The Secrets of Effective Presentations With Nolan Haims

Introduction

Use less words!

Our host finds that one particularly challenging.

In this episode of the Nonprofit Thrive podcast, Ben Freda welcomes Nolan Haims, Owner of Nolan Haims Creative, to discuss transforming the ordinary presentation into an extraordinary experience. Nolan shares how excessive words can kill your message, the secrets to creating ‘glanceable’ slides, and his expertise in utilizing personal stories to enhance the impact of presentations in the nonprofit sector.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [19:13] Nolan Haims explains the power of the “glanceable slide”
• [22:37] The two presentation structures you should only use
• [27:29] How to use Nolan’s The Better Deck Deck as a designer’s tool
• [31:56] Why a final presentation message should never be a Q&A
• [34:17] How personal anecdotes and relevant stories transform a presentation’s impact
• [37:01] Nolan’s methodology for structuring audience-friendly presentations
• [41:30] Using storytelling to make complex information appealing and memorable
• [42:18] Crafting a presentation narrative that aligns with your goal
• [43:57] How to reach out to Nolan for professional advice

In this episode…

Transforming an ordinary presentation into an extraordinary experience involves more than just sleek design — it requires a strategic approach to storytelling and audience engagement. What are valuable insights and tools to achieve this transformation?

Visual communications designer Nolan Haims offers The Better Deck Deck, a tool that helps presenters enhance their visual storytelling. Besides leveraging this tool in creating compelling, visually captivating slides, Nolan also emphasizes using personal anecdotes and relevant stories to make content more relatable and memorable. Storytelling simplifies complex information and makes it more appealing. These techniques, combined with an audience-friendly structure, transform ordinary presentations into extraordinary experiences, leaving a lasting impression.

In this episode of the Nonprofit Thrive podcast, Ben Freda welcomes Nolan Haims, Owner of Nolan Haims Creative, to discuss transforming the ordinary presentation into an extraordinary experience. Nolan shares why excessive words can kill your message, the secrets to creating ‘glanceable’ slides, and his expertise in utilizing personal stories to enhance the impact of presentations in the nonprofit sector.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Ben Freda on LinkedIn
• BFC Digital
• Nolan Haims on LinkedIn
• Nolan Haims Creative
• The Better Deck Deck: 52 Alternatives to Bullet Points by Nolan Haims 
• The Presentation Podcast
• “Designing for Emotions With Kate Purcell of KP Creative Strategy” on the Nonprofit Thrive podcast
• “There’s No Such Thing as the General Public With Eric Brown of Brownbridge Strategies” on the Nonprofit Thrive podcast

Quotable Moments:

• “It’s not the quantity of content, but the impact of the narrative that resonates.”
• “A slide should be like a billboard — glanceable and instantly conveying its message.”
• “Every decision in presentation design either makes your message better or worse.”
• “Bullet points tell, but stories compel.”
• “Your final words in a presentation should be a crescendo, not a fade to black.”

Action Steps:

1. Minimize on-screen text for presentations. This will help your audience absorb the message quickly so they can focus more on what you’re saying.
2. Adopt the ‘B3E’ or ‘three things’ structures for organizing your presentations. These frameworks help in conveying clear and focused messages, enhancing audience engagement.
3. Introduce real stories to make complex data relatable. Stories create memorable and emotional connections.
4. Engage with new creative tools like The Better Deck Deck to step away from bullet points. This encourages creativity and makes a more effective visual presentation.
5. Make the ending of your presentation definitive and impactful. A strong conclusion leaves a final, lasting impression and drives your message home.

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by BFC Digital.

At BFC Digital, we help nonprofit organizations thrive on the web so they can improve the world.

Our team of creative and tech experts understands that an online presence can help foundations and organizations accomplish their missions. That’s where we come in. Over the last decade, we’ve advised our clients on web design, front- and back-end development, and tech support.

We’re committed to supporting a select set of clients who continually inspire us with their vision for a better world.

To learn more on how BFC Digital can assist you in realizing your organization’s mission, visit bfcdigital.com, email us at info@bfcdigtal.com, or call 646-450-2236 today!

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:06

Welcome to Nonprofit Thrive, a podcast where we learn from the humans who are helping nonprofits succeed in the digital world. Now, let’s get started with the show.

Ben Freda  0:22

Welcome. I’m Ben Freda, host of the show, where we share the stories of leaders in the nonprofit space, the people behind the organizations, the foundations, and the companies that help nonprofits change the world. Recent episodes of the show include Eric Brown of Brownbridge Strategies. We talked about strategy and communications consulting for nonprofits, and he actually introduced me to today’s guest. So thank you. To Eric. We also had Kate Purcell of Kp Creative Strategy, who was a couple of shows ago, a web designer for nonprofits, and she talked about important things to think about when you’re doing a web design project. Go check that episode out as well. Before I get into today’s guest, who I’m super excited to have on, I do need to let you know the podcast is brought to you by BFC Digital, where we offer web development that helps nonprofits thrive on the web. If you work at a nonprofit or a foundation or another type of social change organization, I’m sure you know how hard it is to find reputable, responsive, friendly, kind web support to get your web issues taken care of. At BFC Digital, we help our clients succeed on the web by being the web developers you wish you had sitting at the desk, desk next to you, or maybe working from home that you get hit up on Slack or working from Beach, whatever. We help you fix your bugs, evolve your web presence, design new campaign pages, and integrate that new donation system that your fundraiser is so psyched about. We do it all without ever having you fill out a support ticket because support tickets are the worst, and we treat you just like a normal human. Go to BFC digital.com to learn so today, thanks to Eric Brown, I have on I’m very excited to bring on the podcast. Nolan Haims has decades of experience designing visual communications for the largest organization. He trains organizations to communicate more visually and create compelling stories with data. He’s worked with clients like the Hewlett Foundation, the Central Park Conservancy, and the Center for Effective Philanthropy. He also speaks at national conferences. He writes a lot about visual storytelling, and he’s also one of the CO hosts of an excellent podcast called Presentation podcast. Check that out. He is also one of only 15 Microsoft PowerPoint MVPs in the US, so he has a direct line to the people who make PowerPoint to help update and change it. He’s also finally the author of The Better Deck Deck, which is, we’ll talk, we’ll get into this as a book slash tool set about presentations. And he runs his own design consultancy in Montclair, New Jersey. Nolan, thank you so much for joining us.

