A great story is incomplete without a ‘moral’ at the end; similarly, a stunning presentation requires a compelling takeaways slide to make it resonate with the audience and encourage them to take the desired action.
In a conference, various speakers deliver presentations on various topics. By the end of the conference, the audience’s minds get loaded with lots of facts, figures, and information, and remembering them for longer becomes difficult. Here, a well-designed key takeaways slide can make a huge difference and increase the recall value of your presentation.
Wondering how to write an impactful key takeaways slide? Read this article to get all your questions answered!
What is a Key Takeaways Slide?
A key takeaways slide is an essential part of a presentation, which gives the audience a recap of the critical points or main ideas before they leave the conference or meeting. It could include key findings, recommendations, important insights, outcomes, implications, etc.
This slide prevents your core message from getting lost in details and ensures the audience drives your presentation’s key concepts home and easily recalls them later.
Why Must You Include a Key Takeaways Slide in Your Presentation?
1. Provides a Clear Sense of Direction
A key takeaways slide distills your presentation into its crucial points, focusing on actionable insights and the information that matters the most. It gives the audience a clear direction of what to do with the presented information and helps them decide the next move/step.
2. Improves Retention
A key takeaways slide shows a snapshot of the key highlights of the presentation, reinforcing your main message and providing another opportunity for the audience to internalize the information. It improves the audience’s ability to remember information long after the presentation ends.
3. Offers Clarity
Clearness is crucial for strengthening the main concepts, making the data memorable, and creating a lasting impact. A key takeaways slide minimizes the scope of ambiguity and misunderstanding by highlighting the complex and important information in simple and understandable points.
4. Indicates Closure
A key takeaways slide is usually placed at the end of the presentation, just before the Q&A and Thank You slides. It gives the audience a sense of completion and helps them frame relevant questions to resolve their doubts for the last time during the Q&A session.
What to Include in Your Key Takeaways Slide?
a). A Brief Recap of Main Points
You can include a wind-up of core concepts in 2-5 clear and concise bullet points. These points must reflect the essence of your presentation and reinforce the main message.
b). Actionable Insights
Actionable insights are the specific actions or measures you want your audience to implement after the presentation. These steps aid in transitioning content from a theory to practicality.
c). Key Statistics or Data
Key statistics or data is a powerful reinforcement, backing up your points, claims, or arguments. These statistics offer factual support that boosts the presentation’s overall credibility.
d). A Final Thought or Conclusion
You can give your audience something significant to ponder or take action on by incorporating a powerful quote, a thought-provoking question, or a concise statement that strengthens the main idea.
e). A Clear Call to Action
By including a call to action (CTA) in the key takeaways slide, you can encourage the audience to take the desired action. The CTA also makes your presentation more meaningful and helps avoid decision fatigue.
How Many Key Points Should be Included?
The ideal number of points is between three to five. By concentrating on select points, you can highlight the most important learnings, ensuring they are easier to remember and act upon.
Why 3 to 5 Key Points?
(i). Reduce Cognitive Load
Including too many points can often burden the audience with information overload. They might feel overwhelmed and not remember most of the points. Thus, limiting the points enables the audience to absorb the content effectively.
(ii). Boost Clarity and Focus
By narrowing down the content to a few points, you enhance its clarity and allow the audience to focus properly. It also ensures that you do not derail from the core message and highlight the information that matters the most to the audience.
(iii). Easy Prioritization
Not all of the content in your presentation is equally important. Limiting the points in your key takeaways slide allows you to prioritize the most crucial information you want your audience to consider while making decisions.
(iv). Time Efficiency
The shrinking attention span of the audience and the time constraints associated with the presentations call for including only 3-5 points in the key takeaways slide. More points can lead to disengagement.
How to Choose the Points?
- Relevance: Pick the points that best align with your presentation goals and reflect its essence.
- Impact: Pick the points you feel would significantly impact your viewers and inspire them to act and help make decisions.
