A Story to Remember
Using a story is one of the easiest and most effective ways to help your audience remember the facts and information that you want them to take away from your presentation. Think of a story as the coat rack that you organize and hang the information you want your audience to remember and use.
Story Tips
Just a reminder of key tips to keep in mind as you pull together your story:
- Know your audience: Your professor? Your classmates? Young? Old? Researchers who know the technical language of your discipline? Are people unfamiliar with your discipline’s technical language?
- Start with a big idea or something counterintuitive: The idea is to capture people’s attention, and hopefully their imagination so that hopefully their attention will persist to the end of the presentation by anchoring what is to come with your story.
- Tell a personal story (or someone else’s personal story): For some reason, personal or relatable stories are more memorable for most people.
- Show don’t tell: Don’t read text off of your slides but narrate the image on your slide (often using text in the speaker notes section of PowerPoint)
- Build up to a S.T.A.R. moment (Something They’ll Always Remember): This is something I sometimes struggle to do, but if your story can build up to something dramatic or memorable it can help your whole presentation or lecture to be more memorable.
- End with a positive takeaway or call to action: If possible try to end with something positive to help anchor your story in peoples’ memories.
Story for the Makerspace Badging Presentation
It wasn’t easy to come up with a memorable personal story about Makerspace Workshop Badges until I thought back to what prompted us to start a Badging pilot project in the Digital Scholarship Commons (DSC).
Here are the key elements of the origin story of Makerspace Badges in the DSC:
- Not long after we opened our library makerspace, two mechanical engineers took our Electronics with Arduino workshop.
- After completing the workshop they asked if they could have a certificate they could put on their resume to let Co-op employers know that they not only do they know about mechanical engineering but also have some experience with electronics.
- Within a week I’d started our Digital Badging Pilot project I sent the two engineering students Makerspace Badges that they could cite on their resumes.
- Their feedback from students was very positive.
- Since then our makerspace, has issued over 1,500 workshop badges.
Next, we will use these key points to tell a short story at the beginning of our presentation to set the stage for the important information to follow.