Haiku Deck Blog

PowerPoint. Everyone’s used it, everyone’s heard of it, and a lot of people are pretty tired of it. Have you found yourself seeking an exciting new angle to approach your presentations from? If so, try these five fresh PowerPoint alternatives on for size.

Before you decide which method to present with, though, ask yourself what purposes your presentation materials have. Critically thinking about how your materials are going to support you will help your presentation be more interesting and memorable. For each PowerPoint alternative we’ve listed below, we’ve included a few of its best scenarios and benefits, so that you can pick the best presentation method for your purposes.

PowerPoint Alternative #1: Printed Handouts

An often-overlooked option for presenters is to provide a simple handout, instead of putting together a full-blown presentation.

Great for:

• Kicking off new projects
• Meetings with a light tone
• Content that your team might want to reference later
• Meetings outside of the office
• Being prepared ahead of time so you won’t have to fuss with technology

Benefits:

Handouts allow your audience members to interact with the materials, and take your presentation home with them. Your attendees:

• Can read while you speak, benefitting from both auditory and visual learning aids
• Won’t have to divert attention to taking notes
• Will be able to focus more energy into thinking about what you’re presenting on
• Can share your work with others

Handouts in action:

One person who strongly advocates the use of handouts is Edward Tufte, a pioneer in the presenting world. In his words:

Overhead projectors and PowerPoint tend to leave no traces; instead give people paper, which they can read, take away, show others, make copies, and come back to you in a month and say “Didn’t you say this last month? It’s right here in your handout.”

A paper record tells your audience that you are serious, responsible, exact, credible.

How to pull it off:

Once you’ve decided to make a handout, how are you going to make sure it’s memorable and fun? We recommend Canva as a free, easy, impressive way to put together handouts. Canva allows you to generate all kinds of different content, and it makes you look like a design god with very little effort on your part. Here’s an example made by our Chief Inspiration Officer, Catherine:

PowerPoint Alternative #2: Flip-Boards / Whiteboards

If you have a dynamic presentation style, and like to sketch or scribble, you might try a using a flip board or whiteboard to present with, in lieu of slides.

Great for:

• Topics you can draw diagrams to represent
• If you like drawing or sketching
• Involving your audience in brainstorming exercises

Benefits:

• The audience will be captivated by your physical interaction with the board
• You can shift gears easily and use different colors, lines, and shapes to make sure everyone understands
• You can invite team members to be involved at the board
• Doodling can facilitate funny situations easily, which keeps audiences entertained and engaged
• You have the opportunity to really shine as a presenter, because all eyes are on you

Flip boards in action:

Simon Sinek, author and well-known TED talker, often uses flip boards to sketch and demonstrate concepts during his talks, like his highly-popular Start with Why:

How to pull it off:

There are a few things you’ll want to keep in mind when presenting with a flip chart, whiteboard, paper tablet, etc:

• Use bold colors. Yellow, orange, light blue, etc. markers can be very hard to see, especially from the back of the room. Test your markers beforehand and make sure you are well-stocked with easily-seen colors (that aren’t dried out!).
• Practice beforehand. Find the balance between large enough to be read from the back, and small enough to fit on your board, beforehand. Practice writing at a whiteboard angle, which is very different from writing on paper. If you’re nervous about drawing on the fly, you can even lightly draw diagrams you know you’ll be making in pencil if you’re using a flip board, and trace over them with markers when you’re presenting.
• Check for glare. If you’re using a whiteboard, scope out the room with the lighting you’re intending on using, and make sure there’s not too much of a glare for anyone in the audience.
• Speak toward the audience. It’s easy to get caught up drawing or writing on a whiteboard, and to keep speaking when your back is to your team. Just remember, if your mouth is pointed at the audience, they’re going to have an easier time hearing you!
• Write legibly. Don’t get caught up trying to write so quickly that no one can read what you’ve written.
• Include visuals. If you’re using a whiteboard or a flipboard, don’t just use it to write words – even lines and shapes can make an otherwise boring whiteboard much more fun and interesting.

