Welcome, Lakewood comms team!
I like to say that my website here is not a portfolio, just a place to share with friends, but I’d also like to showcase a few work products for you.
Images and blue text are all clickable links.
Social Media
Dog Aging Project spotlights
The Dog Aging Project is a longitudinal study – it collects observations over time. That means we have to keep study participants coming back, year after year.
We try to create value and affinity a number of ways, including fun events, free swag, and access to the research team. Simple recognition products go a long way and are always a hit on our social media channels.
I worked with our legal department to build a simple media consent opt-in process on our private community forum, the Dog Park. This allows study participants to more easily give us permission to use the cute dog pictures they share.
Staff also now complete a brief questionnaire at onboarding that can then be used to populate templates for our staff spotlights. We try to focus these on fun things or career pathways.
These components can all be quickly dropped into templates I built in Adobe Spark by nearly any member of the media team. Each spotlight also makes for a quick and easy ad on social media!
Pack Appreciation Events
Pack events are a fun way for us to engage Dog Aging Project study participants (“Pack members”) and provide a little science education. These monthly events feature different guest speakers and include a Q&A exclusively for Pack members. Parallel activities take place on the Dog Park community forum and in social media posts.
I coordinate the full run of the events, from recruiting and preparing speakers to managing the livestream and any post-event wrap up. I proposed these events as a way to remain engaged with our audience despite the pandemic, but they have proven popular and are here to stay!
Civic Education
Septic-to-Sewer Conversion in the Old Farm District
I joined the board of the Old Farm District Neighborhood Association as sewer capacity became available to an older part of the neighborhood. This new capacity brought a deadline for homeowners to connect to the newly expanded sewer system – and some rather large costs!
The page linked here is part of the two-year education and outreach campaign I led for the Association and highlights key resources and dates. Other elements of the campaign involved regular newsletter updates, social media posts, in-person events (where attendance was routinely over 200!), and virtual events.
One small metric demonstrating the success of the campaign was the growing technical vocabulary of our members with each interaction. Infrastructure policy can be daunting! Clear, accessible information played a key role in bringing about a satisfactory outcome for all.
Redistricting 2021: An overview for Central Oregon
Thanks to my civic consulting work, I often receive questions from friends and local groups asking to explain political happenings. This is my wide angle view on redistricting.
This is written in a familiar tone for the audience of friends. The interactive map was built extremely quickly with Google Maps. Accompanying colored illustration maps were crafted in QGIS using shapefiles from the state legislature. A follow up to this will feature more information-dense interactive maps built with Leaflet.js and GeoJSON maps.
Newsletters & more
Participant recovery emails
Recovery is focused on people who have already indicated an interest in joining the Dog Aging Project, but did not follow through with creating an account. This series of emails follows up with that cohort on average three months later.
The emails include customized greetings using Mailchimp merge tags. If a user clicks the big “let’s get started” button or wishes to update their info, the URL leads to a Qualtrics survey already pre-populated with their information thanks to a base64 encoded merge tag.
Monthly neighborhood news
Whatever draws a neighbor into engaging with their local neighborhood association, we don’t expect anyone to be policy experts. A big part of why they come to us is because they have frustrations.
As the outreach person for the organization, I always tried to keep this in mind and build newsletters that provided usable information, without overwhelming; that provided resources at your fingertips, without rummaging through an unfamiliar website. The linked newsletter is from a fairly typical month.
Thanks for looking! I look forward to chatting with your team.
— Eric