Nolan Haims 3:05

Thanks for having me on.

Ben Freda 3:06

Very excited to talk about presentations, visual storytelling, very relevant to almost everybody that I know. But before we get into that, you know, one of the things I like to do is just get into you know who you are and how you started, where you ended up, how you ended up, where you were now. So you know, when you were a kid, let’s say growing up. I don’t know if you grew up in New Jersey, but what were you thinking about what you wanted to do at that point?

Nolan Haims 3:29

It was Connecticut. Well, I wanted to play for a space for the Yankees. But that didn’t last long. I was, I have, I have many past lives. I was actually a professional magician, Juggler and circus performer when I was a kid growing up. No way, wow, it’s, it’s a weird you know, we always, we always say, sort of in the presentation world, nobody, nobody. There’s no training. There’s no path to get to work in the presentation industry. So we all take really weird paths. Mine was, was maybe weirder than others, but yeah, so I was a professional performer. I, you know, I never worked at the mall when I was a kid, I was, I was actually performing and making money. I knew I didn’t want to ultimately be a performer. I went to, went to Northwestern, I got a degree in theater, so slightly more legitimate, like you look at the levels of maybe theater a little more legitimate than magic. Magic’s above ventriloquism. You got those levels? Yeah. So I got a real degree, partly a degree in Dramatic Writing. So I tell people I literally have a degree in storytelling. So I know that. And then I was a theater director and playwright in New York and Chicago and around the country for about a decade, doing, doing pretty well for, you know, directing all over the place. And I tell people I, you know, made my fortune in theater and retired. And actually, I was, I my my day job was temping like that was sort of office work and ground. Design. I sort of self taught there, so I was always doing that on the side. And, you know, I one day, I was, you know, working at some office, and my boss said, I have to do this presentation. Can you, can you do it for me? Can you make it for me? And I knew it was, you use a software called PowerPoint. I was like, Sure, I’ll figure it out. And this was, you know, many years ago, when it was much clunkier, and I did, and I just, presentation is a small niche in the design world that nobody wants to do. So if you do it, and you do it well, you get good at it, and you become very in demand. So basically, I eventually was started being hired by agencies, and I just, I kept getting offered jobs to design presentations, mostly in the in the corporate world. But my side gigs, sort of at this time were because I was always designing on the side for extra money. I kind of fell into the nonprofit foundation world. The Hewlett Foundation was, I think, maybe my first client. And then, you know, if you worked in that industry, you know, executive migration, people move around, and they pass your name around. And so I ended up working for Packard and Irvine and the Center for Effective Philanthropy. And just like ton MacArthur, like just, just people would go different places. So I’ve worked for tons and tons of foundations, and continue to do that. And then eventually, the, you know, as I said, I made my fortune in theater. And I basically, I, you know, moved on. I founded, I got hired by Edelman, which was the largest PR, might still be the largest PR firm in the world, to found an industry first presentation department basically dedicated to visual communication. So I founded that and ran that in New York for about five years, and then just had enough and decided to go out on my own. And I fortunately, had all these, you know, side clients that really helped, you know, taking that leap. A lot of my foundation clients, you know, it was like, All right, I, you know, I’ve got, got this, got these clients. I can, I can survive for a little bit, you know, yeah, and then, of course, you know, it just, it worked, you know, yeah. And that’s where I am today. So I’ve, you know, for the last 15 years, maybe have been 12 years, I don’t know, have been running my own, my own shop, small, little boutique agency.

Ben Freda 7:19

So, so how, how come? Why is it that presentation design is not a place where designers want to go? I mean, it sounds like kind of the ultimate in design, right? Like you’re telling a story. Personally,

Nolan Haims 7:31

it’s very it can be very cool. Like you see Apple just had a big, you know, launch yesterday, or a big whatever and all that stuff, any screen behind all those cool graphics. Yeah, that’s presentation. Now they’re using Keynote and probably after effects and other things, but like, that’s presentation. You see a big car launch or product launch, that’s presentation. You see a TED Talk presentation. I think I the reason it has, I mean, there are a lot of reasons it has a really bad name, but it’s primarily because the primary tool has always been PowerPoint. That’s the industry standard, and it is not. It’s not a design tool. It’s just not you can use it well if you know what you’re doing, and I do, and a lot of the top people do, but it’s not Adobe. Adobe never launched a presentation tool which was stupid. They should have, but it just, it has this bad name of like, oh, I don’t want to work in PowerPoint because I don’t, you know. I don’t want to use this font. I want to use my fonts. I want to do like, and they just, they just don’t know it. So to be perfectly frank to this day, your average presentation designer gets paid more and can command more than your average web designer, your average designer or or digital. It just is because people don’t want to do it. That

Ben Freda 8:44

is, yeah, that seems super strange to me, but yeah, whatever. Yeah. And do you think, I mean, do you think the software really does hold people back? I mean, if they’re like, is power and what, how do you talk to you were kind of getting for jumping forward to something I want to talk about later, but I’m super interested, too, in your advisory role with PowerPoint. Do you would? How do you advise them? And what do you think should this? How should software move forward?

