Hello world!

First landscape (acrylic on board) 2010

‘evening all!

Wordbone signing on for the first time, so gimme some love till I get the hang of blogging. As a student of the word, I’m  digging up the bones, writing down the bones and burying a few I would rather forget.

For starters, a talk I shared with a couple of friends at school this week about a place where I found bones….

I set down in the middle of a wilderness, at the fork of two great rivers, paralyzed like a deer in the headlights. My trusty tools – a compass, survival gear, I felt like Les Stroud the Survivorman! I had instincts to avoid the swamplands, and roadmap to find food. But, you never know what it is that you can do, until you get there. You never know, until you live it…a new job, I mean.

I had heard about the whistling in the early morning, before the others got there. Some said it was a drifter, a hobo that curled up one cold night, covered himself in hay, and decided to stay, forever. After all, it had been a horse stable built on the bones of traders who met at The Forks for thousands of years. Later it was an engine repair shop, with puffing steam locomotives nursed back to health at the tender hands of the immigrants chattering in old world tongues.

As I entered the big barn doors that first day as publicity coordinator, it was known as the MB Children’s Museum. I was to boost attendance, launch two new galleries, introduce technologies, support school programs, fundraising, rentals, merchandising and board priorities.

If I had paid attention to the anatomy of the job, examined the old bones of its systems, found the creaks and weaknesses, trained to condition my team muscles, things might have been different. Instead, a year later I left the job, wondering, what happened to the bones?

By bones, I also mean real, human bones. Peter, the gallery project manager and friend from the CBC, unearthed human bones from the foundation subfloor of the gallery. He set them carefully on the window ledge above our shared desk. Construction halted. Stakeholders were consulted. Every morning, with growing unease, I contemplated the bones. Within days, all hell broke loose.

• My PowerMac crashed destroying desktop publishing artwork, subscription campaigns, newsletter content and funding appeals.
• Canada Post mail carriers called a strike for two months halting our flagship Christmas mailings
• And, backroom tensions between administration and Board threatened to derail critical stakeholder participation in the launches of the galleries.

So what did I do in the face of impending doom? I took off! Everyday, for ten days, with the snow piled two feet high, I would turn on the big ovens to warm the Museum tent to just above freezing at BOO AT THE ZOO. Within two hours over 3000 pairs of tiny mittened hands would be colouring and gluing magic wands together, to protect them from the tigers roaring back of the tent, and the scary ghosts and goblins in the forest maze outside.

The immediate emotional payoff for toddlers through pre-teens was warming their toes and hearts against the scary darkness. The public relations opportunity for the Museum and the Park Zoo, was to place the SuperPass in the hands of 1000 parents every night, over 10,000 prospects in total. The first joint membership of its kind, with a price point of $82 per family, the offer featured savings of over $500, a 2-for-1 coupon and tracking to build our prospect database.

But what about the bones? Eventually digging the foundations for the gallery continued. And, my triple threat Mac/Mail/Mutiny disaster was solved by finding backup templates, farming out mailings to direct distribution channels and changing dynamics between board and executive. My real challenge was to create excitement for the first gallery in North America dedicated to hands-on experience of power, electricity and infrastructure (Potholes and sewage, how do you make those sexy?).

Again starting with the preferences of our clients, I recruited Red River College Creative Communications students to create the Museum’s first online interactive game about infrastructure, construction and safety. The game was layered into a WFP comics contest to name the gallery – Wonderworks, invented by a precocious three year old.

But beyond this was another public relations opportunity to leverage stakeholders participation from the Infrastructure Council, three governments, 80 industry leaders and 100 corporations. How do you create a sense of ownership and participation, not just dollars and cents?

The mini-backhoe got a load of quarry sand delivered by a CEO from Springfield. Gary Filmon the premier at that time worked alongside engineers to de-bug hydro displays that wouldn’t switch on. (How many engineers does it take to change a light bulb? You don’t want to know!) When Waterworks exhibits backed up, city Water and Waste officials got their hands dirty, tinkering to adjust water flows.

Watching serious adults turning into excited little kids was no more miraculous than other transformations beyond the floors of the gallery.

• A new source of revenue, the award winning Wonderworks promotional product line launched online thru Elements of Nature.
• Averaged yearly attendance of 200,000 visitors suddenly spiked with 40,000 new members within four months.
• Publicity surrounding Boo at the Zoo SuperPass, Celebrity Storytelling at McDonalds I Love to Read Month and a free New Year’s Eve transformed a deficit of sixty three thousand dollars to a surplus of two hundred and thirty thousand dollars!
• And, the Museum now had a new international profile, with calls to purchase Wonderworks blueprints and community approaches.

It’s all about the people. If you pay attention to the people – their real needs and how they want you to fill them, they will tell you how to overcome computer crashes, mail strikes and mutiny..…People drive the systems and maintain the tools, provide the backup when things go wrong.

It’s all about the people. Not what they can do for you, but what you can do for them. And, if you stumble across any old bones along the way, it doesn’t hurt to give them a little respect.

Keep your bones dry as we head into a soggy winter, signing off till next week, wordbone.