PowerPoint Alternative #3: No Slides

If you are really comfortable with your material, try delivering a talk without any slides at all. Think about some of the greatest storytellers you’ve known — how many of them used slides?

Great if:

• You don’t need to show data to prove a point
• Your meeting topic can involve a lot of discussion
• You’re confident about presenting and keeping people entertained
• The content for your meeting can be covered without visual aids, screenshots, examples, etc.

Benefits:

• There’s nothing to distract your audience or teammates from giving you their full attention
• Attendees will learn more about your personality through watching you present
• The situation lends itself nicely to personal interaction
• You’re more capable of moving around the presentation space
• You can pack a very powerful punch by moving your audience with your delivery alone

See it in action:

Some of history’s greatest speakers didn’t use any visuals — just think about some of the most famous speeches you know of.  For example, would President Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address have been so famous if it’d been made in PowerPoint?

Sir Ken Robinson does an excellent job of addressing creativity in the standard educational system in this TED talk, without using a single presentation aid:

How to pull it off:

• Bring physical objects or other props, especially interactive ones
• Incorporate other senses — play music or audio, for example
• Rehearse enough that you can deliver without a script — you can do this in the car, while working out, etc.
• Watch the audience for visual cues you can interact with or respond to, so it feels fresh and unscripted

PowerPoint Alternative #4: Mind Maps

Mind-mapping apps are great tools for capturing and connecting ideas. They help you understand how you got to where you are, the motivations behind ideas, cause and effect, etc. Creating a mind map during a meeting can be a stimulating experience for your whole team and will definitely keep your audience engaged.

Great for:

• Brainstorming
• Planning
• Strategizing
• Collaborating

Benefits:

• Demonstrates connected concepts better than many other methods of presenting
• Helps keep non-linear ideas organized in an easier-to-understand manner
• Provides an interesting visual for gathering input, rather than presenting findings

Mind-Mapping apps to try:

• iMindMap – Featuring one of the most elegant presentation modes available for mind-mapping apps, iMindMap is available for Windows and Mac OS. There’s a free trial, as well as Home & Student / Ultimate editions of the software available.
• NovaMind – Available for Windows Desktop and Mac OS X, NovaMind is in beta for a number of other platforms as well. The app breaks your maps up into slides you can present, and makes moving through your branches and nodes intuitive and effortless. Both the Windows and OS X versions have free trials.
• MindManager 8 – If you want to have a lot of control over how much information is shown or hidden within your mind maps, and especially during presentation, MindManager 8 is for you. It’s available for Mac and PC, and you can get a free trial to see if you like it before buying.
• iThoughts – Creating Mind Maps on the go, or while passing a device around the meeting, can be easy with iThoughts. You can get it for your iPhone, your iPad, and your Mac in the App Store.

PowerPoint Alternative #5: Haiku Deck

Of course we have to mention Haiku Deck! It’s very near and dear to our hearts, as you may imagine — but not just because it’s our job. Haiku Deck embraces our favorite aspects of presentations and storytelling: simplicity, beauty, and fun.

Great for:

• Being inspiring and evocative
• Presentations that benefit from strong visuals and bold text
• Large groups that wouldn’t be able to see smaller text from the back of the room
• Storytelling

Benefits:

• Makes it quick and easy to create gorgeous presentations
• Supports you as a storyteller with stunning visuals to pull your audience in
• iPhone remote allows you to present without having to bring your iPad or computer to the meeting
• It’s available on multiple platforms (iPhone, iPad, PC / Mac / Chromebook via the web)
• Your slides will look clean, attractive, and professional — without the ‘template’ feel of a PowerPoint or Keynote slideshow
• You can print handouts from your deck
• Your materials will be available online (as long as you save them as public or restricted) so you can share with your team

Someone who uses Haiku Deck:

Lots of people use Haiku Deck, for a wide range of purposes! Here are a few good examples to check out:

• Social Media & Content Marketers
• Thought Leaders
• Presenters
• Businesspeople
• Bloggers

But in the interest of the topic at hand, the example I’ll leave you with is from Stefanos Karagos, Haiku Deck guru and founder of XPlain, a performance marketing agency:

The MindMapping Road – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

So, what PowerPoint alternatives do you use?