Nolan Haims 9:10

I’m a Microsoft PowerPoint MVP. Microsoft has a an MVP program across all their products. I mean, they have hundreds and hundreds of weird products, of, you know, networking and security products and all different things. And obviously one of those products is Microsoft Office and including PowerPoint. So for the past 1012, years, I’ve been an MVP. They’re about 15 of us in the US. Maybe they’re about 40 or 50 worldwide, small group. And we are a direct link to the development team. We talk with them all the time. We have a direct line. We’re constantly on email threads thrown back and forth. And we basically, we advise them on we’re kind of a link between users and them. So, you know any any company, and I assume other companies have similar things, they they’re up in their tower. They don’t really know. How users are using things or what they want. So we we find bugs for them, we make recommendations, we ask and ask and ask for them to do certain things that they never do. It’s we don’t get paid. They send us a t shirt every once in a while. Yeah, but no, we’re not on staff. We’re just sort of an advisory that they can take it or leave it basically, sometimes things we bring up make it into the program, and sometimes we’ve been asking for 20 years and it’ll just never go in.

Ben Freda 10:28

That’s interesting. Are you allowed to tell me one of the things that you’ve been asking for over 20 years that

Nolan Haims 10:35

Sure, Paragraph Styles, better data visualization tools, you know, take off that stupid blur on the wipe that they put in a while back. And they, you know, they, but they often say, we’re, we’re the 1% of users like where the power users and like they’re, they make their money off the 99% of corporate user, you know, Office users that don’t care about this, and don’t care about the the JS, extensibility, add on, ability, whatever. But, yeah, you know, stealth, they, they, they’re, they’re a really good group.

Ben Freda 11:10

They’re a really interesting group. I mean, I’m sure they’re running whatever recommendations you have. They’re running through some sort of formula as to whether it’s worth it to do, right? I mean, they have, they

Nolan Haims 11:19

they have, they had just like anything. They have priorities, and they have bosses. And today, it’s all AI all the time. I mean, I will say that the one, the one thing that I always laugh and cry about at the same time, when we’ve, we’ve been in meetings with them, and we’ve asked for some or we’ve been talking about things that they might pursue or might change, like, you know, well, maybe we’ll focus on this, this, and there’ll be, like, a big list on the board, and they’ll ask us if you could pick the top three things to do. Like, tell us what, what should we focus on here? Yeah. And we say, well, do it all your Microsoft. Why can’t? And they say, Well, we have limited engineering abilities and limited engineering budgets. And I say, Yeah, you’re Microsoft.

Nolan Haims 12:02

You don’t have dollars. You don’t, what do you mean budget?

Ben Freda 12:07

You don’t have limited, yeah, limitations, yeah.

Nolan Haims 12:13

I have a limited budget Microsoft. That’s

Ben Freda 12:17

really funny. One thing that I’m jumping around here a lot, but one of the things I did notice that you said a minute ago is better data visualization tools in, you know, in PowerPoint. And you also noticed on your website, you sort of have two separate schools of thought on, sort of presentations in general, and then also data visualization presentations, I think, can you talk a little bit about what the differences are and how they’re similar and how they’re different, and ways to think about that, sure.

Nolan Haims 12:43

So, and by the way, I just launched my new website, like three days ago. So I don’t know if you saw the old one or the new one. The new

Ben Freda 12:50

one, the new one, it’s good, man, it

Nolan Haims 12:51

looks Thank you. The orange, right? Yeah. So I we still do, we still do presentation design, but late, we’ve been moving more towards a almost exclusive training offering. Well, give us a call. If you need presentation designing to give us a call. But the reason for the web redesign was We’re now focusing more exclusively on training people, basically teaching people to fish. And I bucket it into two main areas. My what we call present your story, which is qualitative, presenting your more traditional PowerPoint images and words, and then present your data which is quantitative, presenting. So that’s what you’re asking about, which is data storytelling, data visualization and understanding. You know, most presentations have a mix of both. But you know, if we train a financial organization, usually all they want is the present your data. If we, you know, train, you know, creative agency or something like, Yeah, we don’t really do charts and graphs, just, you know, keep it present your story. But very often we’ll, we’ll mix the two of those. But that’s how I sort of bucket presentation into those two, those two areas gotcha

Ben Freda 14:01

and focusing on the story one first, what are some mistakes that, let’s say, nonprofits or foundations would often make in creating a presentation?

Nolan Haims 14:11

Too many words, too many words, too many words. I mean, that’s I mean what my friend Dave Brady does this annual PowerPoint frustration survey. Like, what, or presentation like, what, what, what angers you, what, what, what frustrates you about presentation? And year after year, it’s too much content, much content, okay, that’s what, simply what. It comes down to, too many, too many, too much content, too many bullet points. And we’ll, we’ll get to my, you know, my quest to get rid of bullet points. But I guess I should talk about the two, you know, when I, when I train organizations, nonprofit or corporate, because i There’s no difference. I mean, and people say, well, is your training different for, you know, C suite people, or, you know, EDPs versus like, no, no. Presentation

Ben Freda 14:54

is a presentation, right? I mean, communication is communication,

Nolan Haims 14:58

okay? So I. Tell people that when you launch PowerPoint or, you know, or Google Slides, or Canva, whatever, you basically have a choice of what you’re using that software for. You can use it to create a speaker guided on screen presentation, which is what the software was basically designed for, right to replace, you know, 35 millimeter slides and stuff. That’s where somebody’s at the front of the room, or on teams, or zoom, and there’s, there’s a screen the speaker is speaking to that information. That’s what it was, you know, designed for. That’s what people are familiar with. Or you can use it to basically create a document that is not speaker guide, that’s a PDF that’s emailed around or physically printed or whatever. And that’s totally kosher. That is fine to do it. PowerPoint is not a document processing tool, but we teach people how to use it as such, because it’s easier to use than word than InDesign. People know it. But I tell people, you have to make that choice, this idea of a hybrid presentation. Oh, I’m going to put it up on screen and I’m going to hand it out. We have some solutions for, you know, the kind of hybrid presentation and how to do that, but in general, it doesn’t work. It’s like, you can’t design an advertorial and then put it up on a billboard, like, those are two different formats.

