Today I step in for the FlipChart.
When did you use the FlipChart the last time?
When did you use it instead of PowerPoint?

I experince very often meetings which are being held only with PowerPoint presentations. How boring. Have you ever taken a closer look to the FlipChart?

With it you can directly develop and explain processes. Or develop diagrams step by step and put them into a proper environment. And, above all: it is a difference from a monotonous PowerPoint. You can work a lot more flexible than sticking to a prepared PowerPoint presentation.
Please be sure that I don´t want to suppress an other media, but want to be sure you know how to use the different media effectively.

• PowerPoint is great when you use video or images – such brilliant display often is even better than Overhead slides. I wonder again and again how much you can say with a good image. How many emotions you are able to invoke in your audience.
• Overhead slides are excellent when you don´t have a data projector or you prepared your presentation such that you develop and expose  the content of the slide bit by bit. Nevertheless this media is being more and more replaced by PowerPoint presentations.
• Visual Aids – Props are very useful if you want to deminstrate something. For expample the effect of the  centrifugal force – you best demonstrate and explain it using an object bound to a wire and spin it.
• The FlipChart is absolutely great to collect ideas or to work with symbols. Or show how processes work. A bit advantage is that you audience goes with you a lot more.

Very often you can choose between the different media when all suit the purpose – and you decide which one you want to use and how to use it effectively.

How to use FlipChart most effectively?

As in PowerPoint I recommend: Use key words!! 1. Write not earlier than you come to the detail in your lecture – that prvides our audience a break and you write really only a single wird. 2. Use symbols – you define what our audience perceives. For example a simple circle can be: an area, a point of view, a bomb (the fues is on the back of the circle), the start of a pie chart, a hole, you define what it is.

Big Pens

I can only join other rhetoric trainer who recommend: use big pens. And I really mean BIG pens which have a width of 1 cm. With them you are forced writing big. Also thicker lines cause more impact. I experince it all the time: a drawing which is drawn with the usual FlipChart pens and the same drawn with big pens – try it yourself.

Symbols

The secret with the FlipChart is to use symbols instead of words. Some time ago I watched a Feng Shui consultant during her lecture. She wrote down words like Fire, Water, etc. But words are abstract – words are labels who stand in for situations / associations which invoke pictures in our mind. With words the mind has to “translate” them into labels and then pictures. Symbols are a lot earier to grasp and visualize. Draw those symbols.

Touch, Turn Talk

A toastmasters colleague – Denise Magyar – provided a feedback when I was in the audience. She recommended to stick to the 3-T rule: Touch – Turn – Talk. First write your word, then turn around to your audience and then talk. Not earlier. This is not easy at times, but it is worth remembering and above all stick to the rule. With the next post about FlipChart I will go into a little more detail.