Have another PowerPoint alternative not listed here? Any other apps you’d like to recommend? Let us know in the comments below!

Need a little marketing inspiration? Here are a few creative marketing ideas from the brilliant minds of our own Haiku Deck community. (We’ll be trying a few of these ourselves!)

1. Create a list of your favorite resources.

What are your favorite sites for curating content? Where do you go to keep yourself up to date on the latest marketing news and trends? Here’s a fantastic example deck from Catherine Pham of The Seen, showcasing her top 30 content marketing blogs and what they’re about.

TOP 30 Content Marketing Blogs – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

2. Repurpose your blog content.

By transforming your blog posts into Haiku Decks, you’re not only providing your audience with a fresh new perspective on the blog post, but you’re also creating a piece of content with visual impact that can be shared across your social media channels in multiple ways. “Content Repurposing” by Niki Payne of Bruce Clay, Inc. is a great example of how she took information in her original blog post and transformed it into a Haiku Deck.

Content Repurposing – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

3. Share your expert tips.

What are you an expert at, or want to be known as an expert for? Showcase your skill set, offer your expert tips, or create a helpful guide. Here’s a great example from social media enthusiast John Walker, featuring ten useful tips for social media marketing.

10 Tips For Social Media Marketing Success – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

4. Promote your next podcast.

Kelly Mitchell and Debra Trappen host weekly podcasts and use Haiku Deck to create an attractive image that is then shared across their social media networks along with information about where, when and how people can tune in. Learn more about how you can use Haiku Deck to promote your next podcast here.

5. Recap a Twitter chat.

Compared to sharing a transcript of the Twitter chat, a Haiku Deck recap is a quick and easy way for sharing the main highlights from the chat. We love Lisa Buyer‘s combination of imported images she’s created on her own for each Twitter chat question, with screenshots taken right from Twitter highlighting answers from chat participants.

#SEOchat – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

Additional Resources

• How To Promote Your Podcast with Haiku Deck
• Ten Reasons Why Visual Communication Can’t Be Ignored
• Optimize the Appearance of Haiku Deck on Social Media
• Optimize for SEO
• How to Embed Your Haiku Deck

How do you use Haiku Deck?

Leave us a comment below on the different ways you use Haiku Deck for social media and marketing. And as usual, if you have any questions, we’re here to help!

Share your next big idea, present social media stats, or promote an upcoming event with one of these simple and flexible Haiku Deck templates. Each template helps you easily create a piece of content that can be easily shared with event attendees, embedded in your blog or website, and posted to your social media channels.

These are must-have marketing presentation templates that you’ll definitely want to keep in your marketing tool box.

Idea Sharing Template

Whether you’d like to start building thought leadership around social media, capture insights from top marketing experts, or share your best social media practices, this beautiful idea sharing template will help get your big idea and supporting key points organized.

To take it to the next level, we recommend uploading your deck to SlideShare to help further share your idea and reach a larger audience.

Click to view the full deck with notes.

Weekly Content Calendar Template

This simple content calendar template will help organize your content and boost your productivity by eliminating the guesswork that stems from the question, “what do I share with my audience today?”

Click to view the full deck with notes.

Event Marketing Template

Marketing your event with a Haiku Deck is a new and fun way to promote your next event or conference. Use it to highlight intriguing keynotes, interesting sessions, and provide people with the opportunity to learn more about the event.

Click to view the full deck with notes.

Customer Quotes & Testimonials Template

Whether you have a collection of quotes from an event, user testimonials, or awesome iTunes reviews of your app, use this elegant Haiku Deck template to capture them in one place.

Customer Quotes & Testimonial Examples – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

How To Template

From explaining “how to craft the perfect Google+ post” to showing someone “how to make your own pizza crust,” our How To Template can help you get the job done with beauty.

Click to view the full deck with notes.

Press Release Template

Add visual interest to your press releases with this presentation template that has high flexibility, allowing you to adjust it for your specific needs.

