NIRI Conference Speaker Deck

OUTKREATE

Turning a conference talk into a selling tool

The NIRI Conference is an annual gathering of Investor Relations professionals and organizations. OUTKREATE attended the 2023 conference as a sponsor, exhibitor, and presenter of a 20-minute "Express Talk" on creating impactful Investor Days — semi-regular events held by large, public companies to both inform current and would-be investors about their financial present and future.

We crafted our Express Talk around balancing content and experience to maximize event messaging, working around the challenges of a limited timeframe and the restrictions imposed by the event's PowerPoint template. Over a handful of iterations the initial story of steak, sizzle, and side dishes was whittled down to a digestible, cleaner metaphor and narrative. Content focused on short descriptors and clear, immediately comprehensible examples of best practices.

The strength of our Express Talk was immediately evident in booth traffic through the remainder of the conference and presentation evaluation sign-ups intended to drive new business.

The Highlights

Establishing the agenda — even for a short talk

While we teed up four tenets of a great presentation for context, we narrowed our twenty-minute focus to the two on which OUTKREATE focuses its expertise and offerings — and made sure to do so visually to get the audience on the same page

Meeting the template halfway, but making it ownable

As the only attending organization focused exclusively on presentation design, we wanted our talk to stand out visually while still adhering to conference look and feel. We developed custom slide elements from the existing imagery and swapped some initial vector art for bold, high-quality photography, topping it off with transitional and entry animations that bring the template itself to life in a whole new way.

Before and afters

It's simple, but it works — demonstrating how an initial client slide can be enhanced from a word cloud to impactful messaging and effective albeit dead-simple design.

Showing off the process

We're not giving away everything, but we needed to show a bit of the method to the madness. Showing a skeleton structure for a strong deck is great, but showing how it comes to life with real content helps to solidify the end result for potential client.

But what don't we do?

A conference talk like this needs to provide actionable value first, second and third — it can't just be a sales pitch. Otherwise you jeopardize your credibility with organizers and attendees alike. Our advice for a strong Investor Day wasn't limited to services we provide, but also to promoting strong internal creative thinking with examples of past clients making their event more than a collection of slides.