The first weeknotes in a while, not because I've not been doing anything (far from it!) but more because the last few weeks were all gearing up to yesterday - the final presentations.
We left our prototypes as long as we could (three weeks) before analysing them so that we could use the maximum amount of data. This all formed part of the final slidedeck along with all of the other things we'd done over the last ten weeks.
Well, actually... not "all". There has been so much done that fitting it into five to eight minutes was impossible.
Tuesday's session with We Are Open was a chance to put some finishing touches to the presentation before a chance to give it a practice run through with the rest of the cohort. Before that was the important business of setting the running order through the use of a "wheel of fortune" style name picker.
We were lucky with a good draw of second place, not first up but able to get over with quickly!
While (hopefully) far from disaster, this first run through clocked in at over 10 minutes and produced some good constructive feedback. "Less text", "more images", and most importantly "add some more jokes", while also lopping about a third off the running time.
No pressure then?
Wednesday was a day for editing. Taking things out, putting them back in, combining two slides into one and trying to pull it all together. The running time got a bit shorter and a few things seemed to click into place.
Thursday afternoon and we are joined by a few members of Catalyst for the final session and the presentations. The introduction by Laura and Doug from We Are Open gave a good overview of the whole ten weeks along with some of the results from our bi-weekly check-ins (confirming once and for all that Back to the Future is the greatest film ever made).
Taking all of the feedback on board form Tuesday, I managed to squeeze everything into nine minutes, not too bad under the circumstances and the whole thing felt better for the changes. A few nice comments in the chat and direct messages hopefully meant it went down well with everyone else.
As for the jokes? I'll leave you with this (anonymised) message I got shortly after finishing
Awesome presentation, I seriously almost spit smoothie out of my nose
Mission accomplished.
It was great to then sit back and listen to the rest of the charities give their presentation. Although there were threads of similarity in them, it was amazing to see how we all sat in the same sessions over ten weeks and yet produced so many different ideas and things to test. They are all doing great things.
