I was fortunate to sneak the Chicago MIT Enterprise Forum‘s Whiteboard Challenge into my schedule Tuesday night. I’m about to take off on a fishing trip with my dad at Milton Lake, far, far up in Saskatchewan, Canada, and I had planned on driving back to Iowa that night to pack for the trip. However, I decided at the last minute to push back my highway-time, and now I’m sure I made the right choice.
Here’s the description of the event from MITEF:
Come for the excitement!
Come for the thrill of the competition!
Come to find out about some of the most innovative ideas in Chicago!
Join the Chicago innovation community as we celebrate the best and brightest new ideas that will shape our future. Come cheer on 15 [actually 13] carefully selected presenters as they compete for a $5000 cash prize! [Split amongst the top 3 places: $3k, $1.5k, $500]
The presenting finalists will have 5 minutes and a whiteboard to describe their innovative concept in front of a panel of Chicago’s most experienced judges and an audience of 200 [I heard about 141 showed up]. No powerpoints, no props, no kidding.
As a participant, you’ll be a part of the process as your vote, over your mobile phone [if you had reception in the auditorium], will account for 20% of the total overall score.
The Whiteboard Challenge is the most exciting innovation event in Chicago and you don’t want to miss out.
The winning presentation was delivered by Dan Masterson for the Guardian Angel Outlet. See a video of the concept demo here.
Rather than talk give reviews of the concepts themselves in this quick post, I’m going to point out 3 helpful tips for delivering a less-formal whiteboard presentation as compared to a more-typical PowerPoint slide sleepfest presentation.
1. Embrace the whiteboard’s unique visual characteristics
By nature, an image on a whiteboard appears gradually as the presenter draws it, one line at a time. This has advantages over a digital presenation where it’s easy to overwhelm the viewer with too much information too fast. It also adds a subconscious suspense component as the viewer waits to see what’s going to show up, like Pictionary on business steroids.
When you’re presenting in front of a whiteboard, add visual information to the board gradually, at approximately the rate you’re divvying oral information. What you want to avoid are the extremes: talking for 4 out of 5 minues without drawing anything (you’ll lose the viewer’s attention as their eyes drift around the room to the captivating carpet stain) or drawing a complicated graphic in silence for 3 minutes (you’ll overwhelm the viewer as soon as you start talking again because you’ll have so much to explain at once).
2. Always write or draw the most important points on the board
If you’re telling the audience how many lives your product will save, or how many 100′s of millions of future customers are lining up at your door step ready to buy (must be hard to sleep at night), then make sure you write this number down (and include the zeros for big numbers — it adds drama as you draw them out, one Cheerio at a time).
And make sure you write the company or product’s name on the board. This is probably the most important thing a viewer should remember, right?
3. Watch game film — in this case, UPS commercials
What can brown do for you? In this case, it can teach you how to give a strong presentation when you’re writing on a board.
The gentle, Bob Ross-with-straight-hair presenter in these commercials (here, here, more here, and here, and on UPS.com here) can teach you a few presentation skills: even though you’re writing on a board, try to do as much talking as possible while facing the audience (people remember faces, not haircuts); draw neatly so that people can concentrate on the message (and not how you scribble like a 3rd grader); and finally, if you’re going to break tip #1 and draw something complex, at least do it right at the beginning so there aren’t interruptions to your flow for the rest of the presentation (the UPS guy gets a head start drawing during the preceding commercial, apparently).
What can whiteboard do for you?
$3,000, at least.
That’s a lot of dry erase markers.
