UNLEASHED: A NEW PARADIGM OF AFRICAN TRADE WITH THE WORLD

SOCIAL MEDIA . WEB REDESIGN . PODCAST . MARKETING MATERIALS

I met the author of Unleashed when I lived in Madison and I was just trying to start a freelance career in graphic design. My first job with him was to recreate over 40 figures for his book. After that was complete, we launched into an online book promotion endeavor together and created the Unleashed brand. 

SOCIAL MEDIA

As the media coordinator, I started the social media accounts, created and continually updated the headers and banners, and then created daily posts. As the team grew, my role developed into a team manager. I designed a media posting guide to keep everyone on brand. I would review posts before they were published to ensure facts were accurately quoted and spelling and grammar was correct. We had to share updates on blog posts, new podcast episodes, and monthly newsletter editions, as well as recent news related to the topics and vision of Unleashed.

Every week I reviewed the analytics on each platform to look for trends in posts that garnered the most responses and times that were most popular for audiences to be online.

WEB REDESIGN

The first edition of the Unleashed website was packed full of information about the book and the other projects the author had planned, however, it was too busy and it was unclear what the site was trying to sell. We also wanted to find a way to incorporate our newsletter into the website itself rather than use a third party service. The author and I discussed what we needed the website to do and what our main objectives were. Then we researched best practices and sample sites we liked that were similar to our type of book.

Once we had done our research, I drew up some page designs and shared them with the author and our webmaster. Once we agreed on the design, I created the layouts in Photoshop for the webmaster to use to build the site. I researched information about how many colors to use and how much of each is best on a website and kept that in mind throughout the site redesign process. 

We decided to not try to incorporate the newsletter into the website afterall. Instead we focused on tweaking the newsletter design and realized that having it hosted on the website was not crucial to achieving our overall goal. 

Finally, once the new website was created, we reorganized the old content and worked out what information we should keep and where it should be kept on the new site. We still wanted to include information about all of the author's plans, but the focus was promoting the book. After the old content was added in, I helped review all the pages to ensure that there was consistency across the website and checked for typos, formatting errors, and broken links.

 PODCAST

In 2016 we launched a new monthly podcast in an effort to create more organic content and share the mission of Unleashed in a new way. 

I created the logo (left) and then every month I recorded an introduction, edited the recording, wrote the content for the website and SoundCloud, and created social media posts. 

Sample podcast: The Correct Path for Long-term Sustainable, Regenerative Development for African Countries with guest Liz Grossman

MARKETING MATERIALS

In addition to the everyday social media postings, monthly podcast episodes and newsletters, I helped create any materials the author required. We tried a couple different things to try to boost book sales like a contest and online book tour. For any interested media, I designed a media kit. And finally, I also created a document that told the story of Unleashed for the author to share with professionals and economic leaders when he attended an UNIDO event, which we were able to share as needed in future correspondence to other individuals.

Book Tour Information Kit

Media Kit

The Unleashed Story