The company has been in business for about a decade and sells it’s nutritional supplements mostly through direct marketing – using websites and advertorials strategically placed in niche magazines. I met the marketing director at the AWAI Bootcamp for copywriters and was hired to help launch a new product (Altitude RX), which helps prevent altitude sickness for those traveling from lower elevations to the mountains. They needed web copy and advertorials. Solution: With the marketing director, we came up with several segments of the prospective market (skiers and snowboarders, hikers and climbers, elk hunters, and military personnel operating at high elevation) and tailored the advertorials to those segments. The advertorials drove traffic to the web site, which was also SEO optimized to attract web searchers. The web copy covered all the segments and used special offers to convert site visitors to buyers. This was a classic problem-solution approach to the copy with this headline: “Tomorrow You’ll Have 25% Less Oxygen to Breathe … Is Your Body Ready?” Results: While the company does not release specific marketing results, the marketing director continued to hire me for numerous assignments for the next few years. Recently, Biomedical Research Laboratories made Inc. 500 magazine’s list of the nation’s fastest-growing private companies with a three-year growth rate of 1,137 percent. I like to think that I played a small part in their success.

Familiar with my work, the Superintendent of my local school district asked me to spearhead a campaign committee to get a $3.2 million bond issue passed in our community. The timing was terrible, though. The local papers and TV news were filled with negative stories about the district – one elementary principal was under suspension but still receiving full pay while waiting the results of a DUI charge and the district was spending tens of thousands of dollars on lawyers over an alleged “wrongful termination” lawsuit filed by the former technology coordinator. Even though most district technology was about 7 years old, the district could only do so much to help pass the bond issue. State laws prohibit school officials from actively campaigning to pass a bond issue and limit the district to providing objective information only. Solution: I volunteered my time to lead the citizen campaign committee, and we had a lot of negative sentiments to overcome. Working closely with school officials, parents, and concerned citizens, we put together a web site outlining the key benefits to the community and the school for approving this tax. Although it had been seven years since the district’s last significant investment in technology, it still seemed like the community had just recently voted to increase funding for technology. Our most powerful tool was a flyer I wrote and designed showing a “poster child” to illustrate the time perspective from a student’s point of view. It showed the same boy as a little kid when the last bond issue was passed and a 6-foot teenager at the time of the vote. The flyer detailed how the taxpayers’ overall school-tax bills would be going down (even if they passed the bond issue) because an older bond for a new building was ending. Results: While our campaign did not spark a landslide of support for the bond issue, the measure passed by a mere 18 votes. As the Superintendent later told me, “There was no way it would have passed without your efforts!” My daughter was just entering Kindergarten at the time, but now she is a tech-savvy 3^rd grader who gets to take home a school iPad every day to help her work on her math, social studies, and reading.