Click to view the full deck with notes.

Twitter Chat Promotion Template

Keeping things short and sweet (just like a tweet), this presentation template helps you promote the most pertinent details of your Twitter chats with simplicity.

Twitter Chat Publicity Template – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

Case Study Template

Move away from wordy case studies to case studies that inspire. This case study template, created by Haiku Deck user Irene Yam, is great for those wanting a new visual way of highlighting customer stories.

Click to view the full deck with notes.

Event Recap Template

Did you recently attend an event or conference and have inspiring quotes or major highlights from the event that you’d like to share on your social media channels or share with other event attendees? Try out this template that combines the perfect amount of quotes and event details to include in your recap.

Click to view the full deck with notes.

Social Media Report Template

Showcase and present stats from your social media report in a new and visually appealing way with this simple and flexible Haiku Deck template.

Social Media Report Template – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

Let us know your thoughts!

What Haiku Deck templates would you like to see? Leave us a comment below and let us know! And, as always, if you have any questions, feel free to drop us a line any time.

Digital storytelling has transformed the way we experience and share ideas. We’re surrounded by digital tales that we can even access right from our cell phones! But with so many stories echoing across the web, making yours stand out can be challenging.

Here at Haiku Deck, we like to think we know a thing or two about telling stories… and we’d like to let you in on a little secret.

Picture-Perfect Digital Storytelling

Presenting your story in a way that ensures it will be exciting and worth interacting with is easier than you might think. Whether you’re rallying support around a cause, or just telling folks about your cat, audiences go nuts for visuals. Want to see a great example? Just check out our deck explaining Ten Reasons Why Visual Communication Can’t Be Ignored:

Ten Reasons Visual Communication Can’t Be Ignored – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

Once you’ve gotten a chance to let that soak in, here are a few more resources that might help give your story even more reach:

• Optimizing the Appearance of Haiku Decks on Social Media
• Optimizing Your Haiku Decks for SEO
• Haiku Deck User Guide: Using Your Own Images
• Haiku Deck User Guide: Share & Export
• Embedding Your Haiku Decks in Your Blog or Website
• Haiku Deck Support: Free Images, Licensing, and Commercial Use

And of course, if you have any questions, you’re always welcome to drop us a line!

One of our main goals at Haiku Deck is to make things simple and easy, especially when it comes to sharing your beautiful Haiku Decks. But, the different image sizes and dimensions on various social media channels can be a bit less easy to handle. We’ve experienced just about everything from having words and images cut off in odd places, sizing of slides that don’t necessarily align with sizing on that specific social media channel, and the inability to reposition the image for a post all together. So, we’ve come up with some ways to handle situations just like this.

First, you’ll need to know how to save your Haiku Deck slides as images. Here are 2 ways:

1. Take a screenshot.
2. Export your Haiku Deck to PowerPoint/Keynote, then save your slides as images.

Now that you know how to save your Haiku Deck slides as images, let’s get started!

Facebook

When sharing a link to your Haiku Deck on Facebook, Facebook will automatically pull the image in the first slide to use for the link’s preview. Sometimes, the link preview looks perfect:

And other times, when your text isn’t centered on the slide, it looks like this (the majority of the text in the top/bottom of your slide gets cut off):

There isn’t a way to reposition the image on Facebook, so here are a couple things you could do to workaround this:

Showcase a different slide from your deck by using the arrows at the top left corner of the image to view the different slides in your deck and select one that looks the best.

Or, if you’d like to use the title slide, here’s a workaround:

1. Take a screenshot of your first slide, or export your deck to PowerPoint and save your slides as images.
2. The recommended image upload size for shared links on Facebook is 1200 x 627. You can use photo editing software such as Photoshop, or free web based tools like PicMonkey or Canva, to upload and resize/crop the image to the correct size and save it as a .jpg or .png image file.
3. Once you’ve saved that image, you can use the “+Upload Image” button to replace the original image with the new image you just created. It should look something like this:

Tip: If you’re sharing the link and using Facebook’s default link preview, you can delete the link in the status box. Your posts will look more clean and less cluttered with text. You can also edit the text that appears in the link preview to include more details about your deck.

