Fighting Burnout—and Looking Good Doing It
There are many mundane tasks that can slowly chip away at an AEC marketer’s soul. But little could be more boring—or more frustrating—than mindlessly formatting proposal after proposal. Many a marketer has dedicated hours upon precious hours to repeating the same task over and over while never getting ahead in the production game.
“I believe it’s a major factor that leads to early burnout in our industry,” says Julie Shaffer, CPSM, owner of Shaffer Creative, LLC.
Early in her career, Julie quickly figured out that she wanted to infuse creativity into the proposal process and develop strategic messaging to win work, not manually format project sheets and resumes ad infinitum. She knew that Adobe’s InDesign software had the ability to automate a variety of processes, so she spent several years of her career investigating this powerful tool. She honed her InDesign skills and discovered a host of quicker, more efficient ways to format content, whether the course text is coming from Microsoft Word or a database. She continuously perfects the process with each new InDesign update (#neverstoplearning).
Not one to keep game-changing knowledge to herself, Julie started training marketers, sharing some tips and tricks to make their lives easier. The training sessions started small, in the form of lunch events for her local SMPS chapters. But these workshops soon grew into in-house marketing team training and courses for SMPS chapters all over the country, with sessions lasting anywhere from two hours to three full days!
As a bonus, Julie provides workshop attendees with a workbook offering insight for all levels of InDesign users. Like her own InDesign journey, the workbook gets expanded with each training session and software update.
On April 6, 2020, Shaffer Creative celebrated Julie’s InDesign workbook winning GOLD in the international Hermes Creative Awards’ Print Media | Publications category! Hermes Creative Awards, administered and judged by the Association of Marketing and Communication Professionals, is based on scoring criteria and recognizes outstanding work in the industry while promoting the philanthropic nature of marketing and communication professionals. The team is thrilled, and Julie is overjoyed that this labor of love is helping marketing coordinators all over the country do their jobs more efficiently and effectively.