Portfolio

Plan

To determine a strong price to performance means of raising awareness, and encouraging engagement of their services.

Studied the population data. Interviewed their consolers, social workers, and therapists. Found that the youth were facing new challenges through technology, social media, and world events that were foreign to the previous generation. We decided to build a campaign targeting the youth. Delivering a series of various sized posters, with singular messages aimed to resonate with the youth audience. Distributed through schools, libraries, and community centers.

They had me create a new impactful visual style, message, and copy writing. A handful of concepts of each were presented.

Leadership

Some of the divisions welcomed the change, to ease the burden on themselves. Other divisions felt quite adversarial in having work they wanted to create their way be threatened. I came into a culture of corporate not wanting to address the issue, answering it largely through ignoring the divisions after the initial announcement. The initial announcement only informed them of what was happening, not why, or how they could still be involved. It was readily apparent that the problem wasn't with the consolidation, but with taking away creative contribution.

As well as removing their confidence in reasonable turnaround time, by nature of having no timely quality response to their questions. I had previously developed an online course for helping employees through the demerger transition of Hewlett Packard into HP and HPE. And used that course to help inform how to talk them through the changes. Although I was hired by Corporate, this was not one of the things I was hired for. I took the initiative to add the goal of helping the divisions through the transition, as it fed directly into the other goals of the transition.

I received high praise from the divisions for walking them through why it was important to have more unified brand consistency, how elements of the new branding standards they didn't understand contributed positively to the brand, but most importantly, explaining how they could still contribute. What we were looking for, and not only what to avoid, but why we were avoiding certain stylistic choices. This empowered the divisions to create initial work we could more easily approve, and improved corporate output quantity and turnaround time.

Need

Dish Network developed a new proprietary hardware ecosystem called SMARTBOX. Effectively a more efficient, modular, compact server solution. The target being large installations serving Dish services to multiple rooms, such as hotels and campuses. They were still finishing up the initial software to manage the hardware, when they had a rapid need to train a large number of field techs in the installation, upgrading, and troubleshooting of the product. They had started building a large number of online learning courses in house, when they discovered they couldn't meet the output challenges, nor the higher quality demand of the department responsible for SMARTBOX.

I was the first outside source hired to help with the product. There was recent tension between the department making SMARTBOX wanting higher quality, and the department doing the course design. The course design department was so good they won awards for creating the most quantity of online learning courses the previous year from Articulate (the course design software). While truly impressive, the quality was lower than the SMARTBOX team wanted, the manager of which came from a background of working ad agencies.

Training

Once we had each other trained, we brought on the rest of the team of over a dozen course designers. We co-lead the team in the creation of the remaining courses over the next few months. Most of our time going into training, critique, and approval. While helping take on additional course designs as we had time between leading the team. I quickly got a reputation for being quite demanding. With some of the new course designers not understanding why we had to be so picky about certain things at first. We only critiqued with guidance for why we were demanding the changes we did.