

Impactful Presentations
Impactful Presentations
Go Deeper with Certificate Programs
Impactful Presentations is part of two certificate programs:
What You'll Learn
Week 1: Introduction - Move Your Audience
2 Video Lessons
- Messages That Spark Change—It’s not what you say, but how you say it
- Mentor Moment—Try something new
1 Assignment
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Choose Your Presentation: Choose the 10-15 minute presentation you’ll be workshopping throughout the course. Use an existing presentation or choose from one of our sample presentation prompts. Identify your audience, your starting assumptions for what you must do or include in this presentation, and the skills you most want to grow.
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Note: For course assignments, you’ll need access to either Google Slides or Microsoft PowerPoint. There will be multiple opportunities to get feedback on your drafts along the way, though you are not required to give your presentation live to the class.
Week 2: Plan the Journey
4 Video Lessons
- What’s the Point?—Identify the goal of your presentation
- It’s Not About You—Empathize with your audience
- Shape Your Story—Build emotional appeal and interest
- Mentor Moment—Start with emotion
1 Assignment
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Crafting Story Arcs: Identify the beats, or key moments, of your presentation. Build four potential sequences to determine the strongest organization of your content. Use your learnings from this exercise to iterate your Big Idea and the shift you want the audience to make.
Week 3: Become the Guide
3 Video Lessons
- Create a Connection—Bridge the divide between you and the audience
- Establish Your Credibility—Inspire trust and belief
- Keep It Human—Present as your authentic self
1 Assignment
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Design for Connection, Credibility, and Authenticity: Select different methods for building a connection, establishing credibility, and presenting authentically, and brainstorm how you might bring them to life. Think through the details of implementing these methods by experimenting.
Week 4: Make it Memorable
4 Video Lessons
- Best Intentions; Bad Presentations—Avoid common presentation mistakes
- Make Patterns—Encourage understanding and retention
- Break Patterns—Shake things up to capture their attention
- Mentor Moment—Find the medium that fits your message
2 Assignments
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Create Pattern Breaks: Brainstorm ways to break patterns using physical space, the senses, and audience interactivity. Build experiments to further explore your ideas.
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Build a Storyboard: Use the feedback and insights from the first three assignments to create a storyboard for your presentation. Identify opportunities to engage, or re-engage, the audience, and consider the holistic journey through your content. Start a visual mood board to guide design decisions.
Week 5: Conclusion - Look Ahead
3 Video Lessons
- Bringing It All Together—A Presentation Case Study
- Mentor Moment—Encouragement to explore
- The End Is The Beginning—Evolve your story and yourself
1 Assignment
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Presentation Finale: Design a meaningful ending and evolve the structure and flow of your presentation using insights from the feedback you’ve received. Craft a full second draft, diving more deeply into visual decisions and scripting key moments. Reflect on your experience over these five weeks to understand the skills and techniques you’ve gained and areas to continue growing.
Meet Your Instructors

Ann Kim
Former Director of Health & Well-Being at IDEO
Ann is a design researcher with roots in anthropology and journalism. Prior to IDEO, she made documentaries for public television. Filmmaking taught her how to visually tell stories as well as how to find, edit, and shape them. At IDEO, she does the same thing, taking the raw materials—interviews, data, observations—and crafting them into stories that inspire.

Alex Gallafent
Senior Design Director at IDEO
Alex is a designer, theater artist, and journalist. Throughout his career, Alex has been figuring out the things audiences need and how best to bring them to life. He’s presented stories on theater stages in London and New York, in broadcast journalism for the BBC, and across the world with IDEO.
Frequently Asked Questions
Cohort courses run on a set calendar, with fixed start and end dates. Course learning is self-paced within those dates and requires approximately 4-5 hours per week over 5 weeks. Courses consist of videos, activities, assignments, access to course teaching teams, and feedback from a global community of learners.
Cohort courses also provide optional 1-hour video Community Conversations, held weekly by the teaching team. They occur during set times, which are released during the first week of the course, and set to accommodate as many time zones as possible.
All of our courses are fully online and self-paced, so you can take them from any time zone, anywhere in the world.
During 5-week cohort courses, your course teaching team will host scheduled virtual community conversations which are optional. Timing will be announced during the first week of the course and is set to accommodate as many time zones as possible. Don’t worry if you aren’t able to make it, as these are purely optional.
Absolutely! We have had many teams go through our courses together with great success. For those taking our courses as a team, we provide a couple of additional benefits:
1. A Team Learning Guide, developed to provide your team with resources to facilitate offline discussion to complement the in-course experience.
2. A Manage Learners function, which provides visibility into your team's progress within the course.
3. The ability to create a private Learning Circle, which is a closed space for discussion on the learning platform specifically for your team.
For more information, visit our Team Learning page.
You can purchase your course by clicking Enroll on this page. This will take you to our checkout process where we accept various credit cards, PayPal, or Shop Pay.
We also offer installment plans which you can select at checkout if you use the Shop Pay method of payment. Available for U.S. learners at the moment.
Collaborate with a Global Community
Work with Expert Coaches
Our teaching team has extensive applied industry knowledge. They'll help deepen your understanding and application of the course content by facilitating written discussions, live video moments, and assignment feedback.
Expand Your Network
Join virtual live discussion groups for deeper conversation, reflection, and connection led by teaching team members and available multiple times a week across time zones.
Receive Feedback
Gain tips, techniques, and a downloadable feedback guide; and share and receive feedback on assignments from peers.



What Others Are Saying
Impactful Presentations
Cohort Course“I've been delivering presentations my whole career, this course is game-changing for everything I knew. This course made me realize there are more creative ways to deliver a message.”
Impactful Presentations
Cohort Course“I had an aha moment when I realized that you need to focus on the shift you want your audience to make versus the content you want to say.”
Impactful Presentations
Cohort Course“Wonderful course on key elements that anyone should use to have a more memorable presentation prepared!”
Impactful Presentations
Cohort Course“Having spent my career presenting to varied audiences, there is no doubt that most presentations are too data-heavy and the audience is lost early on. There is no one better than IDEO colleagues Ann and Alex to provide novel and impactful skills to those who present for a living….or for anyone who just wants to get better at presentation. Not only will you learn great new skills, but you will have fun doing so!”
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Enroll As a Team
The practice and application of design thinking, innovation, and creativity is highly collaborative and team based—which is why we believe that learning is better together. Take a course as a team and develop new skills and mindsets, have deeper discussion during course kickoff and debrief sessions, and build a shared understanding.