Our Activities: 5th August Meeting - Richard Hansen

Chair
Ann
Christmas in July was a great success - Many thanks to Deborah for organizing

Visitors & guests
Richard Hansen, speaker
Amy Doran
Ken McMeeken, RC Morwell
Darren Shields, although according to Ron, Darren is “not really a guest”

Apologies
Pam, Iain, Genta, Norm

Makeups
Helen x2 NYSF selections
Alan & Deb at Men’s Shed
Mark x2 handing over treasurer’s job

Presidents Report
Welcome visitors & guests. Special welcome to Richard who is a friend from Toastmasters.
$2,000 from USC BBQ’s
Next RYDA in October
Wellsure BBQ on Sunday
Great speaker at Christmas in July
Deborah presented cheques to Darren, Amy and Stuart for their respective organizations.

Speaker
Ron introduced Richard
Seems he has found his niche in life helping business and educational groups get their message across.

Richard asked if we have ever had to sit through a really crappy presentation - “every Tuesday” replies Mark. Although “Powerpoint is dead”, it seems that images are still important. 10% of a talk gets remembered, but this increased to 60% when the message is reinforced with images. A picture really is worth a thousand words. 93% of communication is non verbal - but remember, 86.4% of statistics are made up on the spot.

Richard took us back to the “good old days” of slide shows and overhead projectors, but they are even more “dead”, with Powerpoint or similar software king since the 1990s. Microsoft estimates that more than 30 million Powerpoint presentations are made each day - but 90% of them are bad. Themes and bullet points have their place but are maybe a bit “too easy”

Richard illustrated the difficulty of explaining abstract thoughts without pictures by using Deborah as a guinea pig - naturally she failed miserably. Lyn performed slightly better. Luckily Richard had a slide with a circle on it to get the concept across.

Various examples were included - Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth presentation; Jamie Oliver with his wheelbarrow full of sugar illustrating typical childhood sugar intake; Steve Jobs introducing the iPhone; and fat facts about the obese.

In question time, Richard explained his own methods - good for the ears first, heaps of sticky notes, then introduce images. Three points are powerful, and a bit of shock tactics are effective. A one hour talk takes about 60 hours to prepare.

Directors
Helen reported on the NYSF applicants. Naomi & Jamie were interviewed, with Naomi being accepted. There were 60 candidates from the District