minute changes.
Work with your AV team and production crew, as this is bread and butter to them.
Things like using live links in presentations, the need to present online content from Canva, showing high resolution video content, or having a presenter use his Macbook from the lectern are all things which are perfectly possible if properly planned for in advance.
However ignore them at your peril, as the embarrassment of getting it wrong is going to be very public.
For more information on how we can help support your in person, hybrid or virtual event, get in touch. hello@confidence-digital.com
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