Is Anyone Actually Reading Your Board Deck?

You no longer need to go to Niagara Falls or Delaware or even to Kyrgyzstan to understand how tough those places are to spell.  

And, you don’t need to go to Machu Picchu to appreciate its magic.  Now you can just View Machu Picchu from home.  Really.  Have you ever been to Machu Picchu on the Oculus?  It’s so dizzying that you’d never want to go there in real life.  Think of all the time you’ll save that can be spent doing the laundry or avoiding acquaintances.  

Some additional unimportant notes…

• You get ten points for the word View in Scrabble. 
  
  
• Arthur Miller wrote a View from the Bridge.
  
  
• Someone at Zeck just told me that I swish my drinks in my mouth and it’s annoyed her for the past six months.  Nothing to do with Viewing anything but figured I should open up about it. 

Back to it.  Viewing is the best.  

Viewing a cow.  Viewing someone whipping bologna.  And, perhaps most significant …Viewing your board materials. 

According to a made up study by The Viewing People, a fabricated organization dedicated to viewing everything aside from birds, 99% of board decks and investor updates are sent via PDF.  

When you email your PDF (or PowerPoint or Google Slides) you likely have no clue whether or not your board members actually open your deck.  You and your team have spent weeks putting your board content together and you don’t know if anyone has even looked at it when you kick off your live meeting. 

”PDFs and decks are tough to view generally and impossible to read on mobile.” 
- Made-up quote from The Viewing People

People seem to believe that they’re slides work on mobile.  They don’t.  Think about it…No one reads the news or sports in the confines of a Powerpoint rectangle.  Sorry for being so mean about it.    

There is a better way.  

When you send your board materials through Zeck you get a link to a secure, mobile-friendly website. It’s not a portal where you’re just delivering a PDF in different way. It’s definitely not an email with a bunch of attachments that always get confusing. Zeck is a stunning, easy to read, interactive website.  And you’ll get an alert the moment each of your board members start Viewing your Zeck.  

Then, there are some helpful next steps.  

1. You can thank your board members who are Viewing your Zeck and encourage ‘em to engage using Comments.  
   
   
2. You can follow up with board members who haven’t viewed your Zeck.  Everyone loves a friendly reminder.  Except for me, of course.
   
   
3. As always, there is no number three. 
   
   
4. There is no number 4 either.  Aside from Joe Dumars and Chris Webber.  

Also, just so you know…you get an alert when your board members post a comment in your Zeck.  And, your entire board can see the comments that are posted in line with your content. That’s created some really positive peer pressure.  If four of five board members leave comments in your Q2 Zeck, pretty much guaranteed that your fifth board member is going to engage in your Q3 Zeck. 

Some quick notes to sum this all up. 

• Once you and your board use Zeck, you’ll never go back to a deck.  It’s just that much better.  I think Carta and Docusign are fair analogies. 
  
  
• There is no better place to do the laundry than Machu Picchu. 
  
  
• The best reason to read anything by Arthur Miller is to be better at Jeopardy.  In fact, that's probably the best reason to read anything.

Okay.  That’s all.

Thank you.

Decent Humans of Zeck