Unlock wizard-level presentation skills with just 4 focused trainings that take you through creating…

  1. Accessible & modern presentations

  2. Visually engaging slides from scratch

  3. Effective data visualizations & data storytelling

  4. Engaging presentation storyboards

As a researcher, educator, or trainer you’re used to “data dumps” and #DeathByPowerpoint. But the skills to captivate any audience with your info & ideas are just around the corner.

32 hours of on-demand, self-paced training.

Exercises, practice activities, and custom-designed workbooks & handouts.

Visual database of 1,200+ curated diverse images for research & academic presentations.

You’ll learn about our full program of 4 courses on this page

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As someone who wants to change minds, transform communities, and make a difference with your research or lectures…

you’re being held back by some unique challenges…

Grad school never showed you how to share your knowledge in engaging ways.

And maybe:

  • you’re nervous and have public speaking anxiety.

  • you have dry content or educational, data-heavy presentations.

  • your audience is distracted students.

  • your audience is full of “grumpy” academics or “data people” who don’t like change.

  • your audience is full of “non-technical” people who don’t need all the details.

  • you’re busy with other things to do and can’t take forever to design slides.

  • you (think you) “suck at design” and aren’t a “visual thinker.”

  • you need to present in ways that are inclusive and accessible.

  • you must be able to present in-person AND as a recorded video AND on Zoom.

🤷‍♀️ So it's honestly no surprise that most presentations are overwhelming "data dumps"

🤷‍♀️ So it's honestly no surprise that most presentations are overwhelming "data dumps"

But it’s 💯 totally possible for you to turn those overwhelming “data dumps” into visually powerful presentations.

It’s not magic.

It’s about leveling up your presentation skills with 4 specific professional development courses.

Instead of…

Someone charging you $3,500-$5,000 to design your presentation…

…because you don’t need a template and can’t just hire any ol’ graphic designer.

What you need is someone with TWO specialized qualifications: (a) a research/academic background; and (b) multidisciplinary design/storytelling skills to help you present data, storyboard your dry content, and solve your “data dump” problem.

(or) Spending hours upon hours searching online for free templates…

Which is like lighting your time on fire, because (a) your time is valuable; and (b) that’s time spent on something that will work against you anyway, because templates steer you in the WRONG direction if you want to create better presentations!

(or) Repeatedly throwing your money away at marketplace templates…

Which is lighting your money on fire because templates only make your slides worse.

(Plus there was all the time you spent searching through the marketplace).

(or) Paying $250-$500 for ONE presentation skills pre-conference workshop…

Only to realize that you’re so tired from travel or too distracted by other workshop participants (or too nervous about your upcoming talk!) that you can barely focus…

…and then later when you try to implement the ideas, you barely remember enough to make your presentations significantly better…But it’s not like conference workshops ever come with a replay, so you’re screwed.

…Why not just learn a set of skills you can use over & over again to advance your career?

Instead of wasting even more time & money on tactics that don’t work, here are the 4 workshops that will actually teach you powerful visual communication skills.

Let’s take a tour of each course that will turn you into a more confident and powerful speaker.

It all starts with course #1:
Fail-Proof Slide Design

From INACCESSIBLE to ACCESSIBLE slides.

Stop me where I go wrong, but right now you’re probably:

Spending a lot of time manually formatting things like font color, font size, and font type.

Wanting to use less text and more visuals, but not sure what layouts to use or how to design photos with text.

Messing about with slide templates (even though they’re inaccessible and violate basic design rules).

Wanting to use less text, but worried you’ll forget what you wanted to say.

Wanting to use less text and more visuals, but not sure how to find good (free) stock photos.

Limiting how many slides you use in a presentation because you think it’s bad to have a lot of slides.

🤫 p.s. part of this is because you’re completely unaware of the bad habits you’ve picked up over the years, that you’re stuck repeating without even knowing it.

But fear not, friend! This is all about to change because…

After Fail-Proof Slide Design, you will know how to…

Find the perfect image for your slides, super fast.

