CWG Presenter Guidelines, Tips, and Suggestions

Individuals like you who are willing to share their knowledge and experiences are the key to making a conference successful.  Over the years the CWG Board has received a lot of valuable feedback from conference surveys and attendees about the presentations that make up the CWG conference, and we thought it would be helpful to share some of this feedback with potential presenters as you are making the final preparations for the upcoming conference. 

 

  • Please respect the time allotments for presentations.  If you have a 45 minutes slot, prepare a 35-40 minute presentation to allow for questions and unforeseen issues.   Set yourself ten minute goals so you don’t end up with ten slides to cover in three minutes.
  • Please limit an introduction to your company and/or products to one to two slides outside of Partner Track presentations. 
  • Sometimes less is more.  If you have four or five learning points, consider picking your best two and providing more detail on those topics.  Attendees have often asked for more in depth information on some of the topics presented instead of a light covering of several topics.  
  • If you plan on a live demonstrations, consider having screen prints or screen recordings of demonstrations in case there are technical problems.
  • It is always helpful to practice your presentation in completion prior to the conference.  This will obviously make you more comfortable with your presentation as well as giving you an accurate time estimate.
  • The CWG Conferences are an international conference.  English will not be every attendee’s native language.  Please be conscious of the use of slang or wording that may not be easily understood by non-native English attendees
  • It is better not to read slides verbatim. Expand on the material.
  • Always repeat questions. Those in the back may not have heard them.
  • Speak slowly and enunciate carefully.
  • Be positive, be enthusiastic, relax, and have fun.
  • Use text sparingly: Keep your points in a short, concise, outline form. This will inform the audience about the topic and will also help you remember your key points for discussion. There is no need for full sentences, as this will unnecessarily clutter your slides. Use action keywords to point out the important topics of your discussion.
  • Wording should be clear and legible: Use the font that is pre-loaded in the template to ensure that the text can be read by all participants in your session. Text should be large enough to be legible from all areas of the room. Slides should have no more than five bullets and each bullet should be no longer than two lines.
  • Slide titles: Keep your slide titles to one or two lines.
  • Number of slides: A typical rule-of-thumb is to have one slide for each 1.5 to 2 minutes of the speaker portion of your presentation (not including the Q&A time). Stick to one topic per slide. You can have multiple slides per topic. In this case, the same title should be used on the each slide, with the word ‘cont’d’ at the end of the title in all instances after the first use.
  • Visually appealing: Use other sources of information besides text in your presentation. Pictures and visual effects can add to the attractiveness of a presentation if used correctly. However, be careful that those tools don’t override the information you are trying to convey.
  • Colors: Do not use more than four colors in your presentation. Avoid red letters, which are difficult for some people to read. The best readability comes with high contrast of intensity rather than by clashes of color.
  • Alignment: All type should be left justified.
  • Consistency throughout presentation: Be consistent in presenting information in an organized, logical manner.