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Case Studies
Frozen Assets: A Successful Fundraiser
I'm part of the Hubbardston Business Association and in 2008 I was asked to chair the Ways and Means committee. Looking at the organization's previous fundraisers, I realized that these events had required a lot of work for not so much payoff. I wasn't afraid to work hard, but I wanted it to be worth the effort.
The ideal fundraiser would be popular with the public, helpful to the community, lucrative for the HBA, and able to be operated by 5–7 people. I had heard of ice-out contests, where people pay to guess the date and time that the ice breaks up on a local body of water, and that sounded like it would suit the character of our town pretty well. I called the president of a local Rotary Club that ran the same type of fundraiser to ask them for advice on how we could do it in Hubbardston. As luck would have it, they were winding down their ice-out contest and were willing to sell us the custom-built outhouse they had used. The HBA's Frozen Assets fundraiser was born.
We launched Frozen Assets in the fall of 2008 with a relatively small number of people on the committee, which I chaired. We canvassed local businesses, asking them to sponsor the contest in exchange for recognition in all marketing materials and on the Web site. Once we secured our sponsors I created signage for the outhouse, then we put it on a trailer and drove it all over town to publicize the contest. When the ice was thick enough, we set the outhouse on a pond and sold tickets for people to guess the date and time that it would break through the ice. Afterwards, we coordinated with the Hubbardston Fire Department to perform an "ice rescue" so that we could use the outhouse year after year.
I serve as the chief public relations and marketing consultant for Frozen Assets. As such, I've generated a lot of free publicity for the fundraiser by issuing a number of press releases, which were picked up by local papers, designing and maintaining a Web site, conducting a radio interview, and freezing my butt off while selling tickets in the center of town in the dead of winter! In December 2009, I helped launch a volunteer effort at the Hubbardston Senior Center, one of the grant recipients, whereby HBA members moved furniture, painted walls, and replaced ceiling tiles. This led to an Official Citation from the Massachusetts Senate for the HBA in recognition of its efforts to improve the community, which was awarded during a well-attended ceremony (which I helped organize) at the newly refurbished Senior Center in January 2010.
During the 2008–2009 Frozen Assets fundraiser we raised approximately $9,700, awarding a $2,000 grand prize to the person whose guess came the closest to the actual sink date and time and giving two $2,400 grants. And during the 2009–2010 fundraiser we raised over $10,000, distributing about $5,100 to local organizations and awarding the $2,000 grand prize.
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That's Offensive?
A manufacturer of three-dimensional prototyping printers and I were developing a brochure. This was to be their flagship piece, the brochure that would be included in all the press kits, sent out to everyone who inquired about their company, and given away at trade shows. Needless to say, it had to be perfect.
In addition to being a graphic designer, I am also an experienced proofreader, so I always read through the copy for whatever I'm working on to make sure everything is as it should be. As I was reading the brochure, I stopped cold at a sentence tucked into the middle of the piece:
"The [name of company] 3D printer is the final solution to all of your prototyping needs."
This sentence was shocking because, as any student of history knows, the Final Solution was the name of Adolph Hitler's plan to exterminate the Jewish people — the Holocaust.
I immediately called this to the attention of the marketing manager, who had never heard the phrase before and therefore was untroubled by it. But when I explained what the Final Solution was, she immediately allowed me to change the wording.
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Setting Better Business Practices at B-School
I was hired as a graphic designer for the student newspaper of a world-famous business school. When I arrived, the place was run like a clubhouse: the editor-in-chief drifted around on inline skates, munching crackers and spouting off ideas for articles; designers frequently rearranged completed page layouts if somebody submitted an article after deadline; and late nights and working all day every Saturday were standard for getting the paper out on time. For the writers and editors, working at the paper was a blast. But the designers' job was difficult and frustrating.
The editorial staff had some pretty bad work habits. Once, a writer brought a taped interview in for a designer to transcribe, which took him away from laying out the paper for a couple of hours. Sometimes we waited around idly for articles to arrive, then had to scramble to typeset them when they finally were submitted. And writers would often compose their articles while we were trying to put the paper to bed, asking us to check out their work. We only had three days to lay out the paper before the printer came to pick up the artwork, so things could get pretty hectic with all the interruptions.
Adding to the problem was the complete editorial staff turnover each semester, which meant that every few months we designers had to train new people on how a newspaper gets put together and try to get them to adhere to deadlines. But since there was no strict deadline policy the new staff quickly assumed the bad work habits of their predecessors.
A few months into the job, I became the Art Director so I implemented some policies to increase efficiency (with the blessing of the editor and the publisher, of course). First, I set strict deadlines for each section of the paper. Anything that came in after deadline, except for advertising, would have to wait to be published until the following week. Next, the designers stopped working Thursday nights and on Saturdays; instead, we would work regular office hours on Thursday and stay late on Friday, as needed, until the paper was done. And designers would no longer copyedit and proofread articles as they were being written, and would not take dictation or provide transcription services.
At first there was a lot of grumbling from the editorial staff, but after a couple of weeks everyone settled into the new routine. In addition to making the designers' job much easier, I saved the paper an estimated $5,000 a year in overtime wages and got a quality product out every week in less time and with fewer designers than before. And with set policies in place, it was easy for each new editorial staff to quickly come up to speed.
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Photographing Nonexistent Products
A distributor of recreational fishing equipment was getting ready to launch his new product lines at a major trade show. We had worked for months on the labels and packaging and were waiting for the finished products to be shipped by the manufacturer. 
These were to arrive just before the trade show, but I had to design a catalog and sales sheets before they got to us. So how do you photograph a product that doesn't yet exist? Easy: fake it in Photoshop.
I started with a photograph of a similar product. Then I made three copies of the photograph, one for each of the distributor's products. Using Photoshop, I eliminated the labels in the photographs then superimposed images of the labels I had designed, stretching them to fit and blurring them slightly to make them appear realistic. When I was finished, it looked like we'd set up the actual products for a photo shoot!
The catalog and sales sheets were finished at about the same time the product arrived from the manufacturer. The client was able to attend the trade show with both his products and the marketing materials to promote them!
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Choose Your Analogies Wisely
A large Venture Capital firm asked me to include a reference to "platform shifts" in their annual presentation to their Limited Partners. They really fell in love with the idea to refer to the Earth's tectonic plates and to relate the massive, disruptive shifts in 
the Earth's crust to the same kinds of shifts that occur in the way people think about and relate to technology. They wanted to use a diagram of the Earth's tectonic plates to illustrate this point and to talk about "tectonic shifts."
This might have been a good idea before early 2010, but this presentation was to be given just weeks after the devistating earthquakes in Haiti and Chile. Not only would it distract the audience from the presenters' message, it would probably seem very callous and cold.
Fortunately, the client realized that it would be a mistake to include the reference after I pointed out the potential problems it could cause. Instead, I came up with a simple diagram that shows early forms of technology changing into new ones which, when animated, clearly illustrates the idea of "platform shift."
Always consider what's in the news when you come up with marketing materials. The last thing you want to do is create associations between your product or service and natural catastrophes!
