Cindy’s Corner - Why am I frustrated with the media?
Updated on September 7, 2020: Our Additional Services website is now turned off. We are no longer selling t-shirts our Art Directors designed as we move our focus back to helping our clients with their digital experiences.
Hi friends. So several of you have reached out and noticed we have not formally been updating our blog where as I have been active on other social media channels. And you asked what we have been up to. (I’ll answer that below). But first in full transparency, like all of you, I only have so many hours in a day, and we are short on team resources so something had to give, and I decided it would be the blog.
But I’m back (for now) at least to share what we’ve been up to; what’s on my mind and what I think we’re missing in our industry.
If you are the type to watch videos, I invite you to check out my weekly updates via my Instagram TV on my personal account. I’ve been doing them every Saturday to help me remember how I’m feeling, what the work week was like, and what I think we all need to do to help get our industry out of this deficit. Since this Saturday is the US Fourth of July holiday, I’ll be pushing out an update a day early or a day late depending on my mood. 🙂
If you are the analytical type and want to hear what we’ve been up to in numbers, here are some fun stats I can publicly share:
We’ve sold 81 Together We Shine t-shirts which means we are about to make our first donation of $405 to Austin Justice Coalition. We will continue to donate proceeds as more shirts are purchased.
We’ve sold five (5) Miss Corona t-shirts which means we are about to make our first donation of $25 to Out Youth. We will continue to donate proceeds as more shirts are purchased.
Our talented Art Directors have pushed out a total of 9 different t-shirt designs since April.
In May, we donated 812 pounds of food to Central Texas Food Bank to help feed families in Austin. So grateful for Carter Transportation, Altared Weddings & The Cupcake Bar for helping us make this community give-back program a huge success.
Since May, we have helped 10 different clients with their virtual/hybrid events and/or marketing/business strategy. We have quite a few more planned for Summer & Fall 2020, and still taking leads/RFPs for 2021.
We have demo’d more than 23 virtual platforms but we are only marrying ourselves to two (2) exclusive ones because let’s be honest, there’s no need for us to know all 23. And if you recall our Virtual Matrix, we currently have over 52 virtual platforms listed and the list keeps growing weekly.
We have attended collectively over a 100 webinars (honestly we lost count), and we share what we learn with our clients after every single one.
I’ve personally met in person (physically distanced) with about half of our employees since we’ve been 100% work from home. It definitely takes a lot longer to do these these days, and we’ll see if I can actually see every team member in person before the end of the year.
We have officially reopened our physical offices for those wishing to work from there for 24 days now, and we have a lot of new protocols to ensure safety and minimizing the spread of the virus.
We are about to have our first ever 100% virtual All Hands meeting (stay tuned for another post to share what we did based on our own first hand experiences of what has worked well in this new way of meeting).
Let me know if you enjoy these data points, and I’ll try to collect new ones each month.
So what I really want to talk about with today’s blog post is what I feel is missing in our industry right now. I feel like with the rise in COVID cases in the US, it’s very easy for the media to focus on the “superspreader” events when contact tracing is available but is anyone actually talking about the event professionals that are proactively going above and beyond to safely produce a live event that minimizes the spread? Since I have not found anyone doing this, I’m taking it upon myself to start this unofficial polling and hoping I can get enough data points to share back out with all my event peers.
Some more background for those not aware: With our state of Texas being one of the early ones to re-open and allowing weddings and funerals to take place since May 4th and now outdoor events up to a certain size; I am convinced that no one is talking about which events have successfully and safely been planned with no further spread of COVID cases so I’m hoping to use this form to help us figure out what some of the new normals should be for our industry.
FULL DISCLOSURE: I am fully aware that I can’t use this information to implement laws or regulations for our industry, BUT we can use this information to better understand how we can ease back into our jobs and try to recover a very devastated industry. So who’s on board? If you or you know someone that has successfully recently produced a live/hybrid event; is actively doing contact tracing; and know that no new COVID cases are tied back to your event thanks to contact tracing, I want to hear from you. Check out this form link and fill it out so we can start to be our own advocates. I am very much open to any constructive feedback so check out the link and let me know what you think.
Stay safe everyone and please wear a mask if you decide to go out this weekend. For all our American friends, Happy 4th of July! For all our Candian friends, Happy Canada Day! Feel free to leave me a comment so I can tailor our content for what you’re hoping to find here.
Need some strategic insight for your next brand activation? We’d love to hear from you.