The Salvation Army faced a problem we commonly see: the entire company was using an out-dated, poorly constructed, cookie-cutter PowerPoint template. Their team used it at its bare minimum, placing text and images haphazardly across the page and ended up resenting using the presentation software. With users from corporate to charity to church, the presentations needed to span multiple purposes from content-heavy reports to highly-visual sermons, this was definitely a challenge.

Scroll to see how we conquered their layouts.

The Brief

The creative team at The Salvation Army was in the middle of a brand refresh, which was eating up their time and resources. As a result they needed extra help to build a PowerPoint template, in parallel with their branding refresh, that reflected their new visual direction and could be used by the whole organisation.

They had little time to dedicate to the project and didn’t know what they actually needed in the presentation. An enormous task, the already overwhelmed team needed an outside-in approach to not only build a presentation, but decide the best possible way to create a “global” template.

In addition, the creative and marketing team felt they needed training to improve their PowerPoint knowledge and help other members of their team work with and not against the template.

We wanted the team to work with templates, not against them.

The solution

So how do you create a short template that works for everyone?

First we dived into a mountain of research, filtering through any-and-all presentations. We figured out how the staff were using PowerPoint and what type of content they needed to share. It was very content heavy and for the most part ignored the template structure itself – a very common find when teams are not taught how to use PowerPoints to their fullest!

Once we identified similar page layouts, types of content and categorised purposes, it was a case of prioritising the most used elements. This resulted in a combination of content-focused layouts and more visual layouts.

We applied what was decided of the branding update to the template, making sure colours and typefaces were locked in and even included an icon library. After some fine tuning, it was complete and ready-to-roll in the custom training session developed for the team.

The outcome

We took one of the broadest presentation briefs we’ve received and crushed it! We strategised the most effective user-friendly PowerPoint presentations for the whole team and structured an interactive, enjoyable training session that helped the team champion the new templates.

Templates & Training = Presentation Masters

I loved it. It gave me a renewed love for PowerPoint and knowing that I don’t need to always ask the Graphic Designers to be creative I can do it now.

Participants, Salvos

The Salvation Army