It's a wrap! January 2020

"When I first received an email from you, I thought it could be spam."

That's probably not something you should say when giving a workshop to a new client.

Yet I realized it's how you feel the moment when something you've wished for finally comes true.

At the beginning of 2019, I wrote a long blog post in which I said I'd like to get involved in a project that has to do with the EU elections.

It's not that I wanted to work with a specific party.

It's more that I wanted to work on the initiative "Europe."

Did anything happen after I published this blog post?

No.

Or...at least not until the very last week of 2019.

So there it was – this astonishing email.

This email I thought was spam was from the German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMFUS), an organization most of us only know from history books and in the context of the post-war funds that helped rebuild Europe. The email was a request, inquiring whether I'd be available for a meeting to discuss a potential collaboration.

I was surprised, to say the least.

My clients don't usually "just google me." Most of them inquire because of a personal recommendation. My website's typically been a tool for people to get assurance I'm legit and reliable.

Having people find me and inquire to work with me because they googled me is new. It's only been happening since November. And, as you might remember, it was in November that I celebrated my fifth anniversary of working as a freelance community strategist.

It takes five years for any useful SEO to kick in. At least in my case!

As you can imagine, after posting in January 2019 that I'd like to work on Project Europe, I was super excited about this email.

The Open European Dialogue (TOED) is a neutral organization that creates space for policymakers from different European countries to have an informal dialogue.

What is especially surprising to me is that no one else does that. European policymakers don't mingle unless they're appointed to work at the EU government and so TOED was founded out of a real necessity.

In 2015, Mercator Open Dialogue (the name was changed to The Open European Dialogue in 2020) was founded by the GMFUS to facilitate dialogue between Germany and Greece. The leadership identified a need for their expertise caused by current political matters and the sudden influx of people seeking refuge in Europe. The sudden changes put strains on cross-European relations, and there was a need for more empathetic exchange between policymakers.

With the recent name change, the team saw an opportunity to take a second look at their brand messaging and branding. And that's why they contacted me.

During our initial meeting, I learned that they were talking to a few other agencies and it was up to me to create a compelling pitch and find a designer I could collaborate with.

I decided to pitch a collaboration with two designers and give GMFUS a choice of who they'd like to work with. I suggested collaborating with Veronika Sinead or Maximilian Mauracher – both incredible designers.

I'm happy to say Max and I won the pitch!

There are several advantages to working with freelancers like me and Max instead of agencies.

First of all, as a client, you get what you've signed up for.

With many agencies, the leadership makes sales, and it might be an intern who'll do the work at the end of the day. The smaller the client, the less of a priority they usually are for an agency.

Working with freelancers is also cheaper because agencies have overhead, and it doesn't always make financial sense to take on projects with smaller budgets, like many freelancers can.

Usually, it's also much more flexible and faster because a freelancer can only take on so much work; they are also able to deliver promptly.

It's these four reasons that led to a fruitful collaboration request, I'd say.

We've already done the workshop, and I sent off the workshop summary already, so, once we receive feedback, it's time to work on the design and messaging.

I enjoy facilitating workshops and teaching. Right at the beginning of January, I taught a class on how to use social media as a creative at Hyper Island in Stockholm.

I also gave a workshop on internal advocacy to WAGO.

I've recently started working with Target Internet to deliver workshops on behalf of Hootsuite, a nifty social media management tool, to companies in the German-speaking region.

If you've been reading my newsletter to freelancers, you might have already noticed I've been having a bit of a rant about banking and managing one's finances. I'm excited to say that my rants led to something positive: After six weeks of negotiating, I'm happy to say that I signed bunq, a sustainable bank from The Netherlands, as a client. I'll publish a whole blog post about it in the next couple of days, so please keep an eye out if you'd like to know why I care so much!