Ideas Archive - Page 2 of 3

Innovation Starts with Hello.

A common myth on the topic of innovation is that there’s just no time for it. It’s hard to get a group of people in a room, with clear minds, to really focus and come up with the next idea. Other deadlines wait, schedules are packed, and we’re all just too busy to get to that visionary state of mind.

While all of that may actually be true – the real problem lies in the notion that innovation will happen from the inside out. Sure there are internal drivers that can help you achieve innovation – curiosity, a fail-first mentality, perhaps even obsession. But even with these things in place, the best ideas aren’t created when groups of people sit around and think. The best ideas come from actively engaging with and talking to those you serve. Innovation starts with Hello.

Starting conversations and working directly with your audiences is how you will uncover new insights. Until you truly know the way your audience interacts with your product or service, and perhaps more importantly, the motivations behind those interactions, it’s nearly impossible for you to continuously grow and improve.

This is why we practice human-centered design at SmallBox. With a commitment to design research – a type of research rooted in empathizing with real people and understanding their unique environments and contexts – we are constantly striving to keep the end-user at the core of all solutions and ideas. We co-design alongside them, test and iterate directly with them, and ultimately work to ensure the final outcome is truly something that will serve them.

When was the last time you spoke directly to a customer?

Here are three methods we commonly use to spark conversations, ideas, and opportunities:

Interviews: while one of the more common methods used for audience research, an interview can make or break your research based on your preparation and approach. Check out our how-to for conducting a successful interview.
Diary Study: this design research method allows you to collect input from audiences over a set period of time. It’s particularly useful if you’re working in a sensitive problem space or are logistically unable to speak directly to your audiences. Create a series of workbook pages, filled with questions, prompts, and space for the unknown.
Observation: Whether your offering is a service or a product, observing the way your audiences engage or interact with it can generate insights and additional questions you didn’t even know to ask. Be sure to conduct the study in user’s natural environment, and follow the A-E-I-O-U framework for documentation.

Once you have selected your research method(s), take a look at our suggested mindsets to help ensure a successful conversation!

What is Brand Experience Design?

As a company, we’ve spent the last year clearly defining our work and services.

We didn’t quite fit into a marketing bucket anymore as our work had evolved to include more design around people and their experiences with our clients. What we landed on is Brand Experience Design – a term that, to us, includes three key ingredients that make up every successful brand: People, Purpose, and Product/Service.

How We Got Here

Brand Experience Design speaks to our desire to help organizations design and build powerful human experiences. Brand is not just a logo and tagline, we believe it is the sum of both your internal (employee) and external (audiences) experiences. The best companies are intentional about their brand from the moment a new customer walks in the door or a new hire first sits down at their desk. Our work is to partner with these organizations and help them design these powerful moments and interactions.

Yes, these organizations want to grow their revenue and profit, but they are also driven by a more powerful mission – they want to change the world. Maybe it’s a local change, such as improving the lives of the less fortunate in their community. Maybe it’s a national or global goal, such as making education accessible for all. Maybe they are nonprofit, maybe for-profit. It doesn’t matter.

We seek out mission-driven organizations that are intent on improving the world we all share.

Okay, but practically speaking, what exactly is Brand Experience Design? How is it different from marketing? To us, our marketing work was very tactical, completed behind a desk, connectionless, and mostly uninspiring. We were missing the human element. As a result, we began working differently, thinking of our work as a means of breaking down barriers and fueling conversations in order to understand first, and solve second. We dug for real answers from real audiences, we mapped their actual journeys, helped them tell their stories, and worked alongside our clients to engage all of their people to build better solutions from this feedback. We explored the ins and outs of unique interactions and what defined the many variables. We found that marketing is just a very small part of the larger picture, and could not be effectively done without knowing what that larger picture looked like.

Improve Board Orientation by Applying Design Thinking

Since SmallBox has been introducing nonprofits to a creative problem-solving methodology called Design Thinking, we often find that people think the creative framework is intimidating. But as we work with people and they learn about the Design Thinking process, they want to apply it to all their problems.

We are here to tell you it’s okay to be intimidated, and it’s okay to be excited. What you need to know is that Design Thinking shouldn’t be studied and put on the shelf, it requires that you take action and apply it. Even if it’s using one simple tool that you think can get to better insights for your team or outcomes for those you serve. We say commit to Design Doing (not just thinking)!