- Memorability: Select those points that are simple and can be easily remembered.
Tips for Making the Key Takeaways Slide Impactful
1. Incorporate Visuals
In a world where attention spans are fleeting, visuals act as an effective anchor to hold the audience’s attention. They are also an important ingredient in creating a perfect key takeaway slide.
Consider using visuals such as high-quality images to showcase your points. You can also incorporate graphs according to your presentation type.
For instance, if your presentation is a financial overview of the organization, including bars and charts can help make your slide more impactful.
2. Use Clear and Concise Language
Clarity is key when it comes to a takeaways slide. Your message should be short and not contain unnecessary information that might confuse the audience. So, instead of using jargon or long sentences, use simple words and short sentences to ensure clarity.
3. Include Only Relevant Data
To ensure relevance, include numbers and metrics that are relevant to the presentation and support your message. Avoid adding data that is not crucial and does not align with the overall theme.
For instance, your takeaways slide in a company performance presentation can include data related to the overall financial position, profit and loss, etc.
4. Keep the Design Simple
A simple, uncluttered design reflecting the thoughtful use of white spaces enhances the effectiveness of your key takeaways. It shows your professionalism and also increases the recall value of the presentation.
Ensure consistent formatting (color, font size, bullet style) to prevent your audience from getting distracted. You can consider using pre-designed key takeaways slides to avoid design inconsistencies.
5. Provide Context
Contextualizing the information in the key takeaways slide boosts its relevance and helps the audience understand how to apply it practically.
Examples of Key Takeaways Slides
a). Key Takeaways
Whether you want to showcase the outcome of your research, key highlights of the analysis, or the presentation summary, the versatile slides provided in this template are an ally for presenting the information in a crystal clear manner. This multipurpose deck helps sales managers reinforce key ideas at the end of the sales pitch. The minimalist designs adorned with beautiful colors and appealing icons make it easier for the audience to grab the key points quickly.
b). Main Takeaways
This versatile template is an ideal resource for presenting performance metrics, project updates, and crucial points of a complex concept in an engaging and memorable manner. The white spaces and bold typography keep the slides uncluttered and readable. With thoughtful color contrast, you can add visual interest to your presentation and foster easy interpretation and comprehension.
c). Key Findings and Recommendations
Include this sophisticated template in your presentation to illustrate the important insights or results from your research, survey, analysis, or study, along with the actionable steps or strategies based on findings. The table designs, clean typography, and vibrant color scheme will help create a simple, organized, and clear visual representation of your information.
d). Key Messages
Use this template to portray the main points of your slideshow clearly and precisely. The versatile designs, adorned with an easy-on-the-eyes color palette and stunning icons, help you reinforce your core message. You can tailor the designs to align with your requirements and instantly draw the audience’s attention to the crux of the presentation.
e). One Key Message
This template is the best visual resource to highlight the most important message of the presentation in an impressive and memorable manner. Presenters from different fields can convey the core takeaways of their presentations, fostering improved comprehension. The torn paper with a paperclip design and the fantastic animation effects aid in increasing the impact of the message.
f). Key Highlights
Use this versatile template to illustrate your voluminous information in easily digestible snippets and help your audience quickly comprehend takeaways. The exquisite design, adorned with self-explanatory icons and clean typography, allows professionals from different fields to draw the intended audience’s attention. The appealing color contrast complements your message and the overall presentation theme.
Conclusion
A well-designed key takeaways slide reflects your audience-centricity and commitment to delivering value. It provides a quick overview of the important points, helping the audience catch up with the part of the presentation they missed. In addition, this slide highlights actionable insights for determining the next steps, reinforces the core message, and serves as a reference material.
As this slide is essential for giving a strong conclusion and leaving a lasting impression, it must be designed with attention to detail. We hope this article helps you create an impactful key takeaways slide that stays in the audience’s minds for longer.
