Presenting as part of a team in a group presentation

At some point in your career you are likely to be part of a team delivering a group presentation. This may sound more appealing than presenting by yourself (and being the sole focus of everyone’s attention). But it can also raise other issues such as confusions, conflict of interests or inconsistencies in the design.

7 tips on how to execute an effective group presentation:

1. Give everyone a clear job to do

Decide early which team members will be responsible for which parts of the presentation. This can save duplication and makes sure each person pulls their weight. Be crystal clear on the content that each team member will be responsible for. Repetition won’t please your audience!

2. Choose the leader

If you’ve watched The Appentice, you’ll recognise the habit of asking teams to pick a Project Manager. And it’s certainly a good idea to give this role to someone in your team. This person can be responsible for checking that the others are on track, ensuring everyone understands what they are supposed to be doing and for everyone knowing who to speak to if they have any queries.

Group presentations

3. Create an easy to use and creative template

You may already have a house style & template, but often teams will need a bespoke set of slides for an event. So before you get started, the team should decide on the layout, colours and fonts for the slide set and one member of the group should have the job of creating a template with designed slide masters. If you start without this, your team members will waste huge amounts of time formatting slides that aren’t on brand. If they could just put on the content with nothing more: great… but people don’t do this. People start on layout & design. So if you’ve got a decent template to begin with, then this will ensure that there is consistency in everyone’s slides and you won’t need to waste time reformatting at the end. A strong template design will feature a number of useful layouts and will include default settings for shapes, text boxes, lines etc.

4. Meet regularly

Whilst you don’t want to waste valuable time by having meetings for the sake of meetings. (Oh how we love to do that!) You do need to get together with your team mates regularly to double check that everyone is on the right lines and on track to meet deadlines.

5. Allocate sufficient time for compiling the slides

If each team member is working on their own part of the presentation you are bound to encounter a few issues when you bring all of the slides together into your final presentation, so make sure you leave enough time at the end for this. It will work best if one person is assigned the job of collating and compiling all of the slides. And tweaking those inevitable design inconsistencies so that everything looks professional and together.

6. Rehearse rehearse rehearse!

Yes, we’ve typed rehearse 3 times for a reason. When working in a group you will need to runthrough things more than once to work out timings, transitions and script. It’s also a very powerful technique to film yourselves so that you can watch back together to see where adjustments can be made.

7. If your group presentation still looks a bit amateur: ask the PowerPoint Designers at Presented to sort it out!

Seriously – just ping over an email and we can give you an estimate. You might be surprised at the value we can add!

We hope these tips relieve some of the stress that naturally comes with working in a team. Good luck for your next group presentation!