Ben Freda 16:09

Or do they study a radio ad and then put it in the newspaper? And that’s not that’s not gonna work, right?

Nolan Haims 16:12

They are different formats. Your content, your story, can be the same, but the format has to be different. So you gotta make that decision. If it’s, if it’s a document, great, go to town. You want to give somebody 100 slide or page, whatever you want to call it, detailed report, because that’s what they’re asking for. Great. That’s what they need. But if you have 15 minutes, 20 minutes, to get up in front of somebody and put slides up, you can’t do 100 words 100 slides. You can’t do 200 words on the slide, you just can’t you have to speak and say more than what’s on the screen. You have to expand and expound upon it. I’ve heard so many people say, Oh, well, I’m not gonna be able to get to that, so I’ll just put bullet points up behind me. So

Ben Freda 16:54

you think that’s the reverse. Basically, that’s the reverse attitude. You should be putting less on the slides and more in your mouth as absolutely okay.

Nolan Haims 17:01

Otherwise, why are you there if? Well, yeah, if you don’t need to be there, then send a PDF and make it a document, make it a memo or whatever. If you are there in the room, you’re the presentation. There’s a reason you’re there. So don’t walk people through a novel. Don’t walk people through a report. You can hand that out before or after, whatever you need to do. But what you present on screen needs to be one slide, two slides a minute. So, I mean, come on. And if you’re presenting remotely, you actually need to, we recommend using more slides, because you don’t have the physical presence in the room to hold their attention. Basically, it’s the slide that’s holding their attention. Ooh. Now that’s so interesting. So you need to keep things moving more. You can’t sit on the slide for five minutes on a team’s call like that doesn’t work. I gotcha.

Ben Freda 17:45

So fewer words. How do you pick what words, what words to get rid off?

Nolan Haims 17:49

Yeah, yeah.

Ben Freda 17:52

I mean, I guess you know, to be honest, I feel like my hunch is that a lot of people use it as a way of organizing their own thoughts as to what they’re say, and then they leave it in, right? Whereas they’re almost using it as notes. But anyway, maybe that’s wrong. No,

Nolan Haims 18:04

there. No. Nobody edits a presentation, right? That’s, yeah, we talk about that, and nobody outlines a presentation. But if you were to write a detailed report after six months of research, you’re gonna outline, you’re gonna edit, you’re gonna go over. But a presentation is like, Oh, I just threw my bullet points in and, then, yeah, let me throw it up there like you don’t take that time. So in the training, we teach people how to outline a presentation. We teach people how to edit it, how to edit down words. There are, I’ll give you two examples. There’s their literal ways of getting rid of words, something called the three word challenges. You try to get every every item of text, every bullet point, every header, down to three words without losing the message. And the reward is in the trying. So Ben, if you have a 10 word header and you try to get it down to three words, but you’re only able to get it down to five without sort of losing the meaning. And again, we’re supposed to be saying more than what’s up there. So if you get it from 10 words down to five, in my opinion, you made that header 50% better, right? Congratulations. You can also just use more slides, 100 words on a slide that’s not glanceable. People can’t you know that, then that slide should be like billboards, glanceable. So that doesn’t work, but you split that slide into 10 slides, each with 10 words, now you have 10 glanceable slides. Congratulations. Same kind

Ben Freda 19:19

of material. So so the goal is to make the slides glanceable, not readable. Glance

Nolan Haims 19:23

okay. And about, we say in about three to five seconds. So, and again, this is speaker guided. This is not

Ben Freda 19:29

right, exactly right. This is where you’re telling more than is on the slide. Right, right. So, three

Nolan Haims 19:33

to five seconds, they glance at it, they get the gist, they absorb it, and they return their focus to you again. Otherwise, why are you there? Right?

Ben Freda 19:40

Totally, yeah, that makes sense. So, so, and in terms of, if you were gonna advise on the other side of that, the data visualization side, is that that’s probably a bit more complex, I guess, right, it can

Nolan Haims 19:52

1. And again, honestly, this is where industries content does tend to be. You know, can. Be very different. But what we recommend, what we teach, is something called the one second chart, which is how to design a chart that can be understood in as close to one second as possible. So currently, you put up a chart, it’s 3d It’s got bad colors, there’s a legend, there’s grid lines, there’s junk, everything, right? It’s like, bad, yeah, PowerPoint charting, and it takes your audience, like, it takes them, like, 1012 seconds to read it and figure it out. 1012 seconds, they’re not listening to you, and they’re like, they know you. The speaker knows what this chart means. But we’re playing this game. You figure it out. Like, I’m not going to tell you, I’m going to make it as hard and right? So if you can redesign that chart to be instantly glanceable, and now it can be read in 123, seconds, right? I return your attention. Yep, credibility shoots up. I know what you’re saying. Tell me more. So that’s where we teach now, again, more complex to even very, very complex data we can do this with. It depends, and sometimes it will take more effort and work, but we’re not making presentations for us. We’re making it for our stakeholders, right? So, for example, if you’re at a foundation and you’re trying to get, you’re trying to get somebody to, you know, cut a million dollar check to this, to this, this program, or whatever, you put up a presentation, you put up a chart. And if that chart is like, well, you know, okay, I’m trying to figure this out. The person’s smart person, you know, on the other end, you know, like, what the data you’re trying to show? But it takes a while to figure it out. And versus, you put it up and, you know, instantly, oh, wow, this is a problem. Oh, this is in need of funding. And then you can have that conversation. So your credibility goes up. Yeah, it’s the same in in the corporate world too. Yeah, that makes sense.

