Purpose
Shorthand is a visual storytelling platform for creating and publishing visually appealing content, including features, digital magazines, reports, proposals, internal newsletters, and annual reports, among others. Its official positioning is to solve the production bottleneck in digital storytelling, helping users publish visual stories, publications, and reports more quickly while reducing production delays or capacity constraints.
Main Capabilities
- Drag-and-drop editing experience, enabling content layout without writing code.
- Supports presentation across all browsers on desktop and mobile.
- Flexible publishing methods: can publish to any web address, supports hosting with AWS, the user's own CMS, Shorthand hosting, or direct embedding into existing websites; can also publish privately and with password protection.
- Built-in cookie-free analytics to help measure performance; also supports adding existing analytics tracking code, tag managers, and advertising pixels.
- Collaborative workspace that brings editors, designers, and developers together in the same environment and supports streamlined workflows.
- Can integrate brand logos, colors, fonts, and styles through hand-crafted custom themes to maintain visual consistency, and supports scaling content output across teams or the entire organization.
- Provides rich templates and storytelling features to help teams focus on their core work.
- Coding is optional: all Business and Enterprise plans include full custom CSS, HTML, and JavaScript access, allowing users to choose no-code or code customization as needed.
How to Use
Officially described as offering a simple drag-and-drop editing experience, users can choose less customization or more customization as needed. Content can be published to any web address, and hosting can be chosen from AWS hosting, your own CMS, Shorthand hosting, or direct embedding into an existing website. Team collaboration takes place in a unified workspace. For brand visual consistency, logos, colors, fonts, and styles can be integrated into custom themes.
Use Cases
Officially listed application scenarios include: brand publishing, news and media publishing, university and research communications, government communications, sports marketing and news, and nonprofit communications. It is officially stated to serve the world's leading brands, publishers, and media companies, and cites the Honda case to illustrate ease of use: locally produced content can go live within 15 minutes.
Performance and Integrations
Officially stated that stories built with Shorthand are among the most engaging stories on the web, and customers have seen up to 10 times more engagement with their Shorthand stories than with content created using their CMS. For analytics, built-in cookie-free analytics, and also supports external analytics tracking code, tag managers, and advertising pixels.
Security and Compliance
Shorthand has ISO 27001 certification and SOC 2 compliance, and is officially described as a proven enterprise-grade solution, a trusted partner for government and regulated industry customers, and states that it has experience working with customers to help them meet and exceed modern web accessibility standards.
Limitations
Official materials do not specify details such as a free version, specific pricing, platform-supported languages, content quantity limits, or deployment restrictions; the above information is not currently provided.
