I gave a talk yesterday explaining Pecha Kucha to a group of nonprofit executives. Pecha Kucha is a variation on your typical PowerPoint presentation. I’ve seen people call it the intersection of a business meeting and a poetry slam. This Japanese style presentation (created by a British architect and an Italian architect living in Tokyo) was created in 2003 but has grown in popularity to be a worldwide mainstream business presentation style.
How it differs from your traditional PowerPoint presentation is that the speaker uses 20 slides and has 20 seconds per slide to speak. The slides are set up to auto-run so they advance automatically. Then after the 6:40 is up (20 slides x 20 seconds = 6 minutes 40 seconds) the presenter sits down. Questions are only asked at the end. That’s it. It forces the presenter to focus and choose the most important item(s) to discuss and leaves the chaff behind.
As a nonprofit you can use this style presentation to share program information, use of donations, training staff and volunteers, advocacy, and really any topic that you can think up. It causes the audience to pay attention. A couple of tricks to consider when creating a Pecha Kucha style presentation include: using strong images, using timely information, and if you use text and or chart, make sure the audience can read them in 20 seconds or less.
Pecha Kucha style presentations were invented 8 years ago as 1) a fun way to showcase knowledge and products while placing presenters who are beginners or advanced professionals on a level footing and 2) an innovative and disruptive alternative to the boring PowerPoint presentations.
You can do Pecha Kucha with a live audience. You can also post them to the web if you videotape your live presentation or if you record audio of your talk to match the slides. Places to post them include your YouTube channel, your own website, your intranet, or you can even burn them on discs or thumb drives to hand out to people. Here are a few videos on Pecha Kucha as well as a link to my slides. You may find addition Pecha Kucha videos on YouTube or on the Pech-Kucha.org website. I haven’t posted the audio for my slides but will do so and will share the updated information with you. Until then enjoy the videos.
NCE Social Media 