Google+

Google+ will also provide you with a link preview similar to Facebook, but the preview perfectly adjusts to the size of the slide so you won’t need to manually resize the image. You should see something similar to this:

However, if you’re not a fan of the link preview, you can upload an image instead and include a link to your deck within the status. The recommended size for a shared image on G+ is 497 x 373, the same proportion of our Haiku Deck slides, so resizing/cropping is not needed. The result should look something like this:

Not only does sharing an image give you a beautiful G+ post, images that are shared on G+ also have a higher chance of being highlighted (taking over both columns of posts) in your followers’ G+ stream.

Tip: If you’re sharing a quote or blog post that doesn’t have an accompanying image, you can create your own with Haiku Deck. We love doing this for our curated content; here’s one example. And if you’d like to take it a step further, G+ also supports gifs. If you’ve already exported and saved your Haiku Deck slides as images, you can use GIFMaker to create a gif out of your slides, giving the illusion of a slideshow on auto play. Here’s an example from one of our posts.

Instagram

Because of the square format on Instagram (recommended image size is 640 x 640), you’ll need to resize the image of your deck’s slide into a square. To do this, you’ll first want to save your Haiku Deck slide(s) as an image in a place where you can access them on your iPhone or Android phone (we like to use Dropbox and GoogleDrive for this).

Once you’ve saved your slide(s) as an image, you can use apps such as #SquareDroid (Android), Squaready (iPhone), or Canva (web), to upload and save your image as a square without needing to crop it when you upload it onto Instagram. You’ll have an image that looks something like this:

Tip: The only place on Instagram that allows you to have a clickable link is in your bio. If you’re promoting a new deck or blog post, share an attention-grabbing image, update your bio with the link to your new deck or blog post, and mention it in the description of your post that they can click the link in your bio to see it.

Twitter

When sharing a link to your deck on Twitter, your tweet appears in your follower’s home timeline and lists like this:

Tweets like this can be easily missed by your followers, but tweeting a photo helps your tweets to stand out like this:

This is also a great way for Twitter chat hosts to highlight their questions. If you’ve ever participated or hosted a Twitter chat, you know how busy those streams can get. Using this method, your questions will stand out and participants are less likely to miss them; they’re also easier to spot if anyone needs to scroll back through the chat’s stream. Also check out our post, How To Host a Twitter Chat with Style.

Tip: If you’re using Haiku Deck to display a quote, soundbite, or question on Twitter, you’ll want to insert the text more or less in the center of the slide to avoid any odd cropping. The minimum size for in-stream photos on Twitter is 440 x 220.

It’s Friday morning. Class is in 20 minutes, and your students are supposed to present the Haiku Decks they’ve been working on all week. But as you’re finishing up your coffee, you’re skimming through an inbox full of emails from students who couldn’t find their projects at the last minute. Sound familiar?

With so many students, email addresses, decks, classes, and shared devices, it’s no wonder teachers sometimes run into trouble finding their students’ projects or accounts. Thankfully, we’re here to help make one part of this equation a lot easier by explaining the best ways to use Haiku Deck for education.

Haiku Deck Classroom

With Haiku Deck Classroom accounts, the teacher and all students associated with a Classroom account will enjoy the benefits of our paid product which includes privacy features, the ability to download decks for offline viewing and editing, the ability to embed YouTube videos in presentations, and more.

Classroom also includes a handful of new features designed specifically for the teacher:

• Classroom management dashboard for adding/removing students
• Course galleries where teachers can review the presentations that students submit in one convenient location.
• Optional Integration with Google Classroom and Google sign-in

Haiku Deck Classroom is affordably priced for educators on tight budgets and department, school, district, and institutional pricing discounts are available. Learn more about Haiku Deck Classroom here.

Creating a Single Account for Your Class

This is probably the easiest method (and our favorite), but it’s not ideal for all classrooms. You can create one Haiku Deck account for your classroom, and your students can all sign in using the same email address and password. This will save their work to the same account, so we recommend having students include their names in the titles of each deck to make them easy to find.