3 wildly easy layouts for images + text, so you don’t even have to think about it.

Still present slides that are only text (if needed), but use design to make them accessible & actually look nice.

Avoid the #1 element (that all audiences hate) to never have in your presentations EVER AGAIN.

Use the ONE animation that actually helps people follow along with you (and how to automate it when creating slides).

Use the PowerPoint Slide Master to automate the text design formulas (formatting) you learned in this course!

Determine whether you’ve used the correct number of slides in a given presentation.

Which means that you will soon…

Spend less time on all that boring formatting, because you know how to use your slide software to automate most of that.

Have slides that are more accessible than before, which every audience will appreciate!

Be free from those bad habits (like using slide templates or AI designs) that were wasting your time.

Be having a lot more fun searching for free images, because it no longer feels like a slog just to find the “one perfect” photo.

Quickly and easily choose a layout design for slides that will have both text and images.

Have less text on a slide while also being confident that you will not forget what you wanted to say (no memorization required!).

Use the right number of slides in a given presentation.

End that “wall of text” feeling once and for all 🙌

Course #2: Visual Slide Design

From “I’m not a visual thinker” to “OMG! I know exactly how to visualize this!”

Let me guess, right now you are:

Unable to visualize your ideas and avoiding blank slides because you don’t know what to do with all that empty space.

Telling your audience things like “I’m not going to read that to you” as you proceed to talk about stuff not even on your slide (spoiler: that’s inaccessible).

Using slide titles to constantly remind your audience what section of the presentation you’re in (e.g., “introduction, continued” across like 10 slides).

Trying to create your own designs using shapes, text boxes, and icons…but something just doesn’t look right.

Trying to use SmartArt or Design Ideas (or AI design) to present your material in a “more visual way.”

🤫 p.s. part of this is because your creative side has been stifled for years so you’re convinced that you don’t know how to think visually (but I promise, that’s not true!!).

But guess what, my friend? This is all about to change because…

After Visual Slide Design, you will know how to…

Use visual hierarchy (and other graphic design principles) to overcome your discomfort with using blank slides.

Leverage the power of a popular storytelling medium to design your slides—and entire presentation—in engaging ways.

End the inaccessible bad habit of making people read from your slides while you talk about something different than what’s on the slide.

Use simple shapes and text boxes to create custom visuals for almost anything you need: timelines, concept models, statistical models, logic models, visual representations of your concept, etc.

Begin storyboarding your presentation more effectively by adding one simple type of slide to your presentations.

Choose and use icons quickly and effectively, and hack/edit them as needed when they aren’t quite perfect as is.

Use a combination of strategies you learned in this course and course #1 to share quantitative data without even needing a graph.

Which means that you will soon…

Realize blank slides are your favorite places to start, because you know how to visualize your ideas.

Be able to whip together just about any visual you need by using slide software basics like shapes, text boxes, and icons.

Never again have to rely on clunky, goofy, SmartArt or Design Ideas (or AI design).

Align your slides and what you say during the presentation (which makes your presentations even more accessible).

Realize that you do have a creative side, which you can leverage to professionally share information in more visually engaging ways.

Unlock your creative genius!

Course #3: Presenting Data with Slides

From defaults & rainbow graphs to sleek, professional data visualizations.

I see you. Right now you are:

Sharing as much data as possible, because you think that’s what your audience wants (or needs).

Completely stuck on how to share qualitative data in engaging, visual ways (usually because it’s mostly quotes and themes)!

Sharing a massive amount of data in a presentation, because you aren’t sure what point you actually want to make.

Creating “skittle” graphs (rainbow graphs) because you desperately hope that using more color will somehow make your graph easier to understand...or look better (spoiler: it does neither).

Setting up your graphs in the same order as your stats output, without rethinking the order you present the data in.

Putting all your data in one graph and then spending forever talking people through that one graph because you think that’s how you’re supposed to share complicated data (spoiler: it’s not).

🤫 p.s. Part of this is because you’re trying to share too much data all at once and no one has taught you how to storyboard your data.

