Have you ever been sitting around with your buddies and you come up with a fabulous idea for a new product that should be developed, an idea on how to solve a global issue, or even figure out how you would redesign something to make it more interesting or useful? Sadly, a lot of ideas become forgotten or pushed out of the way with the daily errands- whether they are creative, organizational, mechanical, economic, ect. These ideas become neglected- left on the tables, thrown in trashcans, or left smothered under mounds of paperwork. In a business like ours, we use our creative muscles every day solving problems and creating solutions for an array of clients. It’s easy to become stuck in a creative rutt. So, how do you inspire new creative ideas? And once it is inspired, how do you keep your grasp on the idea before it flees? A few of our brilliant staffers thought of a fun way to get our juices going- a creative project/contest was the solution!

On one random Tuesday, we all gathered around the huge TFG conference table and began to discuss fun, creative projects we all could collectively do as a team. It didn’t matter who you were, what your idea was, or how it was delivered- as long as it was a creative idea of your own and you had a blast doing it. These projects were to help harvest creative juices and to spice up the normal workday.

This is how “The Stamp” project started! There was only one limitation to the TFG stamps- we had to, in some way, include one of these items: Cats, Zombies, Rockets, Sporks, or Tom (the founder of the TFG Family). Yeah…we narrowed it down to those 5. You can say we’re a little quirky! Designers, Web Developers, Production Artists, Account Executives, Administrative Executives, and Interns parted ways and began brainstorming and daydreaming of stamps. Even one of the TFG kiddos got into the mix and drew some stamps of her own. If you were to create a stamp without any limitations, what would your stamp look like? And, how would it be different? Maybe its not a stamp at all, or maybe, just maybe, you could have that great idea for the revolution of the modern stamp.

After completion, we placed the stamp concepts on the table where it all started. We voted on our most liked ideas to find our “winner.” Well, take a look at what we created:

So, who won “The Stamp” contest?  After voting, we ended up with perfect ties for second and third place. Take a look at the winners!

One thing we don’t do very well is talk about our own awards, praises, and honors. That’s about to change. A few weeks ago, our sister company Foxy Propaganda picked up some new hardware at the 2010 Graphex Awards. Beverages were guzzled, awards were accepted, and love was made. Here’s what the Foxy ones brought home:

Best of Category – They Said it Couldn’t Be Done
Yeah, that’s right. A whole category for projects that defy constraints and limitations. TFG designed these invitations for huge 40th Birthday blowout. We organized, conceptualized, and delivered a party that’s still being talked about today. The invites for the party were dimensional, clever, and challenging to produce. They were also hard to ignore — even for the judges. Congrats Foxy on a job well done!

Best of Category – Calendars, Booklets
Have you seen Foxy Propaganda’s “Where Am I Now” calendar? If not, you really ought to get one. This clever desk ornament made such an impression on the judges, it took home the “Best in Category” honors. You can request one here.

Best of Category – Booklets & Brochures
Besides garnering a “Digital Best in Show”, the Willbanks Metal Brochure was considered the best of it’s category. We’ve had a lot fun with this client- the work we’ve done for Willbanks deserves it’s own separate post. We’ll talk more about that in an upcoming post!

Digital Best of Show – Bronze
A little something TFG designed, and Foxy printed for Willbanks Metals was awarded a Bronze in this competitive category.

GraphEx is an annual awards competition promoting print excellence. PIA MidAmerica has held GraphEx for over 20 years. Consisting of three divisions and over 108 categories each, this competition provides a wide spectrum of opportunities for printers of all types and sizes to participate.

Most Adults Just Don’t Think Much About Emergency Preparedness
In our neck of the woods, the KnoWhat2Do Emergency Preparedness program provides valuable information and tools to all citizens of North Central Texas in planning and preparing before disaster strikes. Under the motto, “Think. Prepare. Act.” the campaign demonstrates real practices that people can put into action for their own lives. KnoWhat2Do materials are freely and readily distributed to residents on the www.knowhat2do.com website, through educational DVDs, a disaster preparedness guide and a series of public events, presentations and public service announcements — we could go on and on.

Sure Kids Bring Home Germs, But They’re Also Carriers of Knowledge
Think about it. When the government mandated seat belts for automobiles, who were the best advocates? Kids, of course! Surely everyone remembers the cries of the kids in the backseat: “Daddy doesn’t have his seat belt on!” So what better way to spread the Emergency Preparedness gospel than through our kids? Get the kids involved and the adults will soon follow their lead.

www.knowhat2do.com/kids
To get our kids involved, TFG created a section of the KnoWhat2Do website geared towards children. We started with the really young ones, the grade-school types. KnoWhat2Do’s new kid site has games and pages for coloring and various activities geared towards teaching children about emergency preparedness. The site content also encourages kids to share their knowledge with their parents. If we believe the children are our future, (and we do), treat them well and let them lead the way. We couldn’t resist saying it.

