Projectline UK Partners with Volunteer Centre Westminster

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Marketing Musings, News

As part of Projectline’s mission to have a positive impact on its community, the team at Projectline’s European headquarters has joined forces with Volunteer Centre Westminster (VCW) to help increase awareness of the organisation and expand its volunteer base. Projectline will be offering expertise, such as social media consulting, case study production, and newsletter development, pro bono to VCW on a monthly basis.

Projectline and Volunteer Centre Westminster marketing partnershipEstablished in 1986, VCW works with anyone who wants to volunteer in the City of Westminster (their services cover the seven boroughs that make up Central London) and any organisation that wants to involve volunteers in these areas. Many of Projectline’s clients live and work in this area, providing an additional tie between Projectline and VCW.

“Volunteer Centre Westminster was the perfect organisation for our UK office to partner with in their volunteer efforts. Because the Projectline team is somewhat geographically distributed, volunteering remotely using the marketing skills they have at hand will allow a greater impact. We are happy that the administrators at VCW feel that they can use our services,” says Anika Lehde, Vice President at Projectline Services, Inc.

Projectline’s initial project was to review and make recommendations on a draft email survey that VCW plans to send to partners to gain more understanding of the value its services provide. A second project is now underway to produce case studies on the various initiatives that VCW has run. Projectline is committed to providing consistent time and effort each month to help VCW increase exposure of its volunteer opportunities.

If you live or work near the City of Westminster and are interested in learning more, follow VCW on Twitter. To learn more about Projectline and its commitment to community, follow Projectline on Twitter.

For more information on this story, contact Anais de Bourayne at Projectline or Dawn Newton at Volunteer Centre Westminster.

Storytelling with Numbers

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Campaign Desk, Marketing Musings, Marketing Operations

Sometimes when I tell people I work in data and analytics, I can actually see them stop listening. While I rapture on about how exciting it is to enable tracking of views, to the clicks and downloads of our client’s product or event pages, their eyes glaze over and their shoulders begin to droop. I get it. I really do. Data often seems big and foreign and too complicated to warrant our attention. It isn’t something most people feel a connection to.

It’s for this reason that I’ve been so interested in the emergence of a fresh type of data: personal analytics. Scientist Stephen Wolfram recently posted a blog that details the extensive records of his life he’s kept since 1989. The data is rich and tells a much deeper story than one might expect of a coordinate or bar graph. In these graphs, you see his life: his habit of staying up until 3:00A.M., the trip he took to Europe in the summer of 2009, and the break he takes for dinner with his family each evening.

Dan Meyer has collected similar data, compiled yearly into his “Annual Report” and animated into a video clip that I highly recommend watching (see below). His report, which at first glance is not much more than a collection of lists of the beer he drinks and friends he texts, shares a quality with Wolfram’s data—although narrow in scope, they are expansive in terms of insight. There is much to gather and derive from the information presented, even if at face value it seems mundane or trivial.

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Projectline Volunteer Recap: Looking Back at February and March

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Marketing Musings

Each month, a group of individuals (both Projectliners and friends of Projectline) come together to put their skills to good use by volunteering at a local organization. Each organization and the tasks we complete are different, and meet different needs within the community.

In February, we saw our largest turnout in over a year as we rolled up our sleeves and sorted clothes at the West Seattle Helpline’s donation center. More than 25 individuals lent their energy and determination to the effort. The result? We finished the sorting and organizing in half the time! This project directly supported the West Seattle Helpline Clothesline program, which provides support to families in need of clothes. For more information about the other services that this organization provides, please visit http://www.wshelpline.org. http://www.wshelpline.org.

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Picture of the Week: How to Hide at Work

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Pic of the Week

Here at Projectline, we’ve recently started a project to capture all the places we work and bring together our team around the world. Every weekday morning at 10:42 am, our team is invited to send in a picture of where they are, what they’re doing, or who they’re with. Each Monday, we’ll choose our favorite picture of the previous week and share its story here.

10:42 April 26, 2012 - Ish F in Philly

Hey, where did Ish go? Truly making our new office space in PA his own. Even his cup matches!

Weekly Roundup: 4/27/12

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Marketing Musings

Welcome to the Projectline Weekly Roundup. We know that the week can move pretty fast. Since Fridays sometimes offer a chance for a breather, we wanted to share links to some of the articles we liked this week. As always, we’d love to get your take, so feel free to leave a comment or chat us up on Twitter. Happy reading and have a great weekend!

Weekly Roundup

Content Strategy/Marketing
Why It’s So Easy to Get Marketing All Wrong— This post gives some good reasons why marketing should be more involved at the content creation stage. The comments to this post are also very good.

Universal Concern that Creativity is Suffering at Work and School—Adobe released an interesting study about creativity. Of course they tied it into the release of their Creative Suite 6 programs, but I won’t hold that against them. There is still some interesting data here about creativity and creativity is vital to successful marketing.

Social Media
The Rise of Digital Influence—This nifty little “how-to” guide from the smart folks at the Altimeter Group looks at the interesting world of the influencer. The concept of the social media influencer is still largely misunderstood. This post helps to pull back the curtains a bit.

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A Pair of Lessons on Web Content from An Event Apart

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Marketing Musings

A few weeks ago, I attended the web conference An Event Apart. Because my day-to-day role involves helping clients plan how to get content on the web, I went to pick up some new tips and hints. However, what I took away was that, while there are new opportunities and platforms for getting your content to your audience, the key is to not forget core principles. Mobile platforms are very trendy; the organizers added a day to the event to focus solely on mobile. But, it turns out, putting all of your resources in a shiny new box just for the sake of the shiny new box beckons trouble.

Lesson #1: Create Once, Publish Everywhere
So what’s a web designer/content strategist to do? The highlight of day one, Karen McGrane’s “Adaptive Content” session, focused on this issue. McGrane urges to first develop a content strategy around “writing for the chunk, not for the page.” This strategy involves breaking down content into a series of reusable chunks that can be repositioned into any layout, in any platform. A headline is always a headline. A lead is a lead, a sidebar a sidebar, and so on. By storing your content in chunks in the CMS, you can then create specific designs for specific platforms without having to lay out each piece of content multiple times. You’ll also want to set specific parameters around the length of each chunk of content—that 150 character short description may look good on a webpage, but might annoy a reader on a mobile device.

McGrane points to NPR as a good example of this theory. NPR uses and reuses the same content across their website, member stations’ sites, and a variety of mobile apps. Take a look at the deck presented last October by NPR’s Zach Brand, which shows where the “COPE: Create Once, Publish Everywhere” process came from. In it, you’ll see screen captures of the process by which a single piece of content is disseminated across multiple channels, as well as detailed schematics of their CMS API architecture (for the more technically-inclined content strategist).

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Nick Martin on the 2012 International CRP Community Event

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Customer Engagement, Marketing Musings

If you are tied into the global customer reference and evidence marketing community, then you know that a new industry conference is coming our way this May in Boston: The International CRP (Customer Reference Program) Community Event.

Projectline is a proud member of International CRP Community and very honored to be sponsoring the event this year. Along with many other industry leaders and practitioners, Projectline’s own Nick Martin will be speaking on the 2nd day of the conference on the growing connection between social media and search, and why content is the key to unlocking the value of both. You’ve never met Nick? Well, let us introduce him!

We hope to see you May 14-16, but if you can’t make it to Boston, follow @projectline, @CRKSN, and @NickBMartin for live tweets from the event or check out the Customer Reference Knowledge Sharing Network on LinkedIn.