How to create presentations that work for multiple stakeholders?

Illustration of multiple portraits

My two cents

Often you have to build a presentation, like a research report, that you have to present to different audiences that have different levels of expertise and different needs. Sure it would be awesome to make a perfect presentation for each type of stakeholder but that can often be overwhelming as you might need to create dozens of tailored presentations.

Instead you could have a "master" presentation that serves as a base, that you can quickly adapt based on the time, level of expertise and interest of the audience. Simply by making a copy, or just by hiding slides in the presentation tool.

Here are a few ways that can help to achieve this:

  1. Use a Q&A structure: create sections in your presentation that answer specific questions (like: what's the process we followed? What were the key learnings? What comes next? etc.). If you present to the whole organization you might say: let's hide the process part with all the academic stuff. In a few clicks you have a shorter and much easier presentation to follow. And as you use a question and answer structure, the whole presentation still feels like a coherent thing because it's like a typical conversation. You don't have to rebuild the storyline of your presentation each time you make a few changes for one or the other target group.

  2. Use a combination of Summary and in-depth slides: Always start a new topic with a summary and the key learning. Then add slides that go in depth. Now you can quickly build custom presentations for executives (just with the summaries), for detail oriented people (just the details). You can also adjust the level of depth by topic based on the audience you're presenting too. For example, when presenting to the finance team you want to give all the details about the budget, but just share the summary of the process you've used.

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