You know what I’m going to say next. This is all about to change because…

After Presenting Data with Slides, you will know how to…

Avoid the most common mistakes researchers make when sharing and designing their data (quant and qual).

Why you should never present basic quant data as a table (e.g., demographics table), and what to do instead.

How to design quantitative data, such as pie charts, waffle charts, icon arrays, line graphs, bar charts, and stacked bar charts (Likert scales).

How to design qualitative data, such as Venn diagrams, participant quotes, speedometers/gauge charts.

Implement data storyboarding foundations by learning how to present with clarity.

How to use animations to tell powerful, mind-blowing data stories.

Which means that you will soon…

Feel totally confident that you’re sharing data in a professional, sleek way (which boosts your confidence overall).

Realize simple graphs that are designed & storyboarded well are often the perfect data visualizations (for quant and qual), and that you don’t actually need to use Tableau or anything fancy.

Know how to figure out your key message before you even start working on your graph, so your audience can leave the presentation with a solid understanding of the data you presented.

Be able to share only the data you need to, in that moment, so that your audience is never overwhelmed by your dataviz.

Know how to design quantitative and qualitative data, so your presentation design is balanced across all data visualizations.

Use sleek design principles to highlight the key point you need to make, in that moment, which makes it super easy for your audience to stay with you and only focus on the part of your dataviz that you need them to focus on.

Use advanced design strategies and animations to make your data come alive and blow your audience’s mind because of how engaging your data visualizations were (even though you didn’t even use Tableau 😉).

Tell powerful data stories (quant & qual)

Course #4: Captivate Any Audience

From DATA DUMPS to CAPTIVATING presentations that make a lasting, positive IMPACT on every audience.

(Deep breath). Right now you are:

Revising your presentation over and over and over again, and exhausted from the process.

Unknowingly giving your audience mental “whiplash” because of the order you choose to present your information in.

Beginning your presentations with learning objectives, the agenda, logistics, and/or speaker bios.

Unintentionally spewing “data dumps” at your audience, because that’s what you’ve been taught to do.

Ending your presentations with a generic “thank you” or “questions?” slide that just has your contact info.

Constantly facing “writer’s block” (aka “speaker’s block”) because you don’t know what you should include.

Constantly frustrated because you always seem to create talks that are too long at first, but you don’t know what to cut—everything seems so important!

Unsure how to tailor your presentation to different audiences, especially when it’s a “non-technical” or “non-research” audience.

Nervous because you’re presenting about evidence-based policies, diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice and your audience is defensive or hostile to that.

🤫 p.s. Part of this is because you start your presentation prep by asking “what do I want my audience to know” and/or because you’re still using written outlines to plan your content. Both of those make your life harder!

Ok, let’s do this one last time. This is all about to change because…

After Captivate Any Audience, you will know how to…

Use the storyboarding formula to make ANYTHING engaging for ANY AUDIENCE.

Avoid the current default model of communication that is tragically ineffective.

Apply a new model of communication is both fun and simple to use (and, of course, more effective).

Understand the psychology of your audience and share your info in more relatable ways.

Confidently decide what to include in your presentation AND what to leave out of your presentation.

Use storyboarding strategies to choose a clear and coherent order for your presentation.

Craft an opening hook that, within the first 30 seconds, convinces them to watch from start to finish (and that leverages current evidence about the primacy/recency effect).

Stop ending on a whisper, and end with a strong call to action (even for class lectures!) that leverages current evidence about the primacy/recency effect.

Appropriately deal with (or prepare for) audiences that might be resistant, hostile, or defensive (particularly relevant for people who talk about diversity, social justice, inclusion, and equity)

Which means that you will soon…

Feel more joy when working on your slides, and way less frustration. (Warning: you may be caught laughing at your own jokes or gleefully cheering at the creative way you just figured to present that “dry” content!).

Create a better first draft of your presentation, which will cut down on how much time you spend revising it (or, at least, stop that feeling you’re just spinning your wheels).

Create such a captivating presentation, that your audience might even forget social media exists.

