The New BrianSiguenza.com

On this eve of the Fourth of July weekend, we held our weekly meeting via Zoom. My projects were a large topic of discussion because we want to roll out marketing efforts fairly quickly. The commercial has been sent for review along with my brochure. Our hope is to get a spokesperson on board to endorse the product we’ll be offering, someone who is part of the Olympic movement. On that note, my next step is to build the ICC website from scratch. I have been given the green light to purchase a domain through Bluehost and start creating the look and feel of the website. Outside of WordPress blogs, I have never made a fully-functional website from the ground up, so it is uncharted territory for me.

I am still not 100 percent on all the details of this product, namely how consumers will access it. Here is another hint that I am going to reveal about it: it is a fully-online experience, so the website will be connected somehow. That much I know. The rest is going to have to be trial and error. The good news is that it is not live yet. Some edits still need to be made to the product itself, so we have some time to generate the content and then tweak as necessary. Actually, with the three-day weekend coming up, I have a lot of time because it isn’t like I am going to head out and watch fireworks in a pandemic or anything like that.

A couple of things needed changing on the promo that I cut for the ICC. They want it just a little bit shorter and to change the contact information. It’s not anything that serious, so it didn’t take too terribly long to complete and send back. Keep in mind that while I have some pretty nice software at my disposal, it is not professional grade. That type of equipment costs money, something I do not have a lot of being a nonprofit communications specialist by day and MBA student by night. That said, I think what I have gets the job done, for now, so I see no need to put down cash for slick upgrades. All it takes is a little improvisation, as I alluded to in a previous post.

In addition to iMovie for editing and Canva for graphics, I took quality images off a site called Pexels where users grant a public license to disseminate the images as they see fit, including commercial purposes, which this would be. I think what I enjoy the most about creating content on a shoestring budget is the fact that it forces you to think outside the box as far as putting together a great promotional piece without all the bells and whistles that a Madison Avenue advertising agency has. I am coming up with some pretty good material for the ICC and I hope that it will not be too much longer before I am able to show it in all its glory.

I am now on round three of edits for the brochure that I’m putting together for the product. An e-mail was sent over with suggestions a few days ago but this is the first chance I have had to look at it. Overall, it is a good start. The main thing is changes to the copy in the brochure so it is more effective. A line-by-line review of cosmetic changes follows (J. Henson, personal communication, June 23, 2020). The list is very thorough, which is good because it leaves no room for doubt about what they want out of this. How to accomplish some of these is a different story. Having a typeface that is similar to the Space Force TV show was brought up again, but there is only so much I can do with the software that I have.

Over the years, I have created many different documents for public consumption and never received feedback as explicit as this. In past responses, I have been told what is wrong with the document and to figure it out myself. Not so with the ICC. It is a collaborative effort and while it is still up to me to make the adjustments, a member of the group says it would be better to do it a particular way, and here’s why. Again, no guesswork on my part, no having to clarify a request. It is very straightforward. And it demonstrates just how committed they are to putting out a quality product in every possible aspect.

In gathering data on different resources that exist for the security component we want to include in our product, there really are not a whole lot of firms offering that type of training. Certification is provided through higher learning institutions as part of a larger program, but the credit hours can run rather pricey. One school I found has a cost of approximately $495 per credit hour, but you need 12 hours to get the certificate. Once you figure the math, you’d be looking at almost $6,000 overall. Other programs have a single cost of about $495, but the content is remarkably different from what has been proposed to us. I will drop another breadcrumb for fun: a course in one of the programs deals with Israeli security, definitely a part of safety but we want to base our product on emerging trends that affect us all in some way, shape, or form.

I am sorry that I can’t provide more than cryptic clues at this point, but the project is still in the development stage so I have to keep things confidential. Everyone likes the direction where we are heading though, so it shouldn’t be too long before we can tell you more. In the meantime, I will keep plugging away at it and doing whatever the ICC needs me to. Being part of something still out of the mainstream is quite the adventure. There are challenges to it, but it’s a lot of fun too, so if I haven’t said it before, let me say now how much I appreciate getting to do this.

No such thing as a lazy Saturday for me, this is the longest time I have spent in one day doing work for the ICC thus far. I am in the process of continuing research on the safety component we’d like to add to our product. Also got an e-mail from Dr. Tiell this morning asking for modifications to the video I edited and sent over earlier this week. It is amazing to me how simple it is to share video clips nowadays. During my undergrad and into my broadcasting career, I would have to transfer content from Beta or a digital video recorder to VHS then send it through regular mail. Now it can all be stored in files on the cloud and sent electronically with the click of a button.

But I digress on that point. Dr. Tiell requested a shorter video than the four-minute, 34-second epic I presented. As a result, we went with a straight commercial. Two of them, actually. One was a sixty-second promo, the other thirty. I did have to do some recutting and additional voice tracking to extend it to the minute-long length that is standard in broadcasting. I was so invested in this project that I didn’t realize how much time had passed once I finished. And that is honestly what you want, to be engaged to where the world just stops and you lose track of all time. Again, once we get everything in place, I hope to be able to share the final product with you.

I am back on the market research beat this evening, doing a comparison of programs that might be similar to something else we want to offer. There is a gentleman who is interested in partnering with us on the expertise that he has in his field, so I’m looking at other organizations doing the same thing. It’s very early in the process so who knows what I’ll find, but my process will be to perform a Google search and visit the links for each result until there is no more relevance. As I have said previously, the Internet is chock full of information, a lot of it not what I want. Thus it will take a lot of patience and thoroughness on my part to get the appropriate results.

What I can tell you about the angle we want to take with this particular partnership is that it involves safety. Abraham Maslow famously came up with a structure that has five levels displaying the importance of a certain item to an individual. Safety is at the second level, right above food, water, air, and so on (Hopper, 2020). That right there tells you how important it is for people to feel safe, especially in this odd year of COVID and civil unrest. So I am hopeful, as is the ICC, that this is going to work out and we can offer another avenue for success to the market we want to reach.

We are in a pretty good place but keep chugging along so we can get our audience–and ourselves–to the higher levels of the Maslow hierarchy, which Hopper (2020) says deal with prestige and fulfillment.

Reference

Hopper, E. (2020, February 24). Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs explained. Retrieved from https://www.thoughtco.com/maslows-hierarchy-of-needs-4582571