Reposted from the DG&Co. blog

By now, everyone’s heard about Texas Governor Rick Perry’s (latest) gaff. When listing the three federal agencies he would move to eliminate when president, he as able to remember… two. In case you haven’t seen it, check out the video below:

The sometimes-harsh truth is that seemingly minor slips like this have huge consequences. Read more »

I’m really excited about a project I helped wrap up at work recently. Over the past several months we’ve been working with a large group of funders, partners and educators to launch Accelerating Opportunity, which is a new adult education initiative aimed at improving success rates in 11 states.

The project had a lot of moving pieces and it revolved around developing a name, logo, brand and message platform. I also worked with the team at the managing organization, Jobs for the Future, to help launch the initiative. I wrote about it on the DG&Co. blog if you’re interested in learning more or you can check out how the brand is working in action at the Accelerating Opportunity website.

I’m really happy with a few projects that recently wrapped up at work.

1. We helped the Center for Medicare Advocacy relaunch their website, www.medicareadvocacy.org.  This was an interesting project because we moved a site that was built originally on Frontpage over to WordPress. We also used a pre-designed template with only a few modifications. Overall, I’m very happy with the way it came out.
2. Back this past fall, I was out in the Midwest a lot. What I was doing was interviewing students and faculty of a new type of adult basic education that provides students workforce training at the same time as academic instruction. There’s more on the project and some of the profiles we put together on the DG&Co. website.

You may have heard about the Oxford English Dictionary adding “OMG” to its most recent version. Within a week of this, the AP shifted its style to remove the hyphen in email (previously it recommended publications use “e-mail”). I was inspired by this momentous news cycle to write a blog post on our company blog about the importance of having a house style guide.

Check it out.

On the company blog for the past month or so I’ve been writing about how important it is to have meaningful awareness building rather than just another cut-and-paste status update. In short I wrote about how important it is that any campaign is:

• Personal
• Timely
• Passionate
• True

I’d love to hear your thoughts, either here or over on the individual posts.

Happy New Year – we launched a new website for our firm this week. I’m pretty pleased with it. We were able to overhaul the design, content and moved it over to a content management system. I dig Joomla! quite a bit for this sort of project. You definitely need a developer, unlike WordPress, but it’s a lot easier to customize.