Pros:

• Easy to keep track of login credentials
• Work can’t really ‘go missing’ from account mix-ups
• No time spent signing in and out of separate accounts
• No risk of students accidentally saving to the wrong account
• You can sign in at any time to review, share, and delete student work
• Students can save their work as ‘private’ and you’ll still be able to view it

Cons:

• Students could inadvertently delete or edit other students’ decks
• Scrolling through everyone’s decks to find the one you’re looking for could be inconvenient

Maybe your students will be making too many decks for one account to sound appealing, but having separate accounts for each of your students sounds like a headache waiting to happen. In this case, we recommend taking advantage of a nifty little Gmail trick that not a lot of folks know about: the ability to create variants of your Gmail email address that all go to the same inbox.

With any email address at gmail.com, you can add a plus sign and more text after your username to create a variation that will still go to your inbox. Gmail ignores everything from the + forward, so the possibilities are endless.

You can set up one Gmail account (for example, ‘msbeifong@gmail.com’) and then use variants of it to set up separate Haiku Deck accounts for specific groupings of students, such as:

• msbeifong+history@gmail.com
• msbeifong+morningclass@gmail.com
• msbeifong+thirdgrade@gmail.com
• msbeifong+fourthgrade@gmail.com

This way, you only have one email address through Gmail – but you can have as many Haiku Deck accounts based on that email address as you’d like.

Pros:

• Easy to keep track of logins
• Easy to keep track of student work
• Low risk of work being saved to the wrong account
• You can sign in at any time to review, share, and delete student work
• Students can save their work as ‘private’ and you’ll still be able to view it
• Not as much time needed signing in and out of accounts on shared devices

Cons:

• Students signed into the same group could accidentally edit, or delete other students’ decks
• Even if they save decks as ‘private,’ any work students are doing can be viewed at any time by other users signed into the same account

If you’d prefer to keep all of your students’ decks separate, then you could have students set up accounts under their own school email addresses. From a support standpoint, we get the most troubleshooting emails from teachers with classrooms set up this way, due to the increased chances of work being saved improperly. If you decide to take this route, here are a few things to consider:

Pros:

• Students’ decks are saved separately
• Lower likelihood of students editing or deleting other students’ decks

Cons:

• The inconvenience of having to sign out/in on shared devices
• No access to decks until students share them with you
• Students cannot save decks as ‘private’ and share them with you
• High likelihood of decks being saved to the wrong accounts due to sign out/sign in confusion
• Higher likelihood of accounts being created improperly (misspelled email addresses, passwords, etc. or accidentally using a personal email address instead of an .edu one)
• Account mix-ups, improperly saved decks, etc. can be somewhat tricky and time-consuming to resolve for all parties involved in this case (less than ideal when you need a fast resolution)

For an easy alternative that still provides each of your students with a unique account, you could take advantage of using the Gmail trick mentioned above (under Method #2). For example, you could create the email address mrbarnesclass@gmail.com. For your students, you could create Haiku Deck accounts for them as follows:

• mrbarnesclass+jonny@gmail.com
• mrbarnesclass+sarah@gmail.com
• mrbarnesclass+alexi@gmail.com, etc.

All emails pertaining to any of the accounts created using this method will go to the original email address, mrbarnesclass@gmail.com. Here are the benefits of using Gmail instead of student email addresses:

• You can easily reset the password for any student account
• Students won’t receive emailed updates, news, etc. from us
• It’s super easy for us to look those kinds of accounts up to provide support
• We can get all of the accounts created for you – just email us at support@haikudeck.com
• If your students have educational email addresses that don’t accept incoming messages outside of the school district, this is a better method to use so that their passwords can be reset

In Summary

We recommend Haiku Deck Classroom for teachers using the app with their students. This provides the greatest convenience for the teacher and also provides important access to student presentation privacy features and download. We’re here to give you a hand and help out if you ever have any questions. Just drop us a line!