Ben Freda 21:43

And in terms of mixing stories and data, I mean, that’s kind of what some people talking about. Now, how would you sort of think about that if you wanted to have presentation with both? I mean, I guess, I guess you would just go slide by slide and yeah,

Nolan Haims 21:54

it’s, yeah. I mean, again, most presentations are a mix of both, depending on the industry and the topic, sometimes more data, sometimes it’s less. But yeah, you should, and again, some of the best practices apply to both. Like you should we pay a lot of attention to headers. So the header should be written on a slide. If you’re going to use headers, you don’t have to, but that basically tells you what the slides about in as few words as possible, right? If you put a chart up, you should have a title to that chart that tells you what the meaning of that data is as quickly as possible. Okay, so you don’t put up something that says strategy phase three. You put up something that says, We need a million dollars to launch the product. Okay, great, but I know it’s now or gotcha.

Ben Freda 22:37

Gotcha. That makes sense. Can you talk to about you mentioned wanting to abolish bullet points, right? So what’s that about? I feel like half the presentations I see are just bullet point slides. Yeah,

Nolan Haims 22:48

right, because it’s easy and PowerPoint, again, to their discredit, is that a word, yeah? Has they have that awful default view where it’s like, put your you know, put up a blank slide, and it’s like, put your header here, put your bullet your bullet points here. And we’ve been trained. Oh, got you right. I mean, we’ve been it’s the only program that I know of that when you open it and you get a blank canvas or whatever, it tells you what kind of information to put in. Like you open Word, and it doesn’t say, start writing iambic pentameter, like you open Excel, it doesn’t say, put quarter for, you know, quarterly sales figures. But PowerPoints like, put your bullets here. You got these bullets. And so people do, and again, that gives it a bad name. The better thing should have been the default should just be a blank slide. We won’t get there, but we’re talking about bullet points. So yeah, they I’m really on this crusade, and have been for a long time, to get rid of them. And professional designers generally don’t use bullet points. They find ways to take those words. And I’m not saying get rid of words, because graphic design, my favorite definition, is the interplay of image and text. So text, but it’s to take that text and to lay it out in such a way that there aren’t those little bullet characters so that the information is still readable and better, glanceable and all that. And it’s essentially a technique called chunking. Yes, the kind of thing I do on a daily basis all the time. Even good web designers do it as well. And so you you find graphic design ways of laying it out. And I’ve been doing it for years, but I still, when I get a slide with bullet points, I’m like, Okay, what do I do? I know what I should, I know I should chunk it out, but, but how like, what? It’s kind of like writer’s block. And so I have, you know, a lot of designers have inspiration files that we, we steal from, and think of, you know. And so a few years ago, I was like, I want, I want to give these sort of inspiration files to other people and teach people how to do this. So I created the better deck deck. It’s a physical deck of 52 cards, these nice, oversized cards, and on the front are 52 variations on chunking different ways you can lay out bullet points on a slide without that actual bullet point. And. And on the back of each card are three real world examples of slides that use that technique that you can steal from so depending on your content, you’re like, I’m staring at bullet points. I’m not a designer. I don’t know what to do. Pull a card out, flip through it. Oh, that’s a cool way of doing it, great. Oh, I didn’t know I could pair them with icons. I could put them in a grid. Oh, I could do a staircase. Oh, I could do a spiral. Oh, I could, you know, put them in it this way. I could put it on and so that, that was deal. So it’s a physical deck. We also have a, there’s a PDF version. There’s also the PowerPoint source files. If you’re really lazy, you can just buy those, just and paste the slides in and then put in your own content, swap it in. What

Ben Freda 25:38

was the process of making the better deck, deck, like, I mean, did you you create and how come it’s interesting, because it’s a deck card, which I love, and I’ve seen this elsewhere, to be really effective in terms of giving people, you know, a tool to help them, you know, do something differently, to give them inspiration for doing something a little bit differently. But, um, what? How did you come up with the idea of making a deck out of it? How did the idea come up in the first place? How did you come up with the idea of making a deck out of it? And making a deck, kind of in and how did you get the deck done? I mean, the whole thing sounds

Nolan Haims 26:05

fascinating. Yeah, it well, it took years of just stalls and stops and trying to get basically gathering as I would design slides. Whenever I did it, I would say, oh, that’s, that’s a good solution. And I like, oh, I guess I can categorize that. And I squirrel away the slide. And so I had to, I had to, I had to, basically design all these slides. There were 150 design examples in there. And so I would do that all the time. And then, you know, when it got to the end, I had to make some new ones. And, you know, swap in some generic imagery and things. But one of my favorite things that I’ve had on my shelf for years is Roger van oaks, creative whack pack. Do you know they don’t know it? No, don’t know it. It was one of the first decks of cards, like creative inspiration cards. And it’s the deck of cards that just give you basically thought starters for when you’re sort of creatively stuck, like different techniques for breaking that. And I was like, that’s really cool. It’s not a book. I think you actually wrote a book later, but it’s just this neat other way. So I always wanted to make something like that, and this just seemed like a natural fit, rather than a book that you have to pull out each time and flip through like this is more tactile. Literally, it’s easier to have on the side of your desk. I hear from a lot of people. I keep it on the side of my desk. Whenever I need an idea, I just pull it out and I flip through and then, yeah, which, you know, I designed it myself, and took a while got it, you know, had to find a printer overseas to print it and and cross my fingers when I hit, you know, buy. And, you know, it was on a container ship coming up these huge boxes. And I was like, oh, yeah, actually, it’s exactly what I wanted. So,

