How we made presentation development interesting
If anyone of you has ever made a presentation for someone else, then you can easily relate to this.
It is important for the team who is working on the design to have the content in place before they could even start off the designing, information layout, and other stuff. Whereas, the client always wants us to get started and keep the placeholders empty where he can fill up the content later. This way of working is often frustrating and usually end up till the version 10th of the assignment where the client's content and feedback is still pouring in.
Moreover, our designers also felt that the overall presentation does not offer a wow experience till it gets completed. This is due to several comment boxes and largely written "Work in Progress" throughout the slides where content is awaited.
We started thinking of ideas on how we can ask/push the client to send the data at the earliest while not pressurizing or offending them and also make the work in progress versions look better.
With some brainstorming, we came up with a concept of "Presenticks" = (Presen?tation Stickers). Presenticks are little customizable stickers which can be pasted throughout the presentation wherever some input from the client is required.
It is not something out of the world, but a simple innovation where we inserted small, little bears through the presentation with smart, thoughtful visual messages to communicate & persuade the client for the missing data or information. We had no idea on how our clients will respond to such an experiment, so we thought of giving it an open try with few of our clients.
To some of them, they wanted to get rid of those tiny bears and gave us the content immediately. While others appreciated & laughed on the overall experience and shared the same within their team who were delaying the content. The best happened with a client who loved the bears so much that she kept 2 of them in her final presentation :).
Further to our surprise, a client approached us back after some time asking for us to develop a customized set Presentation Stickers for their brand using their brand mascot which they can use internally.
This was a wow moment of truth when we realized that a lot of team members within our client's organizations thinks the same like we did about a presentation development process and wanted to make it interesting.
Today, an experiment started out of frustration has become an offering where we give customized presentation stickers as an add-on to the Corporate Communication Kit assignments. This little innovation made the collaborative presentation development engaging and a fun experience for everyone.