Mitt Romney’s Healthcare PowerPoint

As I teacher of presentation skills, you can imagine my interest this past week as I read that Mitt Romney had used a PowerPoint document in his recent speech on HealthCare. I set down my Wall Street Journal and raced from the breakfast table to my laptop to find a copy of his slides, which I did here: (you can also see his presentation on YouTube). I poured through his slides and, as I’m prone to do, began scribbling notes on the messages they contained, their flow, the supporting evidence provided and the visual display of the content.

With a focus on presentation over politics, here are five suggestions I’d offer Mr. Romney to improve this presentation, should he ever need to give it again.

1.) Establish and lead with a clear, compelling main message. Romney’s main message was: “I have a better solution to improve healthcare than Obamacare.” Yet he spent the first thirteen and a half minutes – nearly half his speech – extolling state’s rights and defending the healthcare program he signed into law as Governor of Massachusetts. Given the similarities between his Massachusetts plan and Obamacare, he needed to address this point, but he’d have done better to lead with his new vision, then address the Massachusetts issue later.

2.) Develop visuals for display that emphasize imagery, saving the detailed text for a handout. Romney’s slides, while not as busy as most business presentations, still contained far too many words, forcing the audience to try to simultaneously read and listen, a very difficult task. This is the most common and damaging mistake presenters make. Romney should have instead chosen rich imagery appealing to the audience’s emotions, making his points more memorable, and quicker to grasp. Visuals and handouts are both essential in presentations, but they serve very different purposes, and thus almost always should be separate documents.

3.) Write the main message at the top of each handout page in a clear, powerful sentence (I’m assuming that in following step 2 above, Romney would use the slides he displayed as a handout). Romney’s document contained topics or titles atop each page. This forces the audience to read and process the detailed information on the body of the page to distill its meaning. Better to provide this meaning in a clear headline, enabling the audience to use the details of the page to confirm, rather than deduce your message.

4.) Present your evidence passionately, but objectively. Romney summarized the goal of Obamacare as a “government takeover of healthcare.” You may conclude that that is in effect the result, but it’s a gross distortion to suggest that was the GOAL. He later wrote that Obamacare was an “economic nightmare,” a “radical plan,” and an “unconstitutional power grab.” He might believe that, but using inflammatory terms as a presenter will paint you as highly biased and make the audience less willing to accept your ideas. Again, this is advice given from a presentation, not a political perspective (for the record, I oppose Obamacare).

5.) Remove all unnecessary decoration from both your visuals and your handouts. You don’t need to put the colorful “Romney” logo at the bottom of each page, or the “Believe in America” stamp. It’s not essential to the message of each page and merely adds unnecessary objects the viewer’s eye must sort through to get to the true meaning of each individual page.

I could go on, but these five would be enough to dramatically improve Romney’s presentation. Most presentation principles are simple in concept, yet we struggle in their use. Learning to do so makes a HUGE difference in the impact of our message. As evidence, just look at the difference between Senator Al Gore and Inconvenient Truth Al Gore!

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