Congrats to My Earth Day Client!

April 23, 2013 Leave a Comment

JWR Inc, Johnson Creek, WI

It’s been online for a while, but there’s no better time than the week of Earth Day to congratulate JWR Inc. on their new website! And how fitting, considering JWR and its sister company NewWay Global are innovative leaders in the waste and recycling industry. They are my 2013 Earth Day clients!

Last year, the JWR marketing team came to me wanting an updated website. I did their site five years ago and it has served them well. It’s helped them earn recognition and they’ve built a reputation based on their quality products and reliable service. With this company image well established, JWR now wants to emphasize its forward thinking. As owner Dave Wolf says “JWR has always been successful with niche products. We’re always trying to be a year or two ahead of the game.”

What better way to communicate such eco-moxiness than a new website!

JWR’s team had a list of ideas of “must-haves” for their site. Earlier this year they were featured on The Environmental Report so they wanted a way to showcase this and any future videos. They wanted a responsive layout for a variety of communication devices. And they wanted to maintain their own content. Thanks to Ben Seigel, of Versa Studios, we came up with a great Expression Engine framework that allows easy CMS capabilities. JWR is doing a super job with it.

So congratulations JWR! And happy Earth Day to you!

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Keeping My Clients in the News

April 9, 2013 Leave a Comment

Every March, Forward Mutual Insurance Company hosts its policyholders’ meeting at the Ixonia Fireman’s Hall. Yes, the company presents its annual report, but probably even more important to this faithful crowd of mutual supporters are the door prizes, tasty luncheon and gathering together with longtime friends. It’s so very Wisconsin; I love writing such news! 

Interestingly, in  a day and age when “online content marketing” is all the buzz, sometimes an old-fashioned press release in the local newspaper is still the best. For Forward Mutual, this is one of those times.

Howard Wiedenhoeft congratulations Donald Bohn, Ixonia, WI

President and CEO Howard Wiedenhoeft represented Forward Mutual Insurance Company in expressing gratitude to Donald Bohn for his years of service as treasurer of the board of directors. Bohn announced his retirement at the company’s 138th annual policyholders’ meeting.

 

BOHN RETIRES FROM FORWARD MUTUAL, NEW BOARD ELECTED

IXONIA, WI, (March 25, 2013) – Director Donald Bohn announced his retirement as a board member of Forward Mutual Insurance Company at its recent annual policyholders’ meeting. Bohn has served as treasurer for the Ixonia company since 2010.

“Don has been a strong leader for our mutual,” says Stephen Zillmer, Forward chairman of the board. “He is a quiet man, but when he speaks he has something meaningful to say. He is conservative, in that he’s careful to do what’s good and safe for the company. Yet he’s progressive, in that he supports moving into the future when he knows its best. We’re going to miss him here at Forward.”

Bohn began serving on mutual boards in 1984, when he was elected as a board of director for Watertown Mutual Insurance Company. He served as its secretary/treasurer for 12 years. In 2006, he guided Watertown Mutual through a merger with Concord Mutual Fire Insurance Company.

In 2009, Bohn once again guided Watertown Mutual through merger agreements, this time with Ixonia Mutual Insurance Company. On January 1, 2010, the two companies joined together and formally adopted the new name of Forward Mutual Insurance Company. Bohn was elected to serve as treasurer for the board.

Bohn has been a lifelong dairyman in the Watertown community and involved in local farm cooperatives. He is now retired from milking and enjoys working for Glacier Rock Farms in Lebanon, where he gives tractor rides to children visiting the farm.

Also at the meeting, policyholders re-elected David Blank, Randall Wegner and Dale Wolf to serve as board members. Other members of the board are Roger Degner, David Flood, Mark Mallow, Donald Reese, Robert Salov, Dale Zastrow and Stephen Zillmer. Zillmer serves as chairman of the board, Degner serves as vice-chairman and Reese will serve as secretary/treasurer.

Forward Mutual Insurance Company provides insurance to home and farm owners in 16 counties throughout southeast Wisconsin. It maintains a policyholders’ surplus of $5.2 million and an A.M. Best rating of A minus.

“Forward Mutual is the only town mutual in Wisconsin to have an A.M. Best rating,” says Wiedenhoeft. “As our organization grows in many ways, we’re confident about the future and await the challenges that lay ahead.”

 

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Branding Rock County’s Breadbasket

March 25, 2013 Leave a Comment

RCHSPantone

Woot! Woot! Congratulations to Mike Reuter and his Rock County Historical Society (RCHS) team for their great work with Adunate in creating a logo for their upcoming marketing campaign. And so the branding begins!

Mike, who serves as executive director, contacted me a couple months ago regarding the society’s campaign called Breadbasket (I wrote about the society here). Breadbasket will be a yearlong traveling exhibit that chronicles Rock County’s culinary history. The exhibit will run from June 1, 2013 to June 1, 2014, and will target youth of all ages, families and underprivileged families. According to Mike, these audiences will benefit from Breadbasket’s following embedded themes:

  1. Seed to Spoon: Where Does Our Food Come From?
  2. Tasty Traditions: How Does Food Shape Who We Are?
  3. Our Food Future: Bleak or Bright?

