How to Create a Professional Presentation for Any Quarterly Board Meeting

You're no stranger to quick internal presentations within your department. In fact, you might even consider yourself somewhat of a presentation professional at this point. After all, for any of these low stakes presentations, you can knock out a powerpoint within an hour or two, present it, and not think about it again. But then every 3 months, you see the company's top board members filing on into a conference room and suddenly those quick presentations won't fully cut it. In the conference room, you just think they're deeply listening to your strategy suggestions, but instead the members are scrutinizing every small missed company logo, every underwhelming, default chart and every misaligned headline.

These little mistakes may seem small, and far less important than making sure the data is correct, but they’ll be slowly adding up in the back of your board’s mind, even if they can’t exactly say what's bothering them. And it’s these small moments that can put a crack into the veneer of professionalism and allow doubt to creep into your audience’s minds. When you’re presenting to your board about important strategies and decisions for the upcoming quarter, that’s the last thing you want happening.

What to Include on Each and Every Board Presentation

The Quarterly Board Presentation is so important to each and every company. It’s the presentation where everyone, from the sales and marketing team, as well as the board itself, aligns and sets down the strategy for the next upcoming 3 months. It's about discussing strategic takeaways, various risks that might pop up, as well as opportunities that could arise. And there are things that the presentation can include to make sure that everyone stays on track and focused the entire runtime.

Every presentation project, whether for a board or not, should start out with setting down and developing the overarching message. For quarterly presentations, that message will be expected to include what has changed from the last meeting, from sales numbers to overall missions and strategies, and why that matters. Quarterly board meetings will also usually require a unified decision for any future strategies, so it's also important to make sure every slide and headline are continually moving your audience towards the hoped outcome. Once that's all really honed in, you can then begin to plot out the slides for a full story. 

As you're doing that, here are things to remember that’ll make your message even clearer for anyone even glancing at your slides. 

For each slide, keep it to one main idea.

Cramming together too many thoughts, as well as every bit of context and data on just one slide will absolutely bury and bog down each slide and really bring down the pace of the entire presentation. This can commonly be called topic bundling, where instead of one slide answering just one question, decks will instead try to cover context, metrics, implications, and the ask all at once. Lead with one recommendation first and then back up your decision with evidence on future slides.

Hone in your headlines.

To further steer the message, especially on slides that’ll include graphs and charts, you want the main takeaway to be apparent even in the headline. A board member should be able to read just the titles of your deck and understand the entire narrative, instead of squinting through chart legends and endless numbers. If your headline is just a generic paragraph that doesn’t actually say anything, no one wants to read that. Don't make anyone guess at an interpreation by replacing that headline with an action or takeaway instead. For example: "Q3 Financial Performance" leaves a whole wide void ahead of you, while "Q3 14% Increase Driven by Strategic Release of New Product Lines" immediately gives everyone the same idea.

Prioritize visuals and short bullet points.

When you fill a slide with multiple paragraphs of dense text, your audience will be slammed against that wall of text and immediately want to tune out. If you’re wanting to include more evidence or add context for future questions, that can be included in the appendix or in a pre-read document. There’s a difference between documents and presentations, and on your presentation, cut away the novel in favor of quick visuals and voiceovers.

Customize your visuals, from bar graphs to line charts and more.

Your board is constantly seeing so many of the same default PowerPoint charts that as soon as they pop up, there will be only static in their brains. PowerPoint lets you customize more than you think, from taking away unnecessary grid lines that might be clouding up the chart, increasing axis labels to make everything easier to read, and changing the colors to match your overall brand. Something as small as that can make a chart stand out more in everyone's mind and make it feel like much more of a full experience. 

Include a key takeaways slide.

A quick takeaway slide will concisely sum up the plans and decisions everyone made during the presentation and keep them fresh in everyone's minds.

Small Things Still Keeping You Down in the Board Room

Alright, you now have your presentation file ready, complete with clean and professional designs supporting your big overarching message. But there could still be smaller details dragging you down that you're not noticing.

Give your presentation a last scan to see if you're leaving in any of these mistakes and red flags:

• Using the wrong aspect ratio: Your company might have been using the old 4:3 square layout instead of 16:9 for as long as you can remember, even before you worked there. And it might feel like a whole project to convert all of the presentations into a new size, but that's an investment that’ll immediately amp up every future project. It's immediately noticeable when your presentation isn't fitting within a conference room monitor.

  
  

• Crowded slides: White space may feel like wasted space in an important presentation, but rather it's the moment for your audience to breathe. Cramming in as much content onto one slide can only make a slide look overwhelming and cluttered. To combat this, you can include the obvious margins of space around your main paragraphs and images, as well as making sure there's enough leading between bullet points.

  
  

• Too many different styles: If you’re using 7 colors and 6 different fonts for each and every slide, it’s suddenly looking like a magazine collage rather than a professional presentation. Narrow down your font choices to no more than 2 and keep your colors to 3 or less brand compliant choices. 

  
  

• Misaligned elements: You don't have to zoom into individual pixels, but aligning the top edge of an image to another element like a headline or paragraph of text can take you a long way for a refined presentation. PowerPoint has built in gridlines as well as alignment tools to make sure nothing's ever off again

  
  

• Too many or too high energy animations: You may think adding spinning or bouncing moments to your presentation will pump up and excite your audience. But rather these animations can feel elementary and too goofy for a board presentation. Stick to clean fades or no animations at all.

You don't have to be a PowerPoint expert to nail your Quarterly Board Meetings. Using these small tips and tricks, as well as other resources we have for free on our website will have each deck looking professional.

And if you're wanting help with even higher stakes presentations or longer sales presentations, reach out to us today!