Ben Freda 27:36

so when you find somebody to to make a deck like that, do they send you, like, a sample of how it’s gonna end up. Like, or, yeah, we

Nolan Haims 27:42

spent months going back and forth. I’m like, I need to see samples. Yeah, I, you know, different, you know, here, this is, you know, factory that makes playing cards, basically, so they live, they can do anything. They’re like, here are the 15 finishes you want. Or, if you want something else, we’ll do that. Like, how do you want your box made? How do it’s a cool, like, magnetic closure. I was going to do something very simple, and my wife was like, oh, no, it’s all about packaging. So, yeah, I mean, they’re amazing. They just, we sent, they sent me proofs, and went back and forth. And, yeah,

Ben Freda 28:11

totally. And what was the day like when you finally realized they’d had arrived, right? Yeah? Like, were you saying

Nolan Haims 28:17

Yeah? Like, they, they these stacks and stacks of boxes outside my house. My neighbors had no idea what was going on. It was, it was neat. And I still have stacks all around my house, because I sell it, I sell it on Amazon, but I also sell it through my website. That’s the primary way. So, yeah, so we’re, we fulfill, you know, orders come in, we got to ship them out. So that

Ben Freda 28:36

So that is so cool, and such a creative process too. Of great. And I kind of like the idea. I mean, the playing card idea makes perfect sense, because you’re talking about how to make things chunkable. And a playing card, a deck of cards, is chunkable, right? Like, in a way, a book isn’t right, like a book is all connected, and you kind of have to go from one end to the other and all that kind of stuff. This deck of cards you could throw up in the air, and any one of them you could pick out, and it would be a chunk

Nolan Haims 28:59

right? And that’s an interesting point. I have never believed in systems. Maybe it’s because I’m lazy, maybe it’s because I don’t have a shortage span in general, just general system. Well, I’m not talking about like, like municipal water systems, like, I’m all for that, but like system, like story systems. Now, I technically have a degree in storytelling, and I mind. I know them all. I know Joseph Campbell. I

Ben Freda 29:26

know you know you talk about heroes journey and stuff like that,

Nolan Haims 29:29

yeah. Like, I mean, there are lots of different ways to to sort of view a story, and I know them all. But I, I’m very, I’ve always been very skeptical of people teaching presentation and saying, Well, the way to make a good presentation is to find who your protagonist is, and to make it like the plot of Star Wars, and to have this and that, yeah, now all of those things, and there are a few out there that are more formulaic, that they’re not. None of them are wrong. Like if you follow that path, you will end up with a decent story. And if you have your instigating of. And your conflict and all that. And if you want to look at you know, like Nancy Duarte is resonates a phenomenal book about analyzing famous presentations and things like that. They’re all valid. They all work. But in the real world, I know when you’re trying to push a deck out, you don’t have time to break it down and whiteboard it and, and, and, you know, I hope you can outline but, and that’s why everything I teach is modular. And I don’t believe there’s such a thing as a good slide, a good deck, a good chart. And there’s no such thing as a bad chart or a bad slide. There’s better and there’s worse. Okay, every decision you make, whether you choose to chunk those bullet pounds points out, whether you choose to, you know, take that header down from 10 words to five. Every decision you whether you choose to make that box green or dark green or light green. Do I use this font or that? Every decision will make that presentation better or it’s going to make it worse. And your goal should be on this continual path of betterment, always making those decisions. So all our training, every single thing, is modular. It’s not like you have to go through these 12 steps to get a better presentation, because I know you don’t have time. If you have five minutes to make a slide better, okay, you’re gonna use this technique. If you have 10 minutes to make that bar chart better. You’re gonna use these techniques if you have, okay, tomorrow a half hour to make these three slides better. Okay, you’re gonna use other techniques we’ve given you have more time now, right, right? That’s what

Ben Freda 31:26

you pick on. What you pick a section one improve. You improve that section. But what about how they do? You have any sort of general principles for, like, how they should flow, right? Like, to pay obviously, it depends on what you’re trying to do. I mean, you could do a presentation to your I don’t know. Like the for the example, before you have, you can be doing a presentation to a big funder for this foundation, right? Like, you know, the funder is interested in climate change. Maybe you talk about climate change work. I mean, is there like, a way you should be thinking about how that should flow, where there’s, like, a climax or something, or is that all kind of BS?

Nolan Haims 31:56

No, it’s not. And again, if you follow one of those, you’re not wrong, and you’re not going to necessarily end up with a bad presentation. I do teach. I do teach presentation structure, but what I teach is very simple, two types, two structures you can pick from, and this is when I make my own presentations. Is how I pick from the two types are called B, 3e or three things. B, 3e is stands for beginning, three things and end. So essentially you write a little upfront that would they include the history, the introduction, the challenge, whatever. But basically keep it as short as possible, because nobody cares. People want you want to get into your three main things you want to say, Okay, three stories, three challenges, three questions, and you can umbrella them, right? You can have sub questions, and you know things, but think of it that way. And then the E stands for end, which is your wrap up, your call to action, whatever. Again, keep it as short as possible. And please don’t end on Q A, do your Q A, and bring it back to yourself, just for a minute or two so you can wrap up. And those will be the last words that you leave people with. Not, Oh, that’s interesting. Yeah, lame question from that guy in the back.

