eDecks: 5 Incredible Reasons to Use Them

How and when to use eDecks in corporate communications.

If you’re working in corporate communications you’re probably slaving away over aslide deck or two;- and if you are it’s most likely drafted up in PowerPoint orin Google Slides. Using these applications is completely logical;- almost everyone is familiar withthese tools and they’re a quintessential skill that’s been taught in schoolsfor decades now. However, there’s been some incredible advances in web that’s going to make skills in site design platforms a significant advantage in the future.

So what are eDecks?

The answer is pretty simple - they’re essentially a website or webpages with a specific communication objective or educational purpose. Some companies go as far as setting up mini sites others use their corporate website to build out sub sections of their sites. This is most frequently seen with Investor Relations Sites and online versions of Annual Reports.

More and more use cases

In the era of no-code and low-code it’s never been easier for designers and communicators to take their skills into cyberspace. We are literally spoilt for choice when it comes to easy to use available platforms with something to suiteveryone at every skill level and thousands of educational content curators on YouTube to help you tackle every glitch or twitch you could imagine.

The no-code or low-code movement started around 3-5 years ago with early pioneers like Wix and Squarespace providing very simple easy to use tools that designers, communicators and everyday people could use to develop websites without requiring the skills of a web developer. Suddenly it became possible to draft and format a website as easily as a PowerPoint presentation and many companies now use whole sections of their websites to communicate key messages or spin up mini sites to harness the advantages that digital versions offer.

Checkout these three examples;

• Snowy Hydro Pop-up Book; A public relations and community engagement site for ahydro-electricity producer undertaking a major project. An excellent example of a web-based communication initiative. https://popupbook.snowyhydro.com.au/
• TES Experience H2’ Concept Pitch; A website used to explain the concept behindtheir green hydrogen with carbon capture business model to investors and thepublic. https://experience.tes-h2.com/
• Boeing’s 2022 Sustainability Report; A section of the corporate website dedicated entirely to their ESG with links to individual reports on their ESG performance each year. https://www.boeing.com/principles/sustainability/annual-report/index.page#/products

Once it used to be only those with large internal web teams that could use web for these communications but thanks to the no-code or low-code options now available it’s become a lot easier for the average business to leverage digital. It’s also possible for communicators to own and manage these initiatives themselves making it a lot more cost effective than it used to be.

Potential use cases

Before we get started on why… I want to cover the when…

The use cases for eDecks depend entirely on your audience and the intended purpose. In my opinion eDecks can have value to materials that are continuous updated but for the most part kept the same - think pitch decks, sustainability reports (ESG), shareholder briefings, quarterly reporting, user guides etc;- to anything positioning something of significant value or complexity to potential clients even if confidential or personalised as it’s possible to password protect pages and duplicate; these could be roadshow presentations; business development presentations; tender submissions and even proposals.

I’m keeping this to just the broad strokes but the bottom line is if you have spent the time to develop effective templates in Word, PowerPoint, InDesign or similar there’s really no reason you can’t establish the same kind of templates online and you might find that the things that made this impossible before are no longer an issue with modern platforms.

So let’s get into 5 good quality, commercially sensible, reasons why you shouldn’t dismiss the value of using a website as a medium for an important format.

#1- Performance analytics to optimise efficacy and engagement.

One significant advantage of eDecks is the ability to track and analyse how your audience is engaging with content. There are 3 main indicators that websites can track; traffic, behaviour and performance. While you can publish slides to an online location or use platforms like Prezi or Flipbook… having a website connected to Google Analytics can let you harness these insightful performance tools and take advantage of databases for content management.

How is this of value?

Let’s say your business grows by winning projects that you need to bid on through a tender process; Inside the tender you want to effectively educate the selection committee on why you should be the vendor of choice and position the value of your partnership. Your ability to win hinges on how well you’re able to communicate your point of difference over the competition. While the deal value is very high you still have to throw quite a lot of time and resources at the process; if you don’t win it’s extremely expensive.

If this is a strategy central to your growth (or pay packet) the odds are that you want to know whether the panel is reading the detail of your solution or if it’s being skimmed. You’d want to know which pages or information sections panelists spend the most time on so you can trial different ways to optimise how it’s engaging.

Analytics can help you A/B test for the best performing format, design and copy of critical sections in your tender. They can show you where a video was played or how long someone was on the page. If a video is repeatedly not watched for example it’s the wrong tool for the job.

While many tender processes assert that responses get provided in a set format there’s usually an opportunity to present your solution to the panel and no reason an eDeck can’t be used to share the documents to be submitted giving you that extra opportunity to influence the outcome.

#2- Cascading Style Sheets (CCS) and a basic UX design system can help you save time and protect your brand.

Master Slide formatting in PowerPoint is effective until someone copies content into the document from an external source without clearing the format.

Platforms like Webflow have solved these challenges by allowing a Designer to control what can be edited by collaborators through a separate Editing Suite. This allows teams to publish content right into the browser and when designed correctly the content is controlled by the styling settings.

Further, browser extensions like Full Page Capture make it easy to extract pages to PDF for comments from external contributors rather than allowing changes to be made online.

#3- A friendly, media-rich and responsive experience. The ability to define the best way to read, watch, listen or play with the content on the device the visitor chooses to use.

 In today’s very busy world every content curator is competing for the attention of a very distracted target audience. The efficacy of your message hinges on winning a reader and keeping them with you long enough to successfully impart the right impression or achieve an objective.

One effective way to do this is to make it convenient for your audience to read and absorb your content. Sometimes this means less content and more graphics or things they can choose to do.

#4- A familiar navigation concept with interactions that support a self-guided exploration of the subject matter.

You can build a navigation into PowerPoint slides but it’s rather pointless the minute it's saved it as a PDF as the interactions only work from slideshow or if you publish them to the web. Sending a soft copy to clients is no guarantee they will view it the way intended.

Websites typically offer some form of navigation system a feature so common you use them without thinking and it behaves just like a table of contents. Menus on sites are so common place everyone from the very old to the very young know how usethem in today’s society.

 The benefit to big, chunky communication initiatives is logical and something so easily achieved through a website.

#5- The ability to develop Content Management Systems (CMS) & Asset Librarieshelp to organise information and resources on the subject for easy updates.

 Perhaps the quintessentially most useful assets of the website is the ability to utilise content management systems and the closely related asset or media libraries that come built in to the development platform.

If you can group aspects of your content together you will quickly learn the time saving advantages to be seen when you dynamically connect a database to your design elements. These tools allow you to organise structure and control so many micro components of a larger piece of work that may change over time. Team bios, Project Documentation, Certifications, Clients, Quotes, Case Studies, Executive Letters, Report Sections etc these could all be recorded in databases within a larger initiative.

Going back to the tender example given in point 1; If you submit a lot of tenders there’s a good chance that you have developed quite a library of responses and supporting documentation to answer the same or similar criteria over the years; a tender response web asset could greatly assist you to organise and structure that information, significantly reducing the time it would require to prepare a response. The time savings offer a clear case for returns on using a website for this type of communication.

More- Backups, Team User Settings; Password Protection, Version Control, Hidden Pages for Content Under Development, Motion Graphics… I could have gone for 50 incredible reasons but I think I’m making my point. There are a lot of advantages to developing eDecks.

In conclusion, if you’re in a corporate communications role looking to set yourself apart and add more value to your employer; then do the work to up-skill on web and you’ll be well ahead of those who don’t. If you’re an executive that sees the sense in the points I’ve made then start asking your teams to develop eDecks.

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