How to infuse every document in your organization with your identity
Imagine this: all of your organization’s outgoing documents in the correct corporate identity. Sound like a utopia? If so, read on. Utopia is within your grasp.
Visual identity
First things first: you may not have heard the term “corporate identity” before. A corporate identity is the visual identity of an organization or company – a conscious way of presenting yourself to the world. When we talk about corporate identity, we’re talking about things like name, logo, color, typography, layout, etc. If you apply your selected identity to all visual communications, you have consistent corporate identity.
Benefits of communicating in the right corporate identity
And that’s the big take-away: if you apply your corporate identity consistently, you’ll see the benefits. A good corporate identity provides recognition and distinction. Someone sees a communication in a particular corporate identity, and immediately recognizes the sender and what they stand for. This is because the right corporate identity can convey the characteristics of an organization. Simply put: corporate identity ultimately improves perceptions of the company. So a uniform corporate identity means clear communication and a distinctive brand identity.
Corporate identity under control?
Maybe you work in the Marketing or Communications department, and all this is old news. But are you living the utopian dream we mentioned earlier? How do you arrange things so all your colleagues follow the agreed corporate identity guidelines to a T? More importantly, how do you do that without it taking ages? You could always have all outside communications routed through you, but could you really enjoy working like that? Or you play the fastidious teacher, drilling your colleagues in the guidelines, but we can guess how that might work out. Fortunately, we have an idea that does work. The solution? Corporate identity automation.
The power of interactive templates
You likely know about working with templates, but do you know the power of interactive templates? You may be an ace at building elegant templates with all the right corporate identity elements, but what if a colleague decides to makes your document their own – making a tweak here and there, until it’s hardly recognizable. That’s a natural drawback of manual work processes in an organization. For this reason alone, process automation is the answer. And the same goes for your corporate identity, with interactive templates and effective template management.
Corporate identity automation lets you manage corporate identity separately from content. The template managers make and maintain all the templates. So as the Communications department, you’re the boss of the corporate identity elements in your organization’s templates. This way, all your documents will be “on brand” from now on (not to mention on point as well). This is because your colleagues enter the right content in the document, but can’t make any unwanted changes. So you know the recipient will get the document in the right corporate identity and immediately recognize the sender (that’s you!).
Always the right corporate identity
Is it really that easy? Yes, really. But even if everything gets upended and you introduce a cool new corporate identity, you’ll still be glad to have the functionality of corporate identity automation. Instead of having to adjust each individual template to the new corporate identity, you’ll manage it all centrally. In other words: you adjust the corporate identity elements once in the right place, and the system automatically applies all the changes to all linked document templates. Piece of cake!
And that’s not all. What about working with permissions, so you can set who can edit the different templates, and version management, so you can always go back one (or more) steps when your creative indulgences get a bit out of hand? Trust us: the possibilities are infinite.