Last night I went to Pechu Kucha Night at Solar 1.

Sandwiched between the East River and freeway traffic on FDR Drive, I joined a crowd of 100+ people to watch a series of eclectic PowerPoint presentations on a giant outdoor projection screen. The topics ranged from sustainable underwear to Nauru, a tiny island in the South Pacific on the verge of environmental collapse.

According to the Pecha Kucha web site Pecha Kucha Night, now a worldwide phenomenon, was founded in 2003 by architects Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham as a public forum for young designers to network and share their work. The catch: Presenters are only allowed 20 images, each of which is displayed for 20 seconds.

This presentation format, given before a very broad audience (as much as an NYC audience inclined to see something called ‘Pecha Kucha’ can be), yielded some great best practices:

Plug in: A good idea becomes great when people can make it their own. Presenter Ken Tanabe spoke about the multicultural holiday he founded, Loving Day, which celebrates the 1967 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Loving v. Virginia, that made interracial marriages legal. He devoted a good chunk of his presentation to photos from the annual June 12 Loving Day celebration and giving people many, many options for getting involved and spreading the word.

Connect emotionally: Jason Kibbey’s “Briefs on Boxers,” was an entertaining rap about his sustainable underwear company, PACT. Kibbey covered the basics from organic cotton to responsible labor practices. But it was the photos submitted by real-life satisfied (male) customers that stuck. The photos, silly yet endearing (which might be said of most pictures of men in their underwear. Hm.), conveyed an authentic and enthusiastic experience of the brand. Gold.

Tell a story: There is much flagellating (and very useful) advice out there about keeping PowerPoints brief and to the point (see Guy Kawasaki’s “10/20/30″ rule). Certainly, Pecha Kucha’s six-minute time limit plays no small part in its mass appeal. But equally important is the structure and pace of the story that’s told. In the best presentations I saw, the narrative drove and linked the slides, not vice versa.

Andy Goodman has written a great treatise, Why Bad Presentations Happen to Good Causes, on this topic. Do you have a good PowerPoint rule?