Maintaining a relevant slide library for a medium to large organization is a full time job. Traditionally, the slide library is maintained by a variety of groups such as:

-       Product Marketing & Management

-       Engineering

-       Channels Enablement

Each group is responsible for disseminating information commensurate with their job responsibilities. As follows, they bear the burden of creating slides and presentations that communicate sales and technical concepts from multiple perspectives. This often leaves the audience to sift through a number of slides and discern which slide or set of slides best suits their needs.

Solving this issue saves time and helps to preserve, promote and strengthen your brand. On the surface the process of creating an effective slide library seems cumbersome. I can assure you it is less complicated than it seems and will prove more valuable than you can imagine.

Step 1: Make the slides easily available

Making the slide library easily accessible is a no brainer. Making it available regardless of the office productivity suite (MS Office, Open Office, etc.) is another story.

Most slides are authored in PowerPoint although they are often consumed, edited and presented via Google Docs and Open Office. Although these office platforms are designed to work together, formatting nuances don’t always translate.

Deploying a slide library where the user can output a presentation in PDF, Open Office or Microsoft Office formats solves this problem handily. Enriching the slide library with the ability to search, sort and order the slides inline only enhances the experience overall.

In short, this capability:

-       Alleviates the need for the entire library to be downloaded

-       Ensures branding and formatting are consistent across versions

-       Guarantees current versions of the library are always available

Step 2: Communicate how to use slides and presentations

Communicating how to use the library of slides is key to their effective and ongoing usage. This will limit the creation and use of rogue presentations that use outdated and/or off brand material.

To effectively communicate the “How To” for slides and canned presentations use the following guidelines:

-       Communicate the value of the library to the audience upfront

-       Demonstrate how to use and build presentations

-       Communicate which audiences the slides and presentations address

-       Organize the slides and presentations by audience type

-       Retire old information regularly

-       Provide a method for communicating when library updates have occurred