Let’s put the theory into practice and show you how you can apply a design thinking method to an ongoing nonprofit challenge: new board member on-boarding [aka orientation].

Tool: Journey mapping

In this exercise, the bigger your map, the better. Map the current new board member on-boarding process in a linear fashion on a big piece of butcher paper or a large white board. Flatten the process by mapping it in an order that makes sense, chronological typically works well. This means you need to create a beginning and an end of the on-boarding process.

As you are gathering insights about the current process in this exercise, it’s worth including as many informed stakeholders as possible. This may include new and former board members, staff, and anyone who has prepped, planned or experienced the current on-boarding process. What’s key to remember is that you are working to improve the process for the new board member, not for your nonprofit. Always keep the board member’s experience as the focus of your work.

Use colored Post-It notes to capture steps of the process and apply to the journey map. Post-Its create a visual aspect to the work that accesses the right brain, and allows you to change or add elements to the order of the process when needed. When completed you will have a visual diagram of all the touch points your new board members have during on-boarding.

Once you have mapped the current process, determine which parts of it delight new board members and which parts need improvement or confuse new board members. Ideally, you will ask board members who went through the process what their experience was. Where did they experience high points and low points? Highs and lows in the journey map can be identified using plus and minus symbols or any other creative way your team comes up with.

Once you have assembled all of your touch points and on-boarding highs and lows, you can start to assemble a list of what to capitalize on and what to improve.

Tool: oil change

This tool can be used in various settings, and we suggest applying it to the items on your journey map. This is a simple and quick tool aimed at creating efficient and participatory conversations about what people see in the journey map. It involves a group leader or facilitator asking a series of questions. Here are the ones we like to use:

Based on what you see on the journey map, what’s working?
Based on what you see on the journey map, what’s not working?
What’s missing from our board on-boarding journey?
What else?

The last two are purposely open-ended to encourage team members to bring new ideas forward to the group. We find that often when people start looking at on-boarding (or any journey) differently, it ignites creative ideas that deserve to be captured.

Once you have these questions answered, you can choose any number of voting methods to prioritize your areas of action and focus.

As Design Thinking gains more attention, we will continue to share our process so you can apply it with to the work you lead.

This article originally published on September 12, 2017, Charitable Advisors weekly newsletter.

Jenny Banner has been practicing amateur psychology since middle school. This interest in what makes people tick, led Jenny to careers sales, HR, and consulting as well as a graduate education in I/O Psychology (the psychology of the workplace). In her 15+ years of HR and consulting experience, Banner has worked with companies from Fortune 500 to start-ups, and observed similarities. As a consultant and coach her focus has been on leadership development, career transition, and training. She joined Smallbox as director of strategic initiatives and is applying her unique skill set to help organizations align their internal and external brand perceptions, and is working to refine educational offerings around problem solving using Design Thinking.

eX Summit – Mapping an Employee Experience

When we go to a conference there are some of us who want to leave inspired and some of us who want to leave with practical tools we can apply in our workplaces. In our session in early August at the eX Summit, we catered to the latter group.

We hosted an interactive one-hour workshop that introduced the concept of proto-personas and journey mapping in the context of creating employee experiences. Traditionally, these tools have been used by marketers when discussing customer experiences. We want to make sure that in addition to paying attention to your customers, you’re taking conscious care of your employees.

Here are the highlights of what we covered:
Three categories to consider when thinking about employee experiences are:

Culture – They way things get done, how people treat each other, communication between departments
Technology – How is your technology helping or hindering employees?
Environment – What is your physical space like, and what does it inspire?

Examining and changing employee experiences doesn’t always have a hard cost associated with it.

Tools to use when considering employee experiences:

Proto-Persona: An adapted version of a research-based persona created using secondary research and educated guessing. Typically includes: Demographics, Behaviors, Needs, and Goals. Walking these proto-personas through your employee experiences can provide new insights.
Journey Map: This tool creates a sequential and flat version of an employee experience. In our session we created a journey map for a new hire’s first day from their first hour to their last. We explored what actions a new hire takes, what technology and people they interact with, and what their resulting thoughts and feelings are. Using all of this information, we identified high and low points of a person’s first day. Seeing an experience in this visual way allowed participants to identify pain points and gain points of the experience.

If you missed us at the eX Summit and are interested in learning more about these tools, we are here to help! We are actively looking for opportunities to share these tools with HR and recruiting teams. Look for more workshop opportunities at Smallbox in the upcoming months or feel free to host us at your company.

