Shufflrr is a presentation management solution or corporate SaaS approach for presentations led by James Ontra. Presentation management, graphic material, and having an indispensable PowerPoint slide collection are all incorporated in it. Presentations are important in business communications, and Shufflrr adds strategy to the presentation workflow, from creation through usage and re-use, distribution, updating, sharing, presenting, broadcasting, tracking, and reporting. Each stage of the presenting process is made more efficient using Shufflrr. For global businesses, Shufflrr makes every stage of the presentation process more efficient. Any device anywhere may be used to share, shuffle, and show presentation slides and data. Shufflrr is the result of more than two decades of experience in organizing digital presentations.
In this episode with James Ontra, CEO of Shufflrr, we talk about presentation management, how Shufflrr came to be, the demand for presentation strategy and management, storytelling and enterprise content management, and presentations as a way of communication.
How did he get into the presentation business?
James shared with us that he has worked in the industry since the 1990s. His first? firm specialized in high-end presentation consulting.
With the passage of time and the arrival of YouTube, which helped democratized video production, they needed to innovate, and the next step was to create a piece of software called PPT Shuffle. It was a simple PowerPoint slide library where you see the slides and drag and drop them into your presentations.
Then, around ten years ago, responsive design emerged, forcing them to start all over again. Then, with all the expertise gained, Shufflrr was born.
It is essentially a presentation management tool that is tailored to aid corporate storytelling. “Every presentation is a story, and every slide a scene – and when people can shuffle their scenes into new stories – you get better…” James told us.
What is presentation management
Presentation management, according to James, is the difference between having a single presentation once in a while and not thinking about presentations as a one-time occurrence.
Now, consider your presentations as a well-organized library of 200 or 250 slides that cover every aspect of your business.
You’ll never deliver a presentation with 250 slides, but you can select and choose 15 to 20 slides and put them together in five minutes. After that, add the agenda and the title slide, and you’re ready to go. Having a controlled published slide collection from which to choose allows you to be more flexible and save time.
Presentations as an overlooked communication medium until now
Presentations, according to James, have been overlooked as a communication medium. But then came the growth of advertising, and David Ogilvy devised a strategy for billboards, television, radio, print, and finally, after his time – the internet. A total of five communication channels. The sixth, often overlooked medium, is presentations.
No one before has managed presentations well, no one put a strategy on them. And that’s what presentation management is doing – managing them as a communication medium.
The ability to increase the value of your slides by telling new stories with them, as well as having statistics on who used which slide and in what sequence, is a way to ensure your presentations’ success.
Mix and shuffle slides with Shufflrr easily
Mixing and shuffling the slides improves the effectiveness of your presentations while also saving you time.
If you want to repurpose presentations, you may mix and shuffle the scenes and quickly search for certain slides since Shufflrr saves all content in the database and makes it searchable. You can always pick the best slides for your next presentation or just go and shop for slides.
Another advantage is that this kind of presenting does not push the dialogue. Now the presentation can follow the conversation because you can quickly pull up slides in the given moment.
If you know that you have a slide, you can take it and reinforce the conversation with your client in real-time. This also works great in any trainings.
When the presentation follows the conversation, it becomes more human. And we do that daily. You meet someone and they mention their child, and you have one as well, you immediately open your phone’s gallery to show a picture of your kid.
That is an example of a presentation that follows a discussion. It strengthens your connection at the time since communication comes into a real-life setting where presentations have been only lectures up to today.
The mechanics of publishing slides in the library
In a big company, designating individuals who will be in charge of creating the best slides for your slide collection is invaluable. The ease of the Shufflrr publishing mechanism is a critical component of presentation management for the enterprise.
Usually, there is a person in the company who is good with PowerPoint, and then everyone turns to them with their slides for assistance. Which can be annoying and certainly isn’t effective. However, if everyone does this, it becomes hard to keep track of all the slides. This management issue is one of the primary concerns that people come to Shufflrr to fix, according to James.
You can pick and choose and organize all the slides in a folder structure. Then you publish them for your users to use. And you get to track everything, and the system allows slide updating, so you have a constant feedback loop that polishes your slides with time even better.
This article was written by 356 Labs
Resources
You can connect with James Ontra on his personal LinkedIn. Do not forget to check out Shufflrr. You can find James’ book “Presentation Management – The New Strategy for Enterprise Content” here.
