Presentation workshops in Hackney

Core members of Positive Money Hackney have started a very encouraging initiative! On Saturday mornings, Hackney supporters have been running workshops on creating and hosting better presentations, improving speaking skills and coming up with engaging new ways to present various topics.

Here’s an update on the workshops from John, one of the organisers (and the man presenting at an event in London in the picture above!):

Attendees and topics

For this series of workshops we identified 6 regular members whom we’d like to take the lead on future meeting topics, and working towards really strong presentations that we would have absolute confidence in building a meeting around.

Workshop #1 – identify topics

In this workshop we brought the group together to discuss possible topics for the next season of regular meetings.

Small groups worked together to make a pitch for each topic.

Objective – to come up with a list of topics for the new season, and assign a responsible person to each topic.

Each participant comes away with a topic to research, and come back to the next workshop with.

The topics we came away with were:

• Debt

• The Commons (and community assets)

• Parliamentary lobbying

• Mutual credit clearance

• Land value tax

• Inequality

Workshop #2 – short presentation

In this workshop we developed each of the topics from the previous workshop.

The participants were tasked with delivering a prepared 7 minute presentation to the group.

We were looking specifically for evidence of good research, speech organisation and clarity.

We discussed the each presentation in turn, identifying the strengths and giving the participant at least one recommendation for improvement.

The presentations exceeded expectations on all fronts.

We filmed a minute or so of each presentation as a reference point for our main recommendations to make your presentation even better next time.

The main recommendations and observations that came out of the discussions were:

• speaking pace

• sincerity

• getting to conclusions on time

• adding substance and specifics to your headlines and assertions

• confidence

• signposting of what you are going to tell us about

• eliminating verbal fillers

• introducing some pauses and allowing the audience time to digest new information

Workshop #3 – a longer presentation

At this workshop we will ask each participant to develop their presentation to be up to 15 minutes long. We will look to develop the content and improve the structure and style, and again record all the presentations for self-analysis.

We hope this is of interest to you, and will be happy to help your group set one up if needed!  Please let me know below if you have any comments.

John (Positive Money Hackney)