Be able to tailor your presentation to different audiences, with minimal revisions and no overhaul needed.

Witness the moment, in real time, that you just changed someone’s mind or made them think of something in a new way.

Build trust and connect with your audience in ways that you never thought was possible (which pays off in dividends when you need to get through dry or complicated material).

Suddenly want to do a TED/TEDx talk, because you’ve realized that you have an idea worth sharing AND you now have the skills to get up on that stage and share it like a boss.

Vanquish data dumps (info overload) once and for all!

Being a skilled presenter (AKA visual communicator) feeds 2 birds with 1 scone. 🐦🍪🦜

How’s that?

Having a creative outlet and knowing that your work is meaningful are 2 key ways to prevent burnout.

Few things are more professionally creative than a visually engaging presentation + you’ll literally see the difference you’re making in real-time among your audience.

It’s one of the few burnout prevention strategies that you actually have control over!

PLUS this bundle includes our popular VISUAL DATABASE add-on!

1,200+ FREE stock photos at your fingertips!

I’ve curated a visual database of over 1,200 FREE stock photos that I found online.

This is a HUGE bank of photos ready to go (It took me literally 20+ hours across several years to build up!)

So, this instantly saves you 20+ hours of time, and you can have confidence that the photos you use follow the rules and principles I teach in the program.

You get permanent access to my visual database link. As long as I have a visual database, you will have access (I do not disable your link after your access to the program courses expires).

Plus it’s actually part of a whole mini-course that will get bundled with your program.

There are lessons about:

  • The best stock photo sites I’ve found (i.e., FREE royalty free stock photo sites).

  • How to approach finding the perfect photos in a way where it only takes 1 minute or less to find a photo you can use later.

  • When you need to give credit to the artist/photographer.

  • How to give credit/attribution without cluttering up your slide design.

  • Help with understanding copyright.

  • A guide to which of the PowerPoint built-in photo/images to use and which ones to avoid.

(Access to these lessons expires after the 12 months)

Here’s what happens when you develop these highly valuable presentation skills:

Be a researcher who excites people about your work and moves your field forward.

Create presentations with less stress and more efficiency!

Be a professor whose lectures captivate and inspire students!

Have more fun at your job, impress your boss, and become an invaluable powerhouse at work!

Be a speaker who can move hearts, change minds, and make people take action!

Have confidence in your slides, your info, and most importantly—confidence in yourself.

To sum it up: we’re talking LESS anxiety, MORE confidence.

AKA stop being held back and actually enjoy giving presentations for once.

It’s time to vanquish imposter syndrome. 😤

 🤩 ENROLL NOW 🤩

This Presentation Skills Masterclass Training Bundle includes 12 months’ access to:

  • Course #1: Fail-Proof Slide Design

  • Course #2: Visual Slide Design

  • Course #3: Presenting Data with Slides

  • Course #4: Captivate Any Audience

  • The Visual Database Add-on

Share your knowledge and exciting research WITHOUT FEAR.

This is the year that you master creating presentations that matter—a skill that will never go out of style. 😎

Hey there 👋🏻! I’m Dr. Echo Rivera.

I’ll never forget the time I sat down, excited, to watch a new webinar from a well-respected scholar in my field….only to be so bored within the first 5 minutes that I stopped watching.

I wasn’t even mad at the speaker, but in that moment my heart broke. 💔

Why? Let me give you the backstory ~

I earned my PhD (Community Psychology) in 2014 and then worked at a nonprofit research & evaluation center for 3 years. In all, I spent over 14 years dedicated to research and evaluation.

My research focus was on (ending) gender-based violence using intersectional, community-based approaches. While fulfilling, I realized we had a major problem. All systems of oppression are fully connected, yet many social justice researchers & practitioners are heavily siloed.

Even worse, literally everyone had the exact same struggle 😩—their presentations were dry, boring, confusing, overwhelming, or underwhelming.

I became massively overwhelmed and frustrated that all these brilliant people, doing important work that could literally reduce systemic oppression, were effectively whispering into the void of their own silo.

