This week I had the privilege to chatting with Liseli Sitali at In Her Corner about the highs and lows experienced throughout my career, especially in relation to Hackney Laces. From the rape threats to winning BBC Sports Personality of the Year for London, it sure has been a ride. Sharing my learnings ahead of our 10 year anniversary was incredibly cathartic. I hope you like it.
LISTEN HERE.
When you work in a creative environment (and are social distancing or self-isolating), keeping close and collaborative can feel hard. Here’s a list of tools that can help that I’ve found useful.
Video calls
Whereby – A solid backup if Google Hangouts isn’t working. In this free version, we can have up to 4 people so good for small group chats.
Slack – you can make video calls in platform
Writing
Google docs – Obvs.
Designing / Making
Miro – like a collaborative whiteboard, complete with post-it notes
Figma – design platform for digital projects and products
Marvelapp – great for prototyping or showing flat designs
Canva – thousands of design templates, really good for social posts
Postermywall – quick poster and flyer design with loads of templates
Slidesgo – thousands of Google slides / Powerpoint templates
Workshops with clients
Mentimeter – amazing UX, lots of functionality
Slido – polls and engagement tool
Fun Retro – good for lists and reflection
Tasks and project management
If you know of more that have worked for you, please share!
The most commonly used opening line of every newsletter, email and other comms I’ve received this week as a response to coronavirus is “we’re living in unprecendented times”. One anomaly was from the To Write Love on Her Arms team which led with “Hope will not be cancelled”. That’s my mantra of the moment right now.
I’m starting a newsletter. In the absence of sharing recommendations and inspiration in person with friends and family, I’ll do it virtually. Starting now ..
PS – The above is not my newsletter. It’s a preview of what’s to come. Drop me a line if you want to subscribe.
Brand strategies should be clear. Compelling. Deliberate. And yet, building one can sometimes feel like none of these things.
Every agency, company, and strategist may have their own terms and jargon when building a brand strategy. This can also vary depending on what market you’re working in. I find this confusing, so I made a lexicon of some of these seemingly interchangeable terms.
This is not exhaustive so please send me other terms to know to add to this.
Every project is different in terms of what’s needed for insight, so I like to capture and share ones I have used recently in case others find them helpful. Here’s a little roundup of ones from this week:
Atlas of Emotions – This interactive tool categorises human emotions and responses. It’s super cool and useful for self-reflection and managing teams.
Connected Life Report – The content of this annual report isn’t as interesting than the data comparisons that you can do. If you explore year-on-year differences and geographical comparisons, there are a lot of nuggets (like Brits use ad blocking more than any other geography)
Similar Web – Handy for all those times you *wish* you had access to a client or competitors Google Analytics. Using a combination of sources, including partner website data and open source data, you can get a snapshot of how a website compares to others and other helpful data like referral sources and ad effectiveness.
Alex Scott has long been a hero of mine. The number of barriers she’s smashed through in football, in media and in her life is remarkable. So you can imagine the sheer giddiness I felt when she came along to Laces to surprise the girls (one her day off which I might add, making her even more of a legend).
Thank you so much to the Female Lead for making this happen.
At Laces this week Portia Ferrari and Glamour magazine to share what life is like as a female footballer and being in the team. The interest in women’s football ahead of the World Cup is growing, and it’s so exciting.
Over the past 6 months, Hackney Laces has been working with Sisterhood, a brilliant social enterprise that builds confidence in young women, and London Football Journeys, a charity that uses film and football to strengthen communities.
Through workshops and co-design sessions, Sisterhood has worked with the girls teaching them how to film and edit. And, empowering them to tell their stories as female footballers.
For International Women’s Day, the amazing folks at Girls on Film are putting on an evening of female football films, including the cult classic Bend it Like Beckham. There’s also a panel discussion where I’ll be speaking about the Laces, alongside documentary film maker Fleur Cousens who’ll be talking about her latest project Who Moved the Goalposts. Come along!
When I joined Nice and Serious, out of twenty people I was one of four women. It seemed strange to me that an agency that’s so values driven in their work would have such a gender imbalance. After speaking to the team about it, I was told that we get so many more male applicants than female. This is a reflection of the industry but it shouldn’t define the industry or be accepted. So, Nice and Equal was born as an experiment to understand what some of the underlying issues were and if there was anything we could do to fix this.