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Speaking

Tuesday, November 06, 2007

Revisiting paper handouts

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After today, I may have to rethink my position on handouts.

For years, I have resisted providing handouts of my presentations. The reasons:

• Delivering handouts weeks before the speaking engagement precludes making changes to the presentation, even if events or better examples make such a change a good idea.
• We’re supposed to be going green, right? I have a file cabinet full of presentation handouts from conferences. I’ve never looked at any of them. How many trees would have been spared if those handouts simply had never been printed?
• Somebody (I think it was Wilma Matthews) told me about research that proves people retain less from presentations when they have a handout of the presentation in front of them.
• I hate it when I have a point that’s going to be a big “ah ha” moment, but it’s spoiled by people who can’t resist reading ahead.

My concession has been uploading a PDF of my presentation and making it available for download after the talk is over. Then today came along.

I’m in Vegas (at this moment sitting at McCarran waiting for my flight home). I delivered this morning’s keynote at the annual Healthcare Internet Conference, then did a lunch talk at IABC’s Las Vegas chapter. My cell phone rang while I was speaking and the caller left a message. This is the gist of the message:

Hi. I’m attending a conference at the Venetian Hotel. I found the handout of your presentation and it blew me away. I’m at a different conference but I got permission from your conference to keep this copy I found. I’m with a non-profit and, as I read your presentation, I realized our marketing company is doing things the old way. We’re very highly rated but having trouble getting our story out there. Can you help?

I called him back and we’re going to have a longer call when we’re both in our offices next week.

I never considered handouts as marketing tools for people attending conferences other than the one where I’m presenting. That may be worth a few trees after all.