Synthesis.
It means combining two things to form something completely new. In the case of the Praetorian Group, that means a brand identity and a communications platform.
Greg Bogosian is Special Projects Manager for the Praetorian Group, and he uses online presentations for online learning in the public service industry. Their audience includes people performing critical services such as police officers, firefighters, EMS technicians, corrections officers, and military personnel.
The content includes webinars, podcasts, virtual events, surveys, email newsletters, and training programs about best practices, policy updates and products. So in a nutshell, the Praetorian Group’s presentations help the entire country.
And because they host many different sites for their audience, they need the flexibility to synthesize each site with presentations that can be customized to match each vision.
I talked with Greg recently about the way he uses KnowledgeVision to create and host presentations for their informative sites, which include PoliceOne.com, EMS1.com, Homeland1.com, and several others. 
Each site is different, with its own suite of training videos and presentations. Greg uses KnowledgeVision’s template builder to create skins for each site, to match its look and feel.
“What I’ve found through my experience creating several presentations has been that any element within KnowledgeVision can either be changed, removed, or moved around,” said Greg. “More or less the limits of Photoshop is about the limits of what you can do in terms of the placement of things and how they appear to the viewer.”
This means layouts, color schemes, backgrounds, and other graphics attributes, but Greg found that the importance of customization goes beyond that.
“We really like the fact that we can sort of create not just what you would stereotypically call a branded experience, but really more of an immersive presentation where people have the ability to incorporate some of the elements from the actual educational program into the design of the template itself. I think that adds a lot to the presentation.”
And that’s what synthesis is all about: creating an experience that is seamless, that holds to the original vision while introducing something new. In the case of Praetorian’s sites, that means a site visitor can navigate the menus, see the links to articles and videos, and when viewing a presentation, the slides and videos are immersed into the site’s design, so that the footnotes, chapters and supporting links match the rest of the page.
Customization allows Greg to create a totally immersive experience for the important people visiting their sites. The advantages are:
- Improves Retention: A clean site experience is known to improve message delivery, because everything about the design supports and enhances the brand identity. In the context of an informative video presentation, the design increases the transfer of information by putting the focus on the materials.
- Reduces Confusion: A presentation design should be intuitive, leading viewers to click what looks clickable and read what they need to in a reasonable time. The immediate components are positioned where they most make sense, while long-form material is reachable using links.
- Increases Time On Site: A presentation should involve the viewer for as long as it takes to transfer the message, but this doesn’t mean a long bout of passive viewing. This means an engaging activity path that asks the viewer to follow links, open documents, and contact the publisher to ask for more.
- Improves Navigability: A customized design allows the publisher to create a navigation series that makes sense. It can match the general menu on the main site, or complement it. It’s possible to create a navigation schema that helps people find what they are looking or quickly.
- Elevates The Brand: Even though the message is not always a marketing or sales approach, a solid design still infuses the overall look of the brand. This gives people a positive idea of the site, which brings people back. Customization helps you manage a number of sites with different identities.
For training, sales or marketing, a vision is critical, and to make it easy for people to navigate and learn about products, tools, concepts and practices, a seamless experience is important. It is this ability to synthesize the message with the platform that makes online presentations from KnowledgeVision work well for the Praetorian Group.
View the entire Praetorian Group interview here.
Originally published on The KnowledgeVision Fresh Ideas Blog.
