IX Use Case: David Baldwin Keeps It Close To home
Baldwin&, pre-Covid
Leave it to David Baldwin to come up with an application of Ideasicleˣ that I hadn’t seriously considered. We’ve been in BETA for a few months now and the first was with David’s advertising agency, Baldwin&, out of Raleigh, NC. Technically it was earlier in development than I wanted to begin the BETA, but David has been an original Ideasicle Expert since 2010 and he had a really great way to use the Ideasicleˣ platform that I really wanted to see, and one we can all learn from.
Three separate internal teams of four all working off the same brief.
Baldwin& had a quick turnaround pitch and created three teams of four people to crack the same assignment. I was a little nervous about doing one BETA at this point, let alone three at one time. But we got all twelve of the Baldwin& employees onboarded and they got to work.
One day later I checked in with the project organizer and she said, "Team 1 is ON FIRE with 20 ideas! WHOOT!" That's what we like to hear.
Benefits of using your own people with Ideasicleˣ projects.
The most obvious benefit of using your own people is that, unlike recruiting from our pool of professional freelancers within the Ideasicleˣ platform, you don’t need to pay your own employees. Well, any more than you already do, that is. But it gets better.
Using your own employees, particularly when most of the country is in lockdown, is a wonderful way to get them coming up with ideas together in a dynamic virtual environment. While Ideasicleˣ was not developed in reaction to COVID-19, it can certainly come in handy these days to keep your people productive. But it gets even better than that.
One thing we know from 10 years of research with the original Ideasicle is that having a diverse team of four people leads to exponential ideas (more on that here). Diverse in their humanity, but also diverse in their professional perspective. When using your own employees in an Ideasicleˣ project you can choose a team of four people from different disciplines within the agency. People who may not normally work together like a PR person, a promotions specialist, a writer, and an art director. Or maybe a brand planner, a social media person, an account guy, and a writer. The possibilities are endless.
What you get out of this approach is diversity in thought and better ideas. What your teams get is the respect of being invited and an opportunity to work with different people throughout the company.
Benefits of multiple teams on one project.
It was this idea of David’s that I hadn’t considered, nor ever tried. Putting three separate teams together all working against the same brief. It allows the customer to experiment with different combinations of people to see where they might go. It’s like being a general manager of three baseball teams, the teams’ careful composition increasing the odds that certain strategic areas are covered.
I reached back out to David and asked him specifically how it was using three teams on the same brief and here’s what he said:
David Baldwin
“There’s a real pushback in our industry about ‘everyone can be a creative.’ Ideasicleˣ skirts this, and actually empowers your culture by creating a forum where it’s just about ideas in their purest forms. Then the ‘creatives’ can take them and apply their craft to the truly great ones. In our case we had three interdisciplinary teams working on one assignment and got hundreds of ideas to choose from. The platform is invaluable.”
So there you have it. When you purchase a subscription to Ideasicleˣ, you have access to infinite possibilities when it comes to team assembly. You can hire professional freelancers within the system, you can invite freelancers you love who are not in the system yet, you can use your own employees, or even a combination.
Assembling the perfect team is part of the fun of Ideasicleˣ, and part of the power.
Will Burns is the founder and CEO of Ideasicleˣ.
Follow him on Twitter @willoburns.