This article is about the consulting presentation framework. All business strategy and management consulting firms, such as McKinsey, Bain, BCG, and Booz Allen, use presentation frameworks. In general, they are all variations of the same concepts and design. Since consulting companies are known for developing beautiful, structured slides, the consulting presentation framework represents the optimal way to structure and present your information in the form of a PowerPoint presentation.
It involves very specific rules for fonts, font sizes, the kind of grammar rules to follow, etc. If nothing else, religiously adopting and adhering to the framework will greatly improve the look and professionalism of your slides.
Over the years, I have come across a number of these presentation frameworks from the various companies I worked for. Borrowing from all of them, the framework presented in this article is an amalgamation of the components that I felt worked best.
Now, let’s go deeper.
In a typical content slide, there are 3 main components: the title, the body, and the bumper.
the header
The Headline is at the top of the slide. It is a sentence that introduces the slide. Many people use this space for the ‘title’ of the slide. In this framework, the ‘title’ will go to the Body (described in the next section).
The Headline must be Arial Narrow, font size 24 and bold. Do not use any final punctuation (for example, no period).
As mentioned, it’s one sentence and 1 sentence at most. It should also not exceed 2 lines. If you find that it is longer, reword and shorten your title. If the Headline is more than 2 lines, her audience will be lost and/or bored. As you go from slide to slide, the sentences in the headlines need to connect to tell a cohesive story for your audience to follow.
The body
The body is the largest part of the slide. Contains all colorful content (eg text boxes, diagrams, etc.). Anything you put in the Body should be based on what has been entered in the Header. All text within the Body must be in Arial font. The minimum font size to use is size 10, because anything smaller (using Arial) is too difficult for most people to read. This is especially true if you are projecting your presentation.
At the top left of your Body, you should have the Title of your slide. The Title is what people traditionally put in the Headline area. It is a short phrase that categorizes what the Body is illustrating. Examples include ‘6-Phase Approach’, ‘E-Book Objectives’, ‘Strategic Hierarchies and Related Challenges’. As he noted, the capitalization follows that of a book title (according to the MLA). The Title must be Arial, font size 16, bold and italics.
If you have any numbers or information on your slide that need to be retrieved, be sure to do so. The font should appear in a text box at the bottom left of the Body. It should be Arial, font size 10, and start with the text “Font:”. Consultants use a number of different methodologies and frameworks to structure and design the content of the Corps. We will not discuss these other teachings in this article.
the bumper
All consulting firms have this last component, but they may call it by different names. Deloitte & Touche calls it Take-Away, AT Kearny calls it Tombstone, and Capgemini Consulting calls it Kicker.
The purpose of the bumper is to address the “so what?” question your audience may have. While the Header provided an introduction and context to the slide, and the Body embellished that message with clarifying details, numbers, diagrams, etc., you run the risk of making your audience think, Okay, this is interesting information, but so what? ? ? Why do I need to know this? Why should I care?
Those are all reasonable questions that you should answer with the Bumper. If you can’t think of anything meaningful to put on the bumper, ask yourself if you really need to have this slide on the deck. In other words, if the slide doesn’t offer any additional information that’s important for your audience to know, why include it all? Of course, there are many valid reasons to have a slide without bumpers. For example, the slide only presents the agenda, is a transition slide, or only provides key contact information. Sometimes they simply slide to present raw data.
The bumper is in the form of a light-colored box at the bottom of the slide. It must be Arial, font size 14, bold and italics. Unlike the Headline, it must have final punctuation. Like the Headline, it is only 1 sentence and 2 lines maximum.
To make things easier for you, I’ve created a PowerPoint template that fits this framework for you. You can download it here: http://learnppt.com/downloads/sampletemplate/.