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Presentation Creation

In presentation management, creation means both content collection as well as the actual creation of a file.

A lot of good content probably already exists around your company. It’s a matter of identifying the files, and then deciding if they are presentation management-worthy – for short, PMW. How do you determine if a file is PMW? Presentation management addresses both the long-term enterprise vision and the tactical day-to-day needs of employees. We suggest starting with the experts for each division. They most likely have great content for their particular product on hand.

Cooper Standard asked the regional leaders around the world as well as the directors for each product line. Each director made recommendations for how their content should be used, and then they contributed the content. As you review your company’s content, ask yourself which files cover enterprise information, which files cover tactical information and which files cover both. What content is big picture? What content is going to get my sales rep to close the deal? Or move a project forward? Or educate a new hire? What are the team’s objectives? That will determine which content is PMW.

Content can be created in any application. PowerPoint is the most obvious. Thirty million PowerPoint presentations get created every day. PowerPoint is broken into individual slides, and each slide is a story in itself. PowerPoint makes it really easy to prepare presentations for those tactical, everyday meetings that keep the company humming along.

But presentation management doesn’t have to be confined to PowerPoint. It can work with other apps. Apple’s Keynote has great visuals and effects; Google Slides is cloud-based, which makes access easy; and Prezi is a popular app to create interactive presentations. Presentation management works with all file types that your team members use every day to get their job done: videos, images, Word docs, PDFs, spreadsheets, you name it. Make content in Photoshop, Quark, Apple iMovie -- it doesn’t matter as long as the files can be previewed, reused and repurposed when needed. Anything that can be presented to and discussed with one or more people is content that should be considered in your presentation management strategy.

Compliance should go hand-in-hand with creation to make sure content is up-to-date, accurate, branded and approved. Your industry will determine your compliance requirements, which can be implemented and enforced through the presentation management platform. Here are a few examples of compliance:

  • Legal Compliance: In highly regulated industries like health care and financial, strict rules govern what can be presented, to whom, by whom, in what format or context and finally with proper disclosures and disclaimers. Your PM strategy can manage this content in three ways. First, with routing and workflow approvals that ensure that the lawyers and regulators have approved the content before it becomes available to the team. Second, with file- or slide-locking features to prevent your team from changing text or other content. And third, by linking features to force required disclaimer and disclosure statements along with the content where appropriate. With presentation management you can force your dispersed team to present content in a very specific way – a way that complies with the law and reduces your company’s risk of lawsuits and fines. Our banking clients used slide linking to match the proper disclosure statement to the corresponding slide.

  • Brand Compliance: Brand compliance refers to brand guidelines, graphics, colors, fonts, logos and templates for all files that follow the brand’s guidelines. The benefits are twofold. First, you achieve consistent branding across the enterprise. Second, because your employees are starting with higher-quality content, they appear more polished and professional, but they also become more productive. As they repurpose presentations, they can actually focus on the specifics of their project or deal instead of trying to play graphic designer to make the slides look nice. We encourage all our clients to use only branded content. Start with the best.

  • Message Compliance: What your employees say and how they say it are critical to your company’s success. Message compliance ensures that your team is using the right language and the right version of the slide or file. It’s achieved through good old-fashioned copywriting. And, like legal compliance, it can also be achieved through slide and file linking. For example, if a case study is five slides long, you can link all five slides, so if a user chooses one, he or she always gets all five. This way employees are forced to present the case study in its entirety, ensuring that they tell the whole story, and not just the bits and pieces that they like. (Imagine if we could do that in our personal lives. There would be no misunderstandings, no rumors or good gossip! And then we’d have nothing to talk about over cheap Chardonnay.)

Your presentation management strategy is as good as the presentation content provided. Collecting, creating and policing all of a company’s content may seem like a big task, and it may very well be the first time around. But once that investment has been made, it will make everyone in your organization more productive, and the lifecycle will perpetuate itself as part of the normal course of business. It’s a one-time investment that reaps exponential rewards.