These days running an event isn’t just about getting a great venue, catering & speakers – it’s about the fine-tuning, the added extras and the seamless details.
If you have speakers secured at your next event that perhaps don’t have all the bells and whistles in their tool-kit, then introducing them to the following range of presentation tools can help them to move away from the stock-standard PowerPoint slides and really impress your audience.
Keynote
For all of those Mac users in the world [we are many], Keynote is a popular alternative to PowerPoint and a brilliant way to create amazing slides with stylish design, built in templates, animation effects and smooth transitions.
Keynote is also great way for speakers to add videos or PDF documents to a presentation with speed and ease.
Canva
A brilliant innovation and highly recommended, Canva is the start-up new version of Photoshop. It is essentially a design program that allows you to edit, crop, add text to and resize professional looking images. It also offers free presentation design including a variety of fonts and templates. Wearing all hats as en event planner Canva can be your best friend if a client or speaker needs you to add a new image to a slide, or introduce a speaker. For the amateur, it is much easier to use and navigate then other design tools.
Try it for free and instantly up skill!
Prezi
For those unfamiliar Prezi is an amazing zooming presentation tool that lets you create and present your ideas on a large, zoomable virtual canvas. You can easily place ideas, images, and videos and arrange them in a natural flow to tell your story. You can sign up for a free account, giving you public presentations plus 100MB storage space.
Slideshare
A popular tool that you have likely heard of and perhaps even used, Slideshare allows you to create and or share speaker presentations.
We recommend it as an excellent way to make presentations accessible across distances, and following conferences. Use it as a hosting service to upload and then promote the content from your event. Note: It comes with the added bonus of potentially directing a lot of content to your website. This is great publicity if you're running an annual event & excellent for SEO if you're using the right keywords.
Powtoon
Described on the website as 'free' and 'awesome', Powtoon is great tool to give presentations a fun point of difference. The software allows users to design custom animations, visually and creatively displaying information. A very cool way to engage an audience!
Adobe Voice
Unleashed in 2014, Adobe Voice is an app that allows users to make simple animated video stories and "explainer videos" using photos, icons, music and narration. Slide a short narrated film into a speaker presentation to break up or share complex information and visual content. This is app is designed for anyone and while you need not be a filmmaker, using this tool can make you look like one.
