EKO - Tips for an Impactful Presentation

Bring your ideas to life.

Presentations at the 2025 EKO Spring Symposium are meant to spark the imagination, encourage dialogue, and drive new solutions to our sector’s greatest challenges.

Transforming your ideas into a presentation that resonates with your audience can be challenging. We’re here to help guide you.

What exactly makes a presentation successful may seem subjective. Still, there are a handful of angles we believe can help a presentation shine:

Highlighting operational experience through a case study
Identifying anomalies or counter-intuitive aspects of your experience
Educating your audience in your particular area of expertise
Motivating your audience to take action as a result of your presentation
Entertaining your audience through the use of personal anecdotes, dynamic visual elements, and interactivity

We love this tried and true advice on creating effective presentation decks, adapted from a guide by TED’s in-house talks expert:

Craft your main message first: Start by structuring its support points. Then practice, and time it. Now, start building your slides.
Create a consistent look and feel: Make use of typography, color, and imagery that’s cohesive across your entire deck.
Think about topic transitions: Aim for variety, but be careful not to overdo it (the same goes for consistency … you don’t want every slide to look identical). Creating one style of slide for your main talk, and another style for transition slides, is a good rule to follow.
With text, less is almost always more: Avoid slides with a lot of text, especially if the content matches what you’re already saying out loud.
Use photos that enhance meaning: Simple, punchy photos are where it’s at. They can do wonders in helping content resonate with your audience, without pulling their attention away from your spoken words.
Go easy on the effects: Even if the presentation platform you’re using offers a wealth of bells and whistles, few of them truly enhance the audience experience. If you must use effects, keep them subtle and consistent.
Reproduce simple charts and graphs: Dropping an image of a chart into a presentation almost always disrupts the look and feel of a designed deck. Take control over color and type, by recreating simple graphed data.

For more tips on giving great talks, watch Nancy Duarte's TED Talk on the subject, or learn how to make a S.T.A.R. moment in your next presentation with her best-selling guide, Resonate.

A plain white background is recommended, a yellow background is discouraged.
Presentation slides should be created with a 16:9 aspect ratio.
Use at least 28-point fonts (larger for titles), to ensure legibility from any point in the room.
All presentations will be run from the Tech Table in the room. Presenters are asked to bring their slides on their own laptop.
Need a PowerPoint template? Here is EKO’s Spring Symposium 2025 PPT template with required branding and Arial fonts.