Improving Upon a Designer’s Favorite
Our client, Cyan Design, is a favorite among Interior Design circles. As the creators, maintainers, and brand-propagandists for Cyan’s website since their foundation in 2005, our goal with redesigning their site was to make it more visually appealing to Interior Designers, Decorators and Home/Decor Access Buyers.

While Cyan offers an impressive product catalog, the previous website just didn’t showcase their products with the same imagery or convey the same warmth of their newly printed catalogs. So we revamped it. We incorporated more of the stylish photography that Cyan shot during production of their physical catalog. We think the current design is the best one yet.

Besides updating the design aesthetics with new photography of Cyan products and showrooms, we reworked the online catalog section to make it more user-friendly, more catalog-like in behavior and appearance. We did this by leveraging the publishing technology of ISSUU. This allowed us to preserve the integrity of the catalog presentation with interactive pages containing searchable text and zoomable images. Such an approach kept our development time to a minimum and simplified how we integrated the site with Cyan’s product database. Users can now browse through the book, view products by category listings, or perform keyword searches directly within the online catalog pages. This gave us the best of both worlds – a veritable mashup of online and print.

Everyone Has to Sell Their aging Inventory Right?
To address this ongoing fact of business, we developed a Discontinued section of the website for the general public to take advantage of clearance items. We went one step further though and provided Cyan dealers with the ability to securely log in, see discounted pricing, and expedite orders for bargain closeout items.

Fifteen Thousand Leads!
Thanks to a catalog request system that we created, Cyan has amass a database of over 15,000 targeted sales leads grown organically over a period of three years. Here’s how it works. Site visitors can request a printed catalog by completing an online registration form. Catalogs are sent out automatically with a personalized letter (using variable printing) from the Cyan Sales Director. Next, the Cyan sales rep that handles that person’s territory is forwarded their contact information. After thirty days, an email is sent automatically to ask if they received their catalog. Sales reps are then able to follow up with each person as needed.

To help Cyan manage their ever-growing list of dealers, we built a simple administrative tool to allow them to easily add or remove reps and their associated territories by uploading a spreadsheet once logged on securely. The spreadsheet is then parsed and their dealer database is refreshed. This allows visitors of the Cyan website to locate a dealer based upon geographical location. This database is also used to help Cyan send catalog requests to the appropriate sales representative for a follow up to answer any questions or to take an order once the catalog has been delivered to the customer by FoxyPropaganda fulfillment service.

Making the Public Aware of Our Public Awareness Campaign

North Texas’ KnoWhat2Do campaign teaches residents to prepare for the worst. We had spent the better part of 2008 and 2009 creating tools to provide the details of how, and when to prepare for disasters in North Texas. Now, the time had come to start promoting these tools to the public at large.

Marketing with Constraints Makes You Stronger

Working with the government can be tough, mostly from a scheduling and planning aspect. It can take months to get the funding through all the red-tape. That’s okay, our proposal was flexible enough to allow us to adjust the ad placements even a year after our initial proposal was accepted. The downside? We had to perform a year’s worth of service in just three months! We felt like an emergency response marketing team. To do it, we stuck with a classic strategy of outdoor and radio marketing while introducing cinema advertising to the mix. We pulled it off.

One of our goals for the campaign was to track the specific effectiveness of each media placement. Just because we had a big budget to work with didn’t mean we shouldn’t measure what worked and what didn’t. So we integrated specific web landing pages for each ad message. Some of the landing pages were even personalized to match the county. By adding analytics, we were able to determine the success of each campaign component while supporting new ideas and concepts to improve upon next time.

Personally Engaging Our Community

With an important program like Knowhat2Do, you can’t just toss out ad messages to the general public and expect residents to jump into action. TFG and KnoWhat2Do are in this for the long-haul, and we know that real progress can only be made by reinforcing our ad messages with real, genuine community involvement. That’s where our strategic partner, Erin Steed with Steed Creative comes in. She joined our team and helped us champion the KnoWhat2Do brand. We created annual events like PrepareFair, created speaking engagements, gained press coverage, solicited corporate partners, and reached out to the local media. Also, Dallas/Fort Worth’s beloved weather guy, Troy Dungan, has become the face of the program and we are adding more and more supporters everyday. Erin is helping us grow those personal relationships with the voices of the community. Follow KnoWhat2Do on Twitter to see the type of street level awareness we’re building.

Every Little Bit Helps, but More is needed
We accomplished a lot in our three-month marketing blitzcrieg, but more is needed to reach the public. More is coming. So stay tuned!
BTW, make an emergency plan and build an emergency kit.