A Wall You’re Allowed To Write On

Entering a design research project can be intimidating – heck, sometimes it’s even tough to talk to a new coworker, not to mention interviewing and gathering data from hundreds, even thousands, of new faces. Graffiti walls can be a simple, open way of gathering input from diverse audiences – and are efficient. Once you’ve set up your graffiti wall, it’s not time-intensive to monitor or collect responses.

What Are Graffiti Walls?

A design research method, graffiti walls have three parts:

a prompt (usually a single question),
a large-scale canvas (banner paper, chalkboard, bulletin board with notecards or sticky notes, etc.)
and writing materials (feel free to use color to encourage creativity!) for responses.

These materials are then placed in a common area where your audiences can interact with them. Graffiti walls gather qualitative data – i.e. words, shared language, creative responses that are descriptive in nature, and not numerical.

When Graffiti Walls Are Useful

Consider the audience you are trying to gather information from when deciding to use graffiti walls. Would your audience(s) be comfortable talking to a researcher? If not, a graffiti wall can provide an open forum for them to still be a valuable contributor.

Do time, space, or other constraints prevent easy access to your audience(s)? If so, graffiti walls can provide an accessible space to contribute over a sustained period of time.

Is language a key focus of your design research project (such as branding, organizational mission, vision, and values, etc.)? If so, graffiti walls can cast a wide net for gathering lots of language from a large group of contributors.

When…They Aren’t

Graffiti walls shouldn’t be considered the end-all, be-all method for collecting qualitative research from your audiences. If you’re trying to accomplish one of the below objectives, you should utilize a different design research method:

You need to hear from specific individuals. Graffiti walls are (typically) anonymous in nature, and don’t force participation. If you absolutely need to attribute input from a specific individual, a more focused, individual method should be used.
Your audience’s responses require context or expansion. Graffiti wall submissions are best as short, descriptive words and phrases. If your audience will want to explain their answer at length, consider interviews, surveys, or other methods that encourage expansive input.
You need quantitative data. If your research question needs to provide you with numbers, it’s best to stay away from graffiti walls – which, because of their open nature, should not be relied upon to score audience perception, satisfaction, or other metrics.

Reinventing Your Customer Experience

When it comes to the experiences your organization delivers, “good enough” is no longer an acceptable standard. Your customers – donors, members, patients, and even employees – are being actively courted by other organizations for their loyalty and support.

Customer experience (CX)—it’s a concept that’s having a moment in the spotlight. But what does it mean and what’s the best way to deliver it?

Put simply, CX encompasses all interactions with and aspects of a brand. Products, services (online or off) are all part of a cumulative customer experience. And by customers, we mean any audience that a brand serves: buyers, subscribers, students, donors, members, even employees. In today’s world, one experience that falls short can impact brand perception, so how can you ensure your CX is up to snuff?

Step one is to better understand the current experience.

The rest of this post will walk you through a few tools we often use in customer experience design. To bring these exercises to life, we’re going to use a mock example from an organization we’ve named FitCo. FitCo is a professional association for fitness trainers. They help members connect with one another, and provide access to new research, trends, tips and other professional development opportunities.

Step 1 – Identifying Your Customers

To begin, we must try to empathize with your audiences. Our first exercise focuses on building audience personas. A persona is essentially a profile of your average audience member. For CX purposes, you may even need to create multiple personas. Focus on their challenges, goals, feelings, thoughts, and actions. Sometimes demographics are useful but understanding the emotional attributes of your audiences is most critical.

Download this persona example here.

Step 2 – Map Your Current Customer Journey

Journey mapping looks at your audiences’ experiences with your brand holistically. By mapping out the audiences’ journeys from beginning to end, you may find that there are some glaring pain points, or perhaps simple opportunities to create consistent and engaging interactions.

Full journey map example here.

Your journey map may be more or less complicated than this example. You may decide that your team would benefit from a digitized version, or that butcher paper and sticky notes will suffice.

After completing the mapping activity, it’s critical to document and prioritize pain points and opportunities. Doing so at this juncture will make the next phase of work clearer.

Opportunities & paint points example here.

Step 3 – Create a Game Plan

Now it’s time to put your understanding of CX to the test by creating a game plan. Gather your collaborators and decision makers to set some actionable goals, to create a timeline and then dive in.