Ben Freda 33:08

I almost never see people do that, honestly. Like, usually it’s Q A in the end, and that’s it, and there’s no wrap up. Wow. It just, like,

Nolan Haims 33:16

lets all the air out. I mean, it does usually, because it’s because you don’t have the control of how you end. You ended on the last question, which can be lame. So that’s one of the techniques, b3, and then the other technique is called three things, in which you get rid of the beginning and you get rid of the end, and you come right out and you say, I’m going to tell you three things. And you go for it. And it’s so if you have a 45 minute talk, for example, I mean this, this helps you too, not just the audience. Suddenly you don’t have a 45 minute talk. You have 315 minute talks, and you split it up that way. Have you seen Steve Jobs Stanford commencement speech? No, I haven’t just YouTube it. It’s, it’s good, but he comes out there. It’s one of the few times he sort of talked outside of Apple. And he literally, he talks for about 15 seconds. He says, You know, I never graduated college. I didn’t think I, you know, would ever be here. And he said, I want to tell you three stories. That’s it all. I’m going to do Story number one. And that is his structure. He literally comes out telling three stories and people. It’s, you know, really, really great speech. I

Ben Freda 34:17

love that, because he doesn’t even try to sort of hide it. He’s like, he’s not trying to, like, sneak the stories in to give them a look. He’s just like, I’m gonna tell you stories. That’s it. That’s gonna go, yeah.

Nolan Haims 34:26

There’s no like, could he have hired somebody, you know, a writer, to craft your transitions and your instigating event? Doesn’t matter. No, that’s not what people are gonna remember. And by the way, the only thing people will ever remember, I’m sorry to say, is a story, yeah,

Ben Freda 34:42

okay, talk about that for a second, because that that is becoming clear and clear to me too. Yeah, that’s and that’s psychology, right? Is that what that is human psychology? Yeah,

Nolan Haims 34:52

maybe, I mean, I don’t, but that’s we. Nobody remembers a bullet point, nobody remembers a chart. Nobody remembers. Statistic. They might remember it for the day a few hours, but long term, they’re only gonna remember a story. So I, here’s my here’s my metaphor, or my analogy for stories. I want you to think about your content as a Twinkie, okay? So that your, your your content is the is the creamy filling inside, right? That’s your message, we’re trying to say. And if you just slap that on a plate and put it out there, it’s not going to be very appetizing. It’s also not going to last very long. It’ll start to melt whatever. But wrap it in the delicious golden cake of a story, and then it has infinite shelf life, right? So wrap your content in a story, if you can do it, and don’t be afraid to be personal. I mean, really, don’t I mean those three stories that jobs told, those were personal stories, right? One of the best presentations, and this is a this comes into visuals as well, was a pitch that a colleague was doing at Edelman when I was there, and he was pitching a pharma company to work on the pro some new Malaria Initiative in, I think, Africa. And we had started working on the presentation together, and it was, you know, typical kind of dry stuff, and at one point, like, days into it, he said, No, I want to win this. I really want to win this. I know this. I mean, I went, I’ve been to Africa, I’ve worked on malaria initiatives over there. Like, that’s what I did after college. And I said, whoa, whoa, whoa, why aren’t you saying that? But I said, Do you have photos of this? And he said, Oh yeah, I have a shoe box at home. I was like, Oh my God. I said, Chad, bring them in, right? He brought them in, and suddenly we had photos of him actually doing this work that he is pitching not bullet points, but photos. And he’s like, and he had stories, like, oh, yeah, here’s with me, with this little girl that I met with her father on the way to church. And I’m like, That’s, Wow, that’s

Ben Freda 36:49

fascinating. So that’s what made it an amazing presentation. Yeah, personal it’s the story, personal touches. Yeah, it’s so funny. I think, I think I’ve read somewhere that music and the reason we have songs is because it’s a way of imparting stories. Yeah?

Nolan Haims 37:05

Sorry, yeah, the best of the most blasting stories are those songs I think have good stories, interesting.

Ben Freda 37:10

That’s weird, yeah? Maybe something about human psychology is something about the way that we wired. Who knows?

Nolan Haims 37:15

So around the campfire, yeah? I mean, that’s so if you want somebody to remember.

Ben Freda 37:19

So I guess the secret then would be to create a story that is going to leave them with whatever the message is that you want, right? So if it’s whatever the company is, should do the Malaria Initiative in Africa. So the story would be something related to what the need, what the need is, and how they can make a difference, or something, right?

Nolan Haims 37:37

Yeah, and, and, I know it’s, it’s, it’s hard to, it’s, it’s hard sometimes to find that that perfect story like, oh, I don’t have any stories like, you know, nothing sort of relevant. But I’m just constantly shocked by the number of times I have to, I just, I, I accidentally learn about a story from a presenter, and then we have to put it in. A couple weeks ago, I’m working with the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard and Smithsonian, and they, and one of the one of the speakers, is talking about the great program they have called the stars program, which is trying to get telescopes into rural schools, right? Okay? Why? Okay, to teach STEM and to create the next generation of astronomers and astrophysicists, great. And we’re talking, and there’s, like, pictures of, you know, here’s the telescopes we want to build, you know, get and this and that and it. And we started talking about stories. I said, like, I’d love to know, like, more specifically, you know, like, what are there, you know, what have been the result? Have you had any successes? And she’s like, Oh yeah, tons. I was just having lunch the other day with, you know, Julie. She, I met her, you know, 10 years ago as a as a child in school, and now she’s, you know, doing her PhD. I’m like, it astrophysics. I’m like, Oh my God. I said, okay, okay. A I need a picture of Julie. You need to put that in the present day. This is literally a donor presentation. I’m like, That is the story. That’s the only thing people will take away from, right? That if that is so, I The stories are there. You just have to sort of acknowledge or understand that that’s, that’s what people want.

