How to Create a Culture of Presentation Management

This article was originally posted by a media partner at https://www.business.com/articles/culture-of-presentation-management/.

A good presentation management strategy transforms single-use business decks into enterprise assets that can be used over and over again, to the benefit of everyone in your company.

Presentation management helps everyone make better presentations. It can transform decks that are typically only used once into enterprise assets that can be used over and over again. It ensures that all employees are speaking on message while reducing the time it takes to create a presentation from five hours to five minutes. By creating centralized library of slides that are formatted to present, individuals can easily find, use and reuse them from anywhere. At the same time, HQ can push out slide updates and track slide usage to make better content decisions going forward.

Here are some best practices to help you implement a presentation management strategy and increase adoption throughout the organization.

1. Name a director of presentation management.
   Someone has to own it. Depending on the size of the company, it could be one person or a team who is responsible for creating, collecting, updating, and tracking content. They are usually from marketing since presentation management is a strategic communication much like advertising, PR, or social. They should also have a strong understanding of the company’s business divisions so they can determine what content to include in the slide library, and who should have access to it.
2. Don’t just show how – explain why.
   Training employees on how to use their presentation management solution goes beyond demonstrating features and functions. Explain that, by gravitating to a presentation management culture, your team will be able to focus their energy on giving great presentations and having productive meetings, instead of fumbling around, piecing together a PowerPoint deck.
3. Collect the content.
   A good place to start building your slide library is with your company’s last 50 presentations, which should feature the most up-to-date content. They might not be perfect, but they are a starting point. Go to your network folder or worksite and take the last 50 PowerPoint decks (or other file types), remove any duplicate slides, and build your corporate story. A good corporate story includes information about the following:
   

• The company: history, mission, executive bios, earnings statements, press releases, etc.

• Products and services: product description and details, product benefits, pricing, road map, case studies, etc.

• Marketing: logos, images, videos, PowerPoint templates, marketing plans, KPIs, etc.
  

Now that you have a healthy set of files, format them consistently with your company’s brand templates and clean up any images and charts. In doing so, you are launching your library with a polished and accurate set of slides that the team can use day to day, meeting to meeting, as needed.

4. Launch in phases.
   If your company is a large enterprise with 1,000-plus users dispersed over several different divisions, start small and pick a subset. First off, it makes content collection easier (see above), and you would only have to do it for one division instead of the entire company. Second, a pilot team of 50 instead of 500 is much easier to manage and gives the company an opportunity to work out the kinks before going live across the entire organization.

With presentation management, slides don’t die; they evolve. It’s a practice that can be planned and executed and tracked along with the long-term objectives of your enterprise. In fostering a culture of presentation management across your organization, you can meet the goals of the enterprise and help employees excel in their daily tasks. Long-term combined with short-term, enterprise and the individual – presentation management balances both.