There are a few key tips to keep in mind:

KEEP LISTENING

Never stop empathizing! Contintue to gather qualitative and quantitative feedback from audiences as you tackle challenges and build solutions. Focus on the areas of improvement you have identified, but also listen for new opportunities. Here is one way to accomplish that:

Do some quick audience polling using your social media account.
Implement a HotJar survey on your website.
Ask respondents to polls and surveys if they’d be willing to do a follow-up phone interview.
Reach out personally to your audiences—involve your team members to reach out to your customers, donors, students, patients, or members.

COLLABORATE

Create a task force or committee and arm them with your customer experience research and creative problem-solving methodologies. Bonus points for using the design thinking framework to problem solve.

MEASURE

Define metrics as they relate to your overall goals. Consider these questions:

What’s your baseline?
What are you looking to increase or decrease?
How often will you measure?

It may feel overwhelming at first but clearly outlining and accomplishing these steps can get your team get started.

All of the exercises are also scalable based on time and resources available so give it a try to see what can work for you! At SmallBox, we urge both nonprofit organizations and businesses to utilize these tools to analyze and, ultimately, improve their customers’ experiences. By understanding your audiences and the interactions they share with your brand, you can design a distinctive experience that increases engagement and ensures retention.

Interested in learning more? Download the SmallBox Customer Experience Design Kit for a supplemental guide on the following exercises.

Setting the Foundation for Employee Engagement

Employee engagement was pegged as the top HR trend for 2017, and we’re almost a month into Q2. Hopefully by now you’ve installed the kegerator, had a company picnic and set up the foosball table—and viola, employees engaged! Unfortunately, it’s not so simple. Most often, we find that there are deeper foundational needs to address in order to foster a healthy, engaging team culture.

To create a transformative and engaging employee experience, we need to think more strategically. In the rest of this post, I’ll cover objectives to work toward with your team, and activities that can help jumpstart progress.

The challenge: foundational dysfunction

Does your team struggle with conflict or accountability? How about core values? It’s easy to bypass underlying organizational needs such as clarity around core values, or a team-wide dysfunction like a fear of conflict. It may seem hard to address, but it’s even harder for people to feel invested if the basics like trust, accountability, commitment, aren’t in place.

Objective: Establish organizational values
Activity: Mountains and Valleys exercise

Gather a group of stakeholders and employees that are representative of the company, and ask the group to collaboratively tell the story of the company, or an amount of time leading up to the present. Focus on important highs (mountains) and lows (valleys) that affected the team. Bring in a trusted employee or third-party facilitator to guide the conversation, asking questions that dig deeper.

While listening, write down words from each mountain and valley—from feelings and emotions to themes and other terms. After reaching the present, take a break, then reconvene to discuss the highlighted words or themes. Have the team identify the ones that resonate most with them. What you’re left with is the start of your core values, extracted from your unique team and story. By giving team members a chance to participate, the team will feel more invested in these values, making them more likely to stick.

You can find a more in-depth guide to the Mountains and Valleys core values exercise via Culture Sync.

Oil change stickies.

Objective: Improve candor, address fear of conflict
Activity: Read “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team”—as a team

Addressing dysfunction is a major challenge, which is why companies and teams hesitate to do it. But as Patrick Lencioni, author of “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” states, “the causes of dysfunction are both identifiable and curable.”

Teams that are willing to address common causes of dysfunction can better align around common objectives, make higher quality decisions, and retain star employees. Lencioni crafted this book as a “business fable,” making it easy to read and digest in a matter of hours. It also includes a team assessment, which allows individuals to self-assess their contribution to dysfunction, creating awareness of current roadblocks and behavioral solutions.

Objective: Gauge the team’s temperature & monitor progress
Activity: Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS)

The Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) survey focuses on gauging employee engagement and loyalty by asking the question, “How likely is it that you would recommend your employer to a friend or acquaintance?” The eNPS is useful for setting a baseline that will help determine if your culture is growing and improving over time. It can also help prioritize areas of focus.

Team voting on language.

Hop to it!

Once you have a culture baseline and understanding of what your team desires, set some realistic and attainable goals such as increasing internal communication, giving accolades when core values are demonstrated, and even something as simple as stopping to celebrate wins.

These activities are just a few of many that can help get your organization on its way to an engaging employee experience. What are some of your favorite team or culture-focused activities?

How Do I Know Which Design Thinking Method To Use?

Over the past year, we have hosted several workshops for businesses and organizations throughout the Midwest who see the potential in implementing a human-centered design approach into their work and culture. People often appreciate the process, but have a hard time understanding how to incorporate it into their daily tasks once they leave. Participants often ask, “Is there a guide that will tell me when to use each of the methods?”

