Situation
The Chief Diversity Officer at a large candy company needed help presenting the company's diversity journey to their new CEO. While informative, the original outline relied too heavily on the workforce data, and struggled to communicate the importance of the employee listening tours, the current employee resource group impact, and the call to action necessary to transition the journey under this new leadership.
Strategy
Step 1
The first step was to work with the client to develop the presentation flow for a 30 minute meeting. First we aligned on a "big idea" and a "call to action". This provided all stakeholders with a vision for the presentation story and a clear outcome for their meeting with the CEO. We then broke the journey down into sections - Where we were, Where we are, Where we are going. This provided a clear three act structure that helps to exemplify the current situation and the potential of a more diverse future. I outlined the three sections, making sure the bulk of the presentation focused on the current state of DEI at the company, with the second largest section focus on the future and call to action.
Step 2
The second step required that I identified impactful moments to showcase throughout the presentation. The workforce data was impressive and broke down the hiring data over the last 2 years (the beginning of the DEI journey) between white and BIPOC hires and their retention. This also broke down the data between men and women throughout the company, including leadership roles. This data served as the logical evidence to support our call to action, but there was still an opportunity to highlight the emotional and ethical messages of the past and current DEI journey. This required that I capture employee testimonials and acknowledged the reality of the current racial climate throughout the United States. This was critically important as the company's headquarters are located in one of the most racially diverse and dynamic cities in the country. We would end up dedicating a full slide to the BLM protests. It was an emotional element, but more importantly an ethical imperative in the presentation that helped to align the big idea to the company's social responsibilities.
Step 3
The third step was to develop a strong talk track with the client. To help with this I turned the presentation outline into a PowerPoint wireframe. This allowed us to visualize the flow and decide approximately how much time they would spend on each slide. As the meeting was only 30 minutes we knew that the outline would need to fit to 20-25 slides the most. We also kept the talk track to around 140 words per slide, allowing for pauses on any slides that contained meaning content.
Step 4
The final step was to take this wireframe and translate into a visually impactful presentation. This would involve a consistent look that aligned to the company brand standards, but also served to showcase the important emotional, ethical, and logical highlights throughout. To connect the audience to the emotional message of the presentation I focused on diverse photography of real employees, specifically where they were engaging with one another or engaging in community events. There was a healthy mix of both frontline employees, supply chain employees, and corporate employees. This would also provided the new CEO with a snapshot of the diversity in the company and the promise in the success of the current hiring goals. From an ethical perspective we focused on the BLM protests and the testimonials from employees regarding their membership and support of the employee resource groups. The BLM slide featured a collage of black and white photos from the most recent protests. The slide highlighting testimonials featured builds of quotes that I filtered out from diversity listening tours the previous CEO and CDO hosted. Lastly, to help focus on the logical data throughout the deck, I used bold colors, large icons, and animations to create engaging infographics.
Results
The client successfully delivered their presentation to the new CEO, aligning and expanding on the original goals of their DEI and journey. Throughout the last year they the client has expanded their team, hosting twice as many listening tours, and continued to diversify the company's workforce. We continue to work together to develop their presentations for internal audiences and external industry events.
Services Provided
Story Development Framework
Story Outline and Presentation Strategy
Talk Track Development
Presentation Design
Note: To protect the confidentiality and privacy of my clients, I have altered some identifying details in this case study.