A senior center, twice
The first one I ran was at a senior center, and I went back and did it again.
Both times it was about ten to fifteen people, which turns out to be a good number: small enough that nobody has to address a room to ask something, big enough that when one person mentions a text they got, three others recognise it.
People enjoyed it, and not because of the slides — it was a subject they had been thinking about anyway with nobody to go through it with. A lot of it was less teaching than confirming: yes, that call was a scam; no, your bank would not do that; yes, you are allowed to hang up on someone claiming to be the government.
The part that was not on the slides
Afterwards people asked for help with small things on their own phones. Nothing dramatic, nothing to do with money — the kind of task that is fiddly the first time and obvious once someone has shown you.
That changed how we plan sessions. The twenty minutes after the talk are worth as much as the talk, so we build them in rather than packing the time with more material.
What we did not do, either time
Nobody was asked to sign anything, register, give an email address, or hand over a bank detail. Nothing was sold, and there was no cost to the center or to anyone who came.
What I got out of it
Standing in front of a room of adults and explaining something clearly, twice, did more for my public speaking than anything I have done at school — and not because it is a performance. It is the opposite. You cannot read from a script, because the questions arrive in an order nobody planned. You have to know the thing well enough to say it a second way when the first did not land, and you find out at once whether it worked.
Going back taught me most: the first session tells you which explanations work, the second is where you use that.
You do not need to be good at finance or a confident speaker beforehand. The sessions give you both.
What we are not going to put on this page
No attendance totals, no "people helped" counter, no testimonials. We have run a small number of sessions and would rather say so. When a host site is happy to be named and quoted, they will be — in their words, with their agreement.
We teach people to tell a real organisation from a convincing one. Inventing our own evidence would be an odd way to go about it.