When you're done developing your recommendations, visualizations and other materials, it's time to package everything together in a single presentation. When you're ready to put that presentation together, you'll want to organize it in a way that helps maximize the effect you have on your audience. That means, including some important sections that we'll discuss in this lesson. By the end of this lesson, you'll be able to list the sections that should be included when you present your research, describe what should be included in each of these sections, and explain why each of these sections are important. So let's talk about the research report and research presentation. The sections you always want to include within your presentation or report are, executive summary, background, methodology, results or analysis, conclusion or recommendations. You also want to follow some general guidelines. A very important aspect, let's say, of a presentation is its length and how many slides you're using for your meeting. A general rule of thumb is to use one slide per minute of your presentation. Also, you want to make sure and leave time for questions after your presentation. So, aim for making your presentation half as long as the meeting. For example, in an hour meeting, aim for a 30 minute presentation. In a 30 minute meeting, aim for a 15 minute presentation and so on. So why is this important? Well, let me tell you about my experiences when I used to be on what we would like to call, the client side. So I would have research vendors or partners come in and present research findings for me. What would invariably happen is, the meeting would get started late, certain people we were waiting for them to come and then so the presentation would start ten minutes after the hour. Then, the vendor or partner would spend a lot of time focusing on the methodology and the background, and then invariably people would ask questions and you'd be at the half an hour mark of a meeting and you really would not have gotten to the meat of the matter. Then, the vendor or partner would try to present and invariably would only get halfway through the deck. And you'd have 10 minutes left to cram all of the findings and recommendations in. Invariably this would always annoy the other people in the meeting who just really wanted to understand what the key findings were. Because they would leave that hour meeting not getting what they came for, which were the recommendations. So again, you really want to be clear and concise. So when you're putting together the findings of a presentation, so the real analysis, you should look at every page that's going in and ask yourself, is this interesting? Does it tell a story or propel the story? Can the reader understand what's going on in this slide? If they can't, then you need to revamp it in a way so that each page in your presentation is helping propel the story that you want to tell. So let's also talk about a presentation, what's included? Now, normally the information within a slide presentation is more succinctly designed with short phrases and charts. That's really important because people do not want to read full sentences typically when they're looking at presentation findings. Again, you want to use as few words as possible to convey your main points and ideas. The other thing that I want to talk to you about, which is really important, that we've talked about throughout this course is, those key ideas or those main recommendations that typically whoever has commissioned the research wants to hear. Now as I mentioned before, you should probably have no more than 12 recommendations. But I want to even think about before you put your recommendations together, what are the main points of the presentation? What are those key takeaways, or those key findings? If you think about, if you're in an elevator with the executive who has commissioned this research, how can you summarize that research in one minute or less?
