This lesson is part two of three dealing with creating your research presentation. In part one, we covered general guidelines and problems of a poorly planned presentation. In this lesson, let's look at the building blocks that go into your presentation. After this lesson, you'll be able to describe the executive summary, background, and methodology sections, and explain the purposes of each. Let's get started. So let's talk about all the building blocks of a presentation. Let's start with the executive summary. As I mentioned before, you really want to have a short summary of what the research has encapsulated. The executive summary is a brief overview of this story. It's important to have the executive summary at the beginning of the presentation because you want to have a clear and concise way of communicating your research findings without the viewer having to go through your entire presentation. In many cases, executives or other time-challenged readers, which pretty much includes almost everybody now, may not have time to read all of the slides in your presentation. Here's an excerpt of something you could see in an executive summary. Of the four advertising concepts tested, Concept A was the most positively received because it incorporated a message of being environmentally friendly rather than saving money or being stylish. Key statistics, such as appeal, intent to purchase, and likelihood to recommend were higher in Concept A than Concept B, C and D. This was reinforced in the open-ended feedback where many consumers felt that Product A was contributing to the greater good. So what you have right there is three sentences or so that pretty much encapsulate all of the research findings. Now, let's go on to background. The background slide should explain the backstory, or the reason why the research is being commissioned. Remember when we talked about what is the story? What is the journey that your protagonist is going on? This is what you want to communicate of why the research is being commissioned. For example, the content in a background slide should have context. It should explain the business reason or impetus on why the research is being done, the objective of the research and the solution that the research findings provide. Here's an example of what a background slide might sound like. Company X is developing a new e-commerce website as their current site is outdated and sales have become stagnant. The goal of this research is to understand what are the drivers and barriers to online purchasing for this company so they can create a site that increases online sales. The methodology section is important because it explains how the research was conducted. As I mentioned before, sometimes people will have a lot of questions about how the research was conducted and whether or not it utilized a valid methodology. So it's very important for you to highlight the methodology. So for example, you might want to say, if you undertook focus groups, three focus groups of an hour and a half each were deployed on this particular date, and the target audience was whatever it was. It doesn't have to go into a lot of detail, but it has to just generally explain what you did, who you spoke to and when it happened. Lets give some other examples. For example, focus groups are best utilized to help understand consumers' attitudes and behaviors. Surveys, on the other hand, are often utilized to estimate market sizing or overall demand. By explaining the respective methodologies, it allows the reader to understand the application of the research. Now why is this important? It's important because often what happens is in poor research, the wrong methodology will be utilized. So for example, using focus groups for market sizing, because of the sample size of focus groups which is usually no more than 20 or 30 respondents. It's not a large enough sample size to accurately predict the size of a particular audience. In that case, you would need to use a survey where you would be surveying hundreds of consumers. So again, why you want to include a methodology is not only to tell your viewer or reader what you did, but also to confirm that it was the appropriate methodology for your research needs. Let's move on and talk a little bit more about methodology for surveys. For example, if it was a survey, what you want to do is include the sample size for example an N of 1500. And include the margin of error, which is plus or minus 3%. You've probably heard about margin of error in earlier courses, but in summary, the margin of error explains the statistical likelihood that the data being shown is statistically valid. Include when the survey was administered and by whom. For example, the survey was fielded in May 2017, in the UK, by the Sample Research Company. Finally include what criteria survey participants had to meet. In this case the respondents had to be between the ages of 18 and 49. They needed to be UK citizens, and they had to have purchased product X in the last six months. The methodology section for research done using a focus group can look like this. Three focus group sessions, eight respondents per session, 1.5 hours per session were conducted in March 2017 in San Francisco, California. Notice that in this first sentence we included the number of sessions, the number of respondents per session and the length of each session. We also included the date and location where the sessions were held. The section goes on to state what criteria participants had to meet. For example, respondents had to be moms of preschoolers ages 3 to 5. And it provides other relevant information about the participants, for example, the moms are between the ages of 25 and 34. That wraps up this lesson, we made a good start on the building blocks. In the next lesson we will cover the rest of the essential components of your presentation. I'll see you there.
