Leadership

Getting organized: Building and driving a massive machine

Imagine your favorite sports team has just announced it is thinking about relocating. Now imagine all the die-hard fan clubs, loyal season ticket holders, small business owners, rebellious citizens, and some business service providers heard that there was going to be some sort of highly-promoted attempt to stop it, whatever that attempt was going to be.

The first days of the #SaveTheCrew movement are when I was brought in by a soccer league friend and one of the first leaders because he knew I had a broad marketing, advertising, social media, and creative background and because I was the one who had tipped him off to the news of the relocation as a fellow devastated lifelong fan.

It was evident that overwhelming support for his resistance project, whatever it was going to be, was more overwhelming than support at that point. I shut off my fandom and turned on my organizational management brain.

Taking stock in how disorganized and fractured the conversation was on our Slack messageboard we used as a hub for exchanging ideas, I pitched an organizational model to the group in the first public meetup I attended. I pitched a fully-formed organization that was a full-service marketing, PR, and advertising agency with an additional non-profit organization arm. Mostly, with so many people wanting to contribute we needed to figure out who was who, what they were actually good at, and segment groups based on specialty. This was a war and we needed to know what fronts we might need to address.

Enter the Committee phase of Save The Crew. Using the channel feature on Slack, we set up sub-messageboards for people interested in volunteering their time and talents to distinct audiences this group would need to speak to, influence, coordinate with, and address. There were committees for communications, marketing, PR, merchandising, community outreach, government outreach, local business outreach, legal affairs, and one overarching channel for a smaller circle of leadership where the heads of each initiative could roundtable and provide updates.

Save The Crew was now professionalized. We knew where we had lapses or were overextended and needed to bring in outside vendors and expertise into our leadership circle (we soon added huge support in the PR and marketing/media buying departments). And even if all the final pieces and talents were not in place, we had a committee ready to push back against all sides of a false narratives about any sector of our community. We were now managing a democracy of specialists.

See the full team by visiting the Save The Crew website here.

Click each topic below for a snapshot of my role with Save The Crew

LEADERSHIP
• Organizational consulting
• Creative vendor procurement & partnership

MESSAGE STRATEGY & BRANDING
• Messaging & media response
• Brand ethos
• Consensus building across sectors and audiences

CREATIVE DIRECTION, CONTENT DEVELOPMENT, & ADVERTISING
• Creative media
• Traditional media campaigns
• Social media campaigns

MARKETING & EXPERIENCE ACTIVATIONS
• Events & Appearances
• Community & Organizational Partnerships