So, I’ve had this happen both in a live, in-person setting in a big ballroom with people – on a presentation about tech no less. 😆 Hotel’s AV crapped out – and I just kept talking, doing show-n-tell – I even held up my laptop screen at one point and said ‘this is what you should be seeing but clearly can’t’ – and sent them all the slides and info later. I did a much longer Q&A that time.

Was I nervous? Of course!! 2 things helped – most of the audience knew me, I had many pals/colleagues there, they were forgiving. And I knew my stuff, so I could improvise and keep talking without a screen or PPT.

Online – I’ve had it happen twice in the last year – PowerPoint crashed and wouldn’t show a thing. 2 more things helped – I had saved my slides as a PDF and sent to my client who was doing the technical hosting – in a few minutes we swapped over to her screen instead of mine and showed the PDF instead of slides. Second time it happened this spring – I had not created a PDF ahead of time, and that was more awkward, but I showed what I could, kept talking, asked a lot of questions, redid some videos for the participants later, and promised them the next slot when I re-taught that workshop (it another client-hosted event I was paid for – if it had been 100% my own I would have just re-run the workshop a few days later).

Tips:

Have backups – a PDF of slides, an alternate date to re-run, a plan to re-record an event not live and send videos out

Practice – the more you know your materials the better you can improvise or switch gears

Keep a sense of humor

Stay calm

Keep going to best of your ability. And if you can’t – apologize and make good later.

Tech happens. 😉 We will all have an instance like this at some point