Despite most executive summary slides on the internet being cluttered and complicated, our opinion is that executive summaries should be shorter, simpler, and easier to follow.
Your executive audience is busy and their time is valuable. So it's especially important for your executive summary slide to answer the important questions on their mind, but no more. That 'no more' part is where almost everybody goes wrong.
To that end, here are our recommendations for 4 strong, clear executive summary slides.
1. Three Points & The Team
This is a pretty standard executive summary slide with several distinct areas to put different type of information. This example gives you room for:
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Three points
These are very flexible, and you can edit them to be:
Problem / solution / opportunity
What we did / how we did it / why it matters
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Three stats or highlights
- The project team
EXAMPLE:
The beauty of this executive summary is that it tells the story of your update in the three rectangular sections and provides all the secondary information in an organized way that doesn't compete.
2. The 'Less Is More' Executive Summary
Sometimes you just want to tell a single, compelling story in your executive summary, without bringing in all the supporting numbers, data, and evidence.
This is a very strong approach when you know what'll be most important to your audience. This clean, simple executive summary slide has just three columns.
We've defaulted the headings to be the following, but you can easily change them to tell any story that you need:
- What we did
- How we did it
- Why this matters
EXAMPLE:
3. Executive Summary Walk-Through
In this executive summary example, you'll share all the important stats or highlights you need to share in the first dashboard slide. Then you'll go over each number or update one-by-one with your audience to share what's interesting, unexpected, or a lesson learned from that number.
These walk through-slides are the golden ticket to understanding the dashboard, as they'll allow you to layer in important meaning to each number and explain that all-important "so what?"
EXAMPLE:
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| Dashboard | Statistic 1 | Statistic 2 |
4. Updates By Area
If you're reporting or updating on three different areas, problems, or statistics, a great way to display those summaries are in a gridded view where each area is denoted by a specific color. This allows the audience to keep them separate in their mind and focus on them one at a time as you go over them.
In this executive summary slide, three colorful areas are shown. The template gives you two different types of metrics as examples on the first vs. second slide.
EXAMPLE:
Each of these executive updates has a different strength and purpose. If you'd like even more inspiration, check out our full collection of executive summary slides.