It sounds like a snore—presentation compliance. No one wakes up in the morning excited to make new decks, add legalese, set the correct RGB values to bars in charts, add copyright, and chase down the latest iteration of copy. The thought of that chore might make you want to pull the covers over your head and just stay in bed.
But alas, it’s not so bad and actually, it’s pretty important. Why? Because…
Presentation compliance ensures clarity. The marketing department spends millions crafting the perfect language to describe their products and services. They spend millions more creating imagery that best communicates their brand and image. So why invent the wheel? Presentations are marketing communications, and should therefore use the same words and images as everything else. Someone in marketing has already done the hard work. Let everyone else benefit from that, re-use it in PowerPoint presentations, and their business presentations will be more effective as a result.
Audience Engagement. A good presentation, one that is clear, concise, and beautiful (see above) will get your audience’s attention and help keep it. No one wants to look at a bunch of busy, cluttered slides.
Risk Management. This is important. Presentation compliance will keep your company out of court, away from regulatory scrutiny, and reduce your legal fees. Make sure to include the required disclosure, disclaimer, and references are included with the corresponding content. Why pay the lawyers more if you can easily avoid it?
Here are four ways to keep presentation compliance throughout your company.
Presentation Slide Library – A central slide, file repository that is easy to access and easy to use by everyone on your team. The slide library should include chapters, and presentations, about all aspects of your business. That way, your colleagues won’t have to start from scratch every time they need a new deck. They can just pull slides from the library.
It should be updated regularly by one person, or team. After all, presentations are marketing communications, and they should be treated with the same respect and discipline as you would your website and advertising campaigns.
Universal Slide Updating – A mechanism or process to remove outdated slides and replace them with newer versions. There’s nothing worse than seeing a five-year-old slide with wrong pricing in the middle of a sales pitch.
Brand Central – A lot of companies have slide masters set up in PowerPoint with their logo, colors, fonts and a few layouts. These are excellent starting points for someone to create a presentation from scratch. Provide more layout options, so an anon-designer can simply customize the text on a slide. It will save them a lot of time and frustration. And provide the fonts and color palette so they can easily apply them. In Shufflrr, we have a Brand Central chapter where users can click and add a slide template, click and add a color, click and change the font. All the brand elements are right at their fingertips, ready to work.
Slide Linking & Forced Disclosures – This is critical for compliance. Lock slides into a sequence that includes the required disclosure statements. And or force disclosure slides into the PowerPoint. In Shufflrr, you can set mandatory slides that go in every new PowerPoint.
Compliance and branding go side by side. When a deck is properly branded, it’s more effective and creates a better impression on your audience. Add the proper disclosures, and everyone, from the entry-level associate to the CEO is given a polished, professional, and relevant presentation. You could even say compliance and branding let everyone present like the CEO.
Exploring how Shufflrr can work for your organization is easy. Just click to book a free demo or download our AI-powered plug-in for Windows.