Building by another guy, Body by TFG
Sometime last year, the downtown Fort Worth YMCA underwent major reconstructive surgery. This place has a lot of history. In fact, Fort Worth has been doing chin-ups and curls since 1924! So to help spread the word about the Grand Re-Opening, the YMCA asked TFG to create a small viral app to get people excited about the new sweatin’ facilities. So, we create a little web-app called the YMCA Build-a-Body. Basically, you’re able to dress up a male or female figure in lost-and-found clothing from each decade since the Y opened. To make it fun and increase the desire to share the site, the app allowed users to upload their photos and send the final result to their friends.

Flashy, without any plugins!
Yes, you can do some pretty cool stuff without Adobe Flash. This whole app was built with CSS styling and popular javascript libraries to create simple “dragging-and-dropping” of clothing. We built this pretty quickly and on a small budget — just the sort of stuff we like to do!

If you build it you need to promote it.
Some advice from TFG: If you’re interested in using social media or a viral marketing campaign to promote your business, it’s important to empower and  rally your internal team, that’s right, pep rally is ON. After all, social media is, well, social. And your greatest asset is what those folks who work with your customer on a daily basis have to offer. They’re the “Rock Stars” that will create loyal “Fans.”

Those trees don’t just magically grow in the right spots!
One of the most overlooked professions is Landscape Architecture. But these guys do some seriously cool stuff. We’ve been working with the Texas Chapter of ASLA (American Society of Landscape Architects) for several years now, and we’ve come to really appreciate and notice the work they do.  You can find out more about them at the TXASLA website. Yep. We help them with that too.

Promoting the Annual Get Together
Every year, Landscape Architects form all over Texas (and some neighboring states) get together for a conference where they earn educational credits, network, and have a good time together. TFG was tasked with the entire promotion for the 2010 Texas ASLA Annual Conference in San Antonio, Texas. More than just some pretty graphics, we were accountable for acquiring sponsors and getting butts in seats. Those nice, but tough Landscape Architects gave us a number (of butts, that is) to hit. We exceeded it.

Serious “Stategery“
Our goal was to add value and improve the conference experience for vendors and attendees alike. We used our 1:1 experience to specifically target each of our recipients. To do this, we created personal landing pages and communication messages that enhanced the appeal of the conference. We got them excited about it again! We retained existing revenue, and brought new first-time exhibitors to the conference. Our entire campaign flowed around the creation of a conference micro-site where information was gathered and organized. Our Email and Direct Mail (DM) campaigns reliably sent our targets to the micro-site for registration and conference information.

Ah, Great success!
TFG was able to deliver 86% more vendors than the previous year! Attendance and revenues went way up! And we even got an appearance and shout-out by the mayor of San Antonio. Now it’s time to work on next years conference. Can we improve it again? Yes we can.

A Good Project for a Worthy Message
Since the infamous Y2K hype, have you given thoughtful consideration to emergency preparedness? You might have an old emergency supply kit sitting in the garage, but have you ever sat down and made an emergency plan? Would you even know where to begin? Most folks, probably don’t, so that’s why we created this: www.knowhat2do.com/plan

Our online planning tool helps families of North Texas create their own printable emergency plan from the KnoWhat2Do website. The emergency plan consists of important contact information, emergency meeting places, household information, and more. Our goal was to create a tool that was useful and extremely simple to use. This meant it needed to behave intuitively and quickly.

Research, Borrow & Improve
Before designing the user interface, we reviewed similar applications that already existed, borrowing what worked well while improving what didn’t. As a result, we simplified the interface to allow users to add any number of places, pets, or people via a simple wizard-like interface with the ability to jump to any part of the process. To avoid continual page refreshes after each user-initiated event (adding or removing locations and editing emergency content), we love AJAX.

Making it Easy, Thanks Google!
In addition, we incorporated Google Maps to allow users to easily lookup locations and add them to their plan with a single click of a button rather than having to type each address manually. Similarly, the Google API allowed us to provide phone number searches as well. So if a user wanted to add the phone number for something like Poison Control, they could just search for it and click “add to plan”. Simple and intuitive. Once the user is finished, a PDF is created that they can print, fold, and keep in their wallet or purse.

So far (as of April 15, 2010), 100 families have made plans in case of emergency. It’s nice to know that what we create could help someone should the unexpected happen. We plan to add new features and enhancements to the KnoWhat2Do emergency planner and as soon as we launch 2.0 we’ll tell you all about it in a new post.

Today’s a Brand New Day and there’s a good chance it just might rain today. So just like Spring coming back, our website has a fresh new look. If you’ve never been here before, The Fowler Group (TFG) is a Design and Marketing agency that’s been around since 1968. You may have heard of us.

As time goes by we’ll add more and more projects to the site and you’ll see the kind of work that drives our company and feeds our families. We’ll also share how we work, things that inspire us, and how we weave together our experience in award-winning Creative Design and Marketing with in-house Web Development. We also have to brag about our sister company FoxyPropaganda.com – a pretty remarkable digital print provider located in Kennedale, Texas, if we do say so ourselves.

Here’s to moving forward!
team TFG