How do people communicate, and when do they do it well?

Communication has not really happened before the receiver has fully understood the message. Scientific communication is not any different to what happens in the family. Vips have this way of looking at it: “Each time I have been specific and told my family that I wanted to go for a beach vacation, I KNOW what I conveyed, and I knew I did it well!”

…. so how hard will it be to communicate between teams, trades and across continents and cultures?

Vipsit has, over time, developed design, communication and training  methodologies that bridge the communication gap. We will be happy to work with you to sharpen your communication strategy and methodology for your institution, in your facility design projects or in company memo’s.

MINDMAPS

At Vipsit, we use mindmaps for literally everything. Planning a party, taking notes from a brainstorming meeting, creating storyboards for training, preparing for a trip abroad, or writing a scientific paper. If you are interested in mastering the Mindmap skill-set let us know. We will be happy to share.

POWERPOINTS

Vips has, for many years, assisted colleagues in spicing up existing PowerPoint presentations as well as drafting presentations from scratch using data sets, an outline, or a scientific paper.

PowerPoint can be dangerous when utilized for training. It can let the listener drift off to other fields in an hour-long dream with the eyes slightly open, and the ears closed. However it does not have to be so. Vips have herself given more than 150 international talks. She has extensive expertise in pulling presentations together and actually enjoy doing it.

WE HAVE SPENT TIME LEARNING WHAT WORKS

We have, throughout our entire professional career, worked hard to master the art of actually entertaining people with power point presentations, rather than boring them to death. We have taken classes, read books, and practiced tirelessly to get it right. We believe we have valid perspectives and methodologies to share with you. We can teach you how to lay out a presentation that will be memorable. We will show you how the brain sometimes grasps a presentation instantly and then at other times will refuse to retain even the tiniest bit. We can assist you in making a more graphic presentation with enhanced flow. We can take your information and, starting from scratch, lay out a new presentation or we can review a draft and help upgrade the experience for your target audience. Let us know what you need and we can take it from there.

PRACTICE

We can can help you to build your speaker skills. We will coach you as we listen to your practice and prepare meaningful, concise feed-back designed to improve your presentations.

FEED BACK

Conference presentations are always followed by a formal questionnaire to provide feed-back to the organizers and the speaker. Generally, these questionnaires are good and do provide some meaningful information. But when colleagues in our field begin to send us photos from conferences we did not attend and these photos include some of our original slides, or they send us video of full PowerPoint sequences in which even our original typos have not been corrected – then we believe we are doing something right. When other people are willing to put their name on our product, we have provided something of value.

Does it make us mad? NOPE, NOT AT ALL!  

The field we work in is important. The more often our message gets out there, the more people will receive it. We would appreciate it if our original work was recognized, but if that doesn’t happen, oh well …. we take it as a quality statement that the presenter found the slides to be worth showing.

But please make sure the slide containing our original work is decent quality! Screen snips of PDF files from conference webpages sometimes look blurry and does neither your name or our name any good. Send us an email and let us talk about how we can get a good quality version of the slide headed in your direction.

Write us at Vips@vips-it.com

When, after a 3 hr training event, we receive a complaint from a frustrated person in the audience that “there was no time to plan and write the shopping list for the upcoming family gathering, because what was up there on the screen was so enticing,” and it was on a topic that most people love to hate, we leave with a smile.

When, five months after a conference, some of us meet a person in a bar, who we do not even remember or recognize, and get a question like ” I am still intrigued with regard to ……..”, and in reply to our panicked face they continue, “well, it was between the slide showing ……., just after the section where you talked about ……., and you had not yet started talking about ……..”, then we mark that presentation as “one of those where we got it right.”

POSTERS – LESS IS MORE!

We review poster drafts for clarity, content and message. What should be on the poster and what could be on a handout? We are not graphic artists, we are scientists. We use graphic artists ourselves to give our own posters the last nudge towards awesomeness. But we have made our fair share of posters throughout our careers and we are happy to share and give you feedback on a draft.