You used to design a deck for presenting live, and then tweak it a bit to make it suitable for sending / reading in an email. More and more, I end up doing the opposite (at least for fund raising pitches). You create a deck that can be understood without a live presenter, and then make adjustments for an in-person pitch.
- Business communication gets more efficient in general: fewer, shorter meetings, informal communication
- People (think they) know how to read a fund raising pitch, in a sense their structures are very similar
- More and more pitches happen between fund raisers and investors in different locations (lots of pitches to Asian investors)
Your old enemy was the audience falling asleep, checking out by opening the smartphone, the new enemy is the mouse click (page down, or worse: “close”). Given this, it is as difficult to design a good deck meant for reading than it is to create a TEDTalk-style deck for stand up presentations.
Cover image by Kristina Tripkovic on Unsplash