It’s Award Season

I just found out that three pieces of my work won awards in this year’s W3 Awards.

Start Where You Are, which won a Web Award and an Adobe Site of the Day, took a Gold Award.

Two others received a Silver Award: the Stowe “I Found It” rich media banner, a previous winner of an IAC award, and NewBulbInTown.com, for the energy efficiency utility Efficiency Vermont. New Bulb had previously won an Adobe SOD as well.

Those awards mark an end to an era: they’re my last awards for work I did at Kelliher Samets Volk. It was an amazing and somewhat unlikely run, given the fact that there were never more than 3 of us in the interactive group.  But we racked up a good deal of recognition.

For this last round, thanks again to Corey, Joe, The Hired Pens, Ken and all the others who helped make this work award-worthy.

VSAC is a Winner

The Web Marketing Association awarded StartWhereYouAreVT.org a Standard of Excellence award for Education in this year’s WebAward competition. The site was part of an innovative campaign I helped develop at KSV to get young teens interested in continuing their education.

We pretty much turned expectations and conventional wisdom on its head by creating a Web centric outreach aimed at rural kids. The awards are nice (it won an Adobe Site of the Day as well) but the reaction from the kids themselves (they deemed it a “rock star”) was proof that VSAC found a new way to reach their young audience. All this from an organization that originally expected a TV campaign.

The site lets kids create a visual college of  “who they are.” It gets them to start thinking about what they like to do, and how that might actually lead to a career.

I led the engagement planning, digital strategy and interactive work. Julie Kravetz did the amazing planning, and I was lucky to work with the great interactive team of Corey Machanic (ICD/AD), Anna Goldsmith (copy) and Joe Manley (Flash Development).

Congrats team!