Discussing the project with Mike was exciting. He comes to the RCHS with a great portfolio, having previously worked as the operations manager and curator for the Milwaukee County Historical Society. His plans for Breadbasket are to have large, sweeping, door-type displays, along with educational kiosks. The exhibit will be headquartered at the RCHS campus but will also travel to outlying historical societies.

Mike then put together an interesting team of a people, all individual from one another yet all related to Rock County. For more than an hour we discussed what the county means to them (I’ve developed a super effective process of opening up participant’s creative brains and guiding them through the necessary brainstorming). What a fun time! I learned so many appreciative qualities of this area of south central Wisconsin. I daresay the participants did too—open-minded thinking always gives people perspectives they didn’t have before.

One of the objectives for the Breadbasket logo is that it work both independently and together with the RCHS logo. Therefore, it needs to have its own identity, yet coordinate.

Here’s the RCHS logo.

Rock County Historical Society logo, Janesville, WisconsinThe logo is very befitting to the society; the icon replicates its Lincoln-Tallman House and the typeface represents the Craftsman-style of its other buildings.

We decided the red color that RCHS uses in all its visual communications would be the coordinating factor. Rather than choosing one or the other of the two eras represented in the RCHS logo, we went with a generalized advertising style that would have been common in the late 1800s to early 1900s, a time frame common inclusive of both eras.

Rock County Historical Society

Rock County’s food history is fascinating. Like much of Wisconsin, it evolved as a wheat-growing county in the mid-1800s to a dairy-producing county in the 1900s. Today it celebrates everything from large acreages of field corn, to specialized farmers markets, orchards and vineyards, all of which work together to make up Rock County’s enticing breadbasket of food.

So here you have it: RCHS’s own breadbasket of food! I’m anxious to see the Breadbasket displays and the great programs the RCHS puts together in the next year!

 

 

 

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Gardening in the Dead of Winter

January 30, 2013 Leave a Comment

Michelle Eggert, ConferenceDirect, ad in National Gardener MagazineToday there’s a blistering blizzard outside but working on this gardening ad is like getting flower catalogs in the mail—spring is always just ahead!

Michelle Eggert, of ConferenceDirect, called me a few weeks ago about doing an ad for National Gardener Magazine. As a certified meeting professional, she helps organizations locate and secure venues for their gatherings. She has more than 20 years’ experience, so she’s obviously a proven winner at what she does. But she also wants to break ground in a new market—that of the garden clubs—and she needs to reintroduce herself.

As Michelle and I brainstormed her audience’s demographics, we concluded many garden clubs have little experience in finding venues for their conferences. In fact, not only do they lack the know-how, they don’t even understand how hard it can be. Our objective is to present them with the challenge at hand and show how Michelle can help.

Here’s what we’ve come up with.

We want to talk shop, but not conference planning shop. We want to communicate directly to gardeners, but not in an overly pun-ish way. Above all, we need to do this knowing we have only a micro-moment of the viewers’ attention.

Thanks to Michelle, her husband, her gardening friends, and my daughter (who has more creativity than she knows), we’ve accomplished these goals beautifully!

 

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Schools Using the Harley-Davidson Effect

September 11, 2012 2 Comments

St. Peter's Lutheran School, Helenville, WI, 1906

There’s a really long article by management guru H. Donald Hopkins (Temple University) entitled “Using History for Strategic Problem-Solving: The Harley-Davidson Effect.” In it he tells of corporate CEOs solving problems such as employee moral or product direction simply by examining their own history. And because Hopkins champions Harley-Davidson, his thinking has become known as the Harley-Davidson Effect (although if you google this you’ll likely find more on the Harley-Davidson sound affects:-).

Anyway, my latest project has been an online program for the Wisconsin Lutheran State Teachers’ Conference. I know, I know, associating church with business gives a lot of people the heebie jeebies. After all, it’s the Holy Spirit that works in us, not some business theory, right?

I agree.

But I also go by the conviction that much of our God-given earthly knowledge works really well for his heavenly purposes. The Harley-Davidson Effect is a perfect example.

The Wisconsin Ev. Lutheran Synod (WELS) schools have a strong history in Wisconsin and throughout the U.S. There are 337 schools nationwide, some of them dating back to the mid-1800s. They’re parochial in nature, yet they face the same problems of budget, integration and student-teacher ratio as does every other school. Nowadays congregations do a lot of strategizing and praying just to keep their school doors open.

This year the WLSTC chose “Your Statutes Are Our Heritage” as its conference theme, based on Psalm 119:111. For the program (click here to check it out), we used historical photos to help convey this message. We asked congregations to dig into their archives and, wow, did they do some digging! Not only did people send photos, they also included anecdotes of how their schools were started, what their classrooms were like a hundred years ago, and so many more fascinating stories.

Strategically or historically, however you want to look at them, these photos and stories are poignant reminders that schools have overcome many challenges. They’re proof of so many blessings throughout the generations. And they evoke a sense of pride in the educational work God has allowed them to do.

“Your statutes are my heritage forever; they are the joy of my heart,” Psalm 119:111.

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