The answer is, not really.

The good news? There are many research options to get started and working examples of how different methods have yielded data towards solving specific problem spaces, but ultimately, there’s no prescriptive guide for when to use methods. This might sound like a cop-out but the reasoning lies at the core of human-centered design––it all comes back to your unique audience needs.

There are standard methods to choose from like interviews, surveys, mapping, observations and card sorting, but we encourage people to embrace the methodology. Don’t feel constrained by the methods you know––iterate, customize, gamify––whatever you need to do to relate to your audience and give and receive valuable input. Know that you may need to adjust and adapt on the fly, that’s okay! That’s part of the process. Try not to get caught up in forcing a method if it is not working. If interviews or surveys are not producing the data you need, reassess. Find out what’s missing and what you need to move forward. You may include analogous observations or immersing yourself in a particular environment to get more helpful information.

Don’t feel constrained by the methods you know––iterate, customize, gamify.

Part of the design process is coming up with a method that will best relate to your audience in a way that will get you the information you need. For example, if you need to customize messages to specific audiences, you may want to interview folks and build out personas. While this means methods are customized for every problem space, there are some common things to think about:

What is it that you want to learn?
How many different audience types will you need to interact with?
How does your audience best communicate?
Are you able to have direct communication with them or do you need to explore appropriate indirect methods?
How can you relate the experience to something familiar and comfortable for them?
What are the limitations of the intended method?
How much time or budget is available?

The most important thing to remember is to empathize with the people whose problem you’re striving to solve. Explore different methods, practice them with friends or co-workers to build out techniques and applications, and adapt them to work for you.

How to Ideate: Think About Bad Ideas First

Have you ever pulled your team together for an ideation session that just didn’t go the way you expected? You presented a problem to solve, asked for ideas and the cold, blank stares left you feeling chilled to your bones.

Or maybe you’ve attended a session like this and without preparation, a 900-pound-guerilla-of-a-question is thrown your way so you sheepishly hand it a banana in hopes that it doesn’t eat you.

Whether participating or facilitating, we’ve all been there. When you want to get the most out of your teams’ creative energies, there are endless tips and tricks on how to prepare your team for the session, how to keep the energy alive, how to keep everyone on track, etc.

Today, I thought I’d share a tip on how to warm up your time – the trick to getting to the good ideas is to actually start with the bad ideas.

One way to do this is a quick exercise designed to ease nerves, and help people tap into their creative sides with quick doodles.

Give each participant a stack of blank index cards (roughly 10) and a sharpie marker.
Write a question/prompt on a board nearby.
Give the participants 5 minutes to draw as many bad ideas as they can (bonus points for some background music!).
Once the time is up, have participants share their favorite bad ideas.
You’ll have the room laughing and the tensions eased.

To take this exercise a step further, you could add a second round and ask participants to go back through their bad ideas and flip them into something that could work. This will help show that there is a fine line between the “bad” and “good” and that all ideas are useful in some way.

A third iteration is to have participants start with a stack of fresh cards and go for the wildest idea, pushing them to think outside of the box, no limitations – the crazier the better.

Once you get to the real ideation exercise, you can apply the ‘bad ideas’ approach again by getting out all of the obvious, already-stated ideas that everyone is already thinking about. We often put pressure on ourselves to come up with something new and inventive, but until we let go of what’s already there, there isn’t room to explore the not-so-obvious. To that end, encourage participants (or yourself!) to get those ideas out, even if you know they aren’t the greatest. Don’t wait until the perfect one hits, just write them all down and you’ll certainly get closer to the next big thing a bit sooner.

ideaton-sketching

During an ideation session with ACSM, we asked the group to give us their best ‘bad ideas’ on how to improve communication with their members. One suggestion, shown here, was to use a telephone tree to release all news and information – amazing!

Is it time to version?

We are all used to getting notifications from software updating or “versioning” to its next iteration. In fact, we’ve come to expect regular updates from our devices that improve our experience. Apple even turns these version announcements into something of a spectacle. 2.0 replaces 1.0, and so on. Their fans ooh and ahh at new features and functionality. What if we apply this thinking to companies? Should they also seek to version? What would that look like to roll out major updates to your organization?

Is it time for your company to version?

