The capstone project for UC Boulder’s Effective Communication specialization on Coursera was to write a memo, create slides, and record a presentation to pitch my chosen ideas to my chosen audience.
I took the course in May 2023, so the approaching ending of the Public Health Emergency (PHE) for Covid-19 was on my mind. I had a CTA: extend the PHE. I had an audience: President Biden and DHHS Secretary Becerra, the two people who had power to extend their respective portions of the PHE.
The slide layouts were inspired by a template designed for a hospital, which I felt was fitting. But the template had a variety of slide layouts, and the assignment said to keep it simple. I chose one I thought would be easy for viewers to follow that also allowed for all the information I intended to share.
Once I had chosen my layout, I made a slide for every piece of information I wanted to highlight. This ended up not being a great method, as I had way too many slides. So I went through and saved only the strongest or most important to include.
I ended up using fewer of the prepared slides in the final presentation video, but I also used other visuals to include more information. This graph was one I made sure to use, as it does a great job illustrating just how expensive Covid can get for people without any financial support from the government.
The danger with using the same slide layout for all of the slides is that it can get a little boring. So I mixed it up some by using an image instead of text on a couple of them. Also, using sceenshots from social media, while risking “unprofessionalism,” keeps my slides from feeling too stuffy.
Of course, I make sure to credit my sources.
The assignment also included one slide showing an ad, hence the variation in layout and color. I saw this photo by benzoix on Freepik, and thought it was perfect. She was masked, which is an important part of my message, and there was plenty of space where she was pointing to fit the text. The original image is wider, so I cropped out what I didn’t need.