Ben Freda 39:19

You know, it’s so funny, because I’m trying to think of the work that we do, obviously, with, you know, nonprofits and impact organizations, etc, we’re doing websites for them. We’re doing web development for them. And there’s a bunch of different sort of ways that they want to use the technology to further their mission. So sometimes, for instance, it’s an organization that’s trying to get information out there that may make information about we did a site recently. It was called Healthy Newborn Network. So the point is to get academic studies about how maternity health works to practitioners. That’s the goal. So and then you have, on the other end of the spectrum, you have other organizations that are even campaign organizations, right where we’re trying to say something, convince something of some people of something. Yeah, and then you have all these others in the middle trying to protect a certain group or whatever. And so there’s all kinds of sort of different reasons why these materials exist. And so it’s funny to think about how I mean stories trying to convince somebody of something are very effective stories in trying to get people to, I guess, you know, read and understand data is sort of a different, maybe more difficult thing to do, or maybe it isn’t. My just thinking about

Nolan Haims 40:27

the strong the stories are there. I mean, sometimes you’re gonna, you’re gonna have to work harder if you put up a chart about, I don’t know why you should invest in this precious metal, because you’re, you know, I’m just taking this example and like, oh, well, I’m going to put show this chart of how, you know, the metrics on it show that now is the time to buy whatever. Okay, well, that is a chart. Nobody’s going to remember that, but there’s got to be a go deeper. Why is this metal important? Now, we’re not talking about, like, what? Oh, I’m just going to invest to make money. Like, end of story. But what does this metal do? Now I want to know, oh, it’s because it’s used in EV batteries. And now I’m going to tell you, like, the fact that I was, you know, in a parking lot the other day, and I couldn’t believe I literally didn’t see one car that wasn’t an EV and this or that, or whatever, like everybody, and this, this is, and this is saying, and these batteries need to come from somewhere. And I’m telling you that the percentage of this metal blah, blah, that’s a story, right, right? I mean, and be as simple as that,

Ben Freda 41:30

and a story has to have either a human or somebody who care about, maybe an animal or something, some empathetic center, right? Like they’re a story. It can’t just be about a rock rolling down a hill or something unless you care about the rock, I suppose,

Nolan Haims 41:43

Right? Or what’s that rock hitting at the bottom? Or not? Yeah, exactly.

Ben Freda 41:47

Yeah, totally. But so for this example of, oh, hey, we made a website, sort of a part of a Knowledge Portal, an information portal for people to find information about maternity health, maternal health. So maybe the story really is like, hey, there was a mother who gave birth in this underserved area, and she had a really troubled birth, and she was in a lot of difficulties, and somebody came here and got the information and treated her and look, now she’s alive, or now her kid is four years old. Here’s a picture of the kid. Maybe that’s kind of where you would go with it. Yeah.

Nolan Haims 42:18

I mean, we’re a great example. We’re seeing this now with, with the whole abortion situation, right, where, for years and years and up through, you know, the Supreme Court decision, ever, you know, people anti-abortion groups would say, Oh, well, those are fringe cases. And, you know, there’s, there’s no issue. That’s, you know, the life of the mother will always be considered as if this is not a problem. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then suddenly, and the left would always say, Well, no, no, no, like, it is a problem, and we need care. But now, after a lot of those laws were passed, you started seeing some of those, those stories, for sure, people on the news saying, Oh, my god, I almost died like, you know this because I couldn’t get this. This was, like a not viable pregnancy. That’s a real story. That’s a story, yeah, and you can’t compete with that. That is,

Ben Freda 43:08

Yeah, that’s a person who you care about on camera saying these. What happened to them? Yeah, okay, that makes total sense. Um, listen, this has been an amazing conversation. This thing is going to end automatically in a few minutes. I unfortunately need to wrap it, but I do want to say thanks for coming on. It was great information. Super interesting to me. Knowing so little about presentations, I am never going to use bullet points again. I am going to use these chunkable things instead. I’m never going to do Q and A that’s the last thing that I do, and I’m going to use more stories. So that’s what I got out of it. There you go far, plus a bunch of other stuff, obviously. But what I do want to ask, though, is last, can you just tell people where they can find out more about you? I know we mentioned a few things on the podcast, but where can they find out more about what you know about you and what you do? Nolanhanescreative.com

Nolan Haims 43:57

is my site, and you can get The Deck at thebetterdeckdeck.com, which actually goes right to my site. So, if you don’t want to worry about spelling my last name, just go to the better deck, deck.com. You can get it on my site, and you get a whole bunch of information about my training and about me and other stuff. And if you have a question, reach out. Like, honestly, I always tell people, like, I don’t hide online. Got a question about whatever, even if you don’t have a, you know, project or design engagement or whatever, just, you know, happy to chat, can jump into, yeah, yeah. That’s part of being a Microsoft MVP. We’re supposed to, supposed to deal with the public.

Ben Freda 44:38

And you would do actually, are supposed to engage. You would, you would? You would do it even without that nice guy. All right, thank you so much for joining us. Really, really appreciate it.

Nolan Haims 44:47

Thank you. Ben, it was fun.

Outro 44:50

Thanks for listening to the Nonprofit Thrive podcast. We’ll see you next time, and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.