I grew increasingly anxious that we wouldn’t see major positive social change in my lifetime. I’m not even kidding when I say it started to keep me up at night.

But it was in those sleepless nights that an idea started to form. 🌜✨

I didn’t realize it at the time, but starting in undergrad I began learning a secret weapon. Born out of my intense fear of public speaking, I poured excessive amounts of energy into my class presentations. I started to hear things like, “That was the best presentation ever” and “Damn, I wish our professor lectured like that!”

That turned into conference presentations, evaluation finding presentations to the client, and other high stakes professional presentations. I continued to hear “That was the best presentation ever” and “You’re the first academic I’ve ever understood, you make this technical stuff sound so easy.”

While I was seeing head nods and captivated audiences, my colleagues were seeing blank eyes staring into space.

While I was hearing, “you changed my mind today, thank you!” my colleagues were hearing crickets.

Finally, one night it all clicked together.

I realized, I can’t personally make all the different fields of research collaborate and break down their siloes. But, what I could do is take what I’ve learned over the years and help make everyone a powerful speaker. 💪

And so I decided to center my work around one goal: To skyrocket the number of powerful speakers who use data to make the world a better place. 🚀

My mission is to make sure no respected scholar ever bored people again.

And so Creative Research Communications—my professional development company—was founded.

That’s why I’m here, creating these online courses to help YOU create better presentations. Because, for me, it’s my small part in creating a better world through better communication.

I can’t wait to help you become a powerful speaker! 🙌

with joy,
Echo Rivera, PhD

I’ve helped universities, research/evaluation centers & teams, state departments & coalitions, and TTA providers:

Frequently Asked Questions

General questions about the course

  • You will have 12 months to access the 4 courses and visual database add-on course.

    The 12 month timeframe begins on the date of purchase.

    You will have permanent access to:

    • My personal visual database links (if you bookmark them while you still have access to the program).

    • The downloadable materials from the course (if you download them while you still have access to the program), which include custom-designed workbooks and reference handouts.

  • This masterclass program was made for busy people, because my clients tend to be high performing busy professionals (academics, researchers, evaluators, etc).

    The TOTAL time to complete all 4 courses is about 32 hours, or the length of 4 full-day workshops.

    But EACH COURSE is broken up into digestible sections and short videos. Most videos within the courses are 5-15 minutes. Some videos are longer (about 25-30 minutes).

    Even though the entire program is relatively short, you will have a full 12 months of access, so you can go at your own pace.

  • Let’s work together instead.

  • I’d LOVE that! My 1:1 services are here.

  • Many strategies apply broadly across many cultures and we’ve had students from across the globe find value in our training.

    However, please be aware that this course was made by a native English speaker from the United States.

    We recommend that you take this course only if you are able to easily understand videos spoken in English (all downloadable materials are in English, as well).

    While I have done my best to create a training program that is broadly applicable — and some accessibility/design principles are universal — by nature of my limited experience, you will likely find that you need to make adjustments for your audience and culture.

    At this time, courses 1 and 2 have closed captions in English.

    We hope to fully caption courses 3 and 4 in the future.

  • Due to the nature of the training we share in this course, all sales are final.

    It’s just that knowledge is not a returnable product. It’s one of those things that once you have it, you can't give it back.

    Once you watch even just the first few videos in the course, you will have already learned a new way of thinking about and approaching your presentations that will make them better and more accessible.

    If you aren’t sure an online course is for you (or, you aren’t sure my strategies will help), then here are some options:

  • These are not disconnected, interchangeable, modular courses.

    This is a structured learning program and each course heavily references the previous courses.

    So, I don’t recommend it. But, you get access to all 4 courses in the bundle so you can if you want.

  • I must first emphasize that this is NOT a PowerPoint training program. The courses are 90-95% software neutral so you can use whatever slide software you want.

    I personally use PowerPoint and it is what I recommend for a few reasons:

    • It has more robust features (especially for automation) than Google Slides, Keynote, and Canva.

    • Most people I work with already have it and know the basics, so it reduces the learning curve.