The reality of modern business is one of ever accelerating evolution and change. Entire industries are being uprooted and transformed by new technology and what it enables. New service models, new devices, new ways of working… they are popping up every day. This is putting tremendous pressure on businesses to evolve.

I believe it is time for businesses to adopt the software model and consciously version. Not just their offerings, but the way they deliver them. This starts with the employee experience, the systems and tools the organization runs on, the facilities used to operate and, yes, the product taken to market. You cannot version the offering without updating what powers it.

How do you know it’s time?

Usually when change is overdue, you can feel the pain in different areas:
Is your employee morale declining?
Your market share eroding?
Does your brand feel tired?
Are you getting too comfortable?

All of these are signs that it’s time to version your business. Even if you don’t answer yes to any of these you probably ought to be thinking about it now before you are scrambling to keep up.

To version your company I suggest you start with identifying the past phases of your business. What version you are currently running on? Is it 1.0, 2.0 or 3.0? This creates some a foundation to build from. It also creates language to talk about how things are and how they will be.

For instance, at SmallBox we recently “launched” our 3.0 offerings. This required first acknowledging what our 1.0 and 2.0 offerings were. We started the company in 2006 strictly as a web development shop. The 1.0 version of SmallBox was more of an outsourced development team for other agencies. In our 2.0 era, we branched out into marketing, brand, and finally culture. We often referred to the offerings in this phase as “culture-powered marketing.” We embraced starting projects with “Discovery,” or research that would inform more meaningful designs and solutions.

At this time, we had adopted a new vision: to spark a revolution of people-centered work. We didn’t even yet fully understand what that would come to mean for us, but we stuck with it since it inspired us. Our focus on culture led us to starting client projects at a more foundational level, focusing on identifying or updating organizational values and building core language. This vision and our new ways of working led us to increasingly focus on user experience, design thinking, and deep, strategic consulting with our clients. SmallBox 3.0 is rooted in organizational consulting.

Moving to Action

So, how did we get there? Once we had reckoned with our past and defined our future vision, it was time for action. These were the three steps we found most helpful to getting to our next version:

Team Development
You can’t expect to version your business without preparing your team for the transition. The people in your organization are the real power behind your services and products, so this is not a step to underestimate. The bigger your changes are, the more time and resources you’ll need for this.

We spent the year leading up to our pivot expanding our skills in facilitation, design thinking, and experience design. Some of these skills were already in our toolkit, but we wanted deeper mastery and outside perspective from experts in our field. We hired an expert in facilitation training first. We took online classes and held reading discussions. During our Winter 2016 Factory Week we brought in outside Design Thinking trainers for brand and customer experience sessions. While many of our steps were difficult or time consuming, professional development was by far the biggest investment we made for our transition. Aside from the many hours we invested of our own time, we spent about $50,000 on training for a team of 15.

This area was particularly difficult for another reason – we discovered our new chosen work wasn’t aligned with the career paths of every teammate. We had to make some changes to our team to be staffed correctly for 3.0. Never an easy step. This took time, and many conversations, until we had the right people on the bus.

Product/Service Design
Whether you’re a service or product company, a nonprofit or a business, versioning requires taking a step back and examining all of your offerings. Start by mapping out what your products or services are now, then look at where they need to go. An exercise we facilitate with clients is “Invented/Default Future” which explores what an offering might look like in the future with and without changes.

In our case, some of our services, like branding, just needed a tweak, some needed to be sunset and others needed to be re-designed or built from scratch. We did research, talked with clients, talked with mentors and peers, did countless hours of whiteboarding and collaborating exercises. While we transitioned from 2.0 to 3.0 we began to recognize value in the way we were working and turned that into a workshop which we now offer to clients and the public.

Client/Customer Conversations
This is one of the hardest parts – sharing that you can no longer support an activity that doesn’t align with your new direction. But it’s critical to let go of old things to make space for the new.

We met with our clients to talk about the coming changes, and determine together if we were the right fit for them moving forward. For those still looking for tactical marketing help, we made referrals to a new agency if we aren’t the right partner going forward. We made sure the transition was a smooth one even if it meant doing “2.0” work for a little longer than we had expected.

Making the leap…

By the end of 2016 we will have completed the launch of 3.0. It was often messy and very hard, but we are making it happen and we are confident it sets us up for a long stretch of growth.

If your company feels stuck, maybe it’s time to version. Don’t panic. Just take it one step at a time. Even if you make mistakes, you’ll likely be better than those who choose to ignore the warning signs.