    • Most people I work with also need to use Microsoft Office for other things, and staying in that ecosystem saves time if you already use Excel to make data visualizations.

    • Staying in that ecosystem saves even more time if you also need to create infographics, posters, social media graphics, or reports.

    With that said, this is NOT a PowerPoint training course & there are plenty of people who find value in this course who don’t use PPT!

    • The tech videos are ultimately a SMALL portion of each course.

    • The tech videos are only shown in 1 version of PPT (I have an Office 365 subscription and I use Windows).

    • The tech videos are not 100-level tech training (e.g., how to format fonts).

    • The tech videos are more so I can show you how to use software to your advantage for the strategy we just talked about in the course.

    • I’m showing it in PPT so you can see an example, BUT sometimes other slide software will have the same feature. I’m trying to show you the tech strategy behind that feature, so you can apply that strategy to whatever app you use.

  • Yes! Start with Fail-Proof Slide Design here.

“Does this work for X presentation?”

  • If you have already applied for academic positions (or already have a campus invite), I recommend you purchase my Job Talk Escalator instead.

    As a backup plan, courses 1-3 will help you design effective job talk/teaching demo slides. Then, we should do 1-3 sessions to work through your storyboard/script (i.e., what you will say) and to finalize the design together.

  • YES!

  • YES!

  • Well, these are unique presentations…

    Regardless of what you’ve been told, the Primary goal of these is to check the academic boxes and GET YOUR DEGREE 👩‍🎓.

    These are usually more about showing that you can follow the academic rules, and less about having an engaging defense presentation.

    While it’s (of course) always helpful to have a well-designed presentation, a smart strategy is to keep the design on the more conservative side of things.

    You don’t want walls-of-text, but you also don’t need to create a mind-blowing, life changing experience for your committee.

    The first three courses will be more than you need help you achieve that goal. What we recommend for defenses is to go ahead and learn everything in courses 1-3, but then tone it down based on what your advisor tells you.

    GET YOUR DEGREE. That’s #1.

    …and then as soon as you have some freedom (like the conference presentation you’ll do about your masters or doctoral work), then go full out and use all of courses 1-4 🙌.

  • YES! 100%, no question this will help you have a memorable and powerful keynote.

    I would also recommend getting on Zoom with me so we can really tailor it to the presentation context and fine tune your script and storyboard.

    But, courses 1-4 (especially course 4) will be a gamechanger for you if you have something important like a keynote!

  • lol yes this a thing, can you believe it? Academia and tenure is SO competitive right now, it’s massively unfair.

    But that is the unfortunate reality, so if you are gearing up to do a pre-tenure tour then you absolutely want to make sure those talks are powerful and memorable. Courses 1-4 will help you achieve that goal.

  • Yup!

  • Most definitely!

  • 100%!

Who should NOT purchase this bundle?

Do not enroll in the course if these apply. Or, at least, contact us first at hello@echorivera.com.

  • The strategies you learn in the course are for adult learners. We are, unfortunately, not the right program for you and kindly ask that you do not enroll in the program as it will not meet your needs.

  • If you are a business owner/entrepreneur then I recommend you email me first and tell me a little bit more about your business. I may have better options that are more tailored to a business setting.

  • Please do NOT take this course if you are a slide designer or if you design slides for other people.

    That’s a completely different strategy than what is taught in the course.

    This course will NOT help you with that and your clients/colleagues/boss will be totally freaked out if you applied these strategies on their talks (trust me, I know, I used to be a slide designer and it…yeah. Just no).

    Plus, to use some legal language, it’s a violation of our usage terms and is grounds to remove your access to the course without refund. 😬 Let’s just avoid that whole thing.

  • That’s like, a major intellectual property and copyright violation. 😒

    Even if you planned on doing it for free, this is not okay.

    This course is for people who want to learn these skills for THEMSELVES, it is not a train-the-trainer program.

    If you enroll, we’ll definitely remove you from the course without refund (and may pursue things further).

    So yeah, don’t do that.