Blog Posts

The LeMoyne Center for the Visual Arts, a Tallahassee-based nonprofit art gallery and education center, asked Taproot Creative to help promote its 47th Annual Holiday Show. With memberships and private donations dwindling, LeMoyne sought to use this opportunity to demonstrate its cultural and economic value to the community and promote art as a legitimate business.

The Florida Chamber of Commerce hired Taproot Creative to conduct a usability study and technical audit of its website and use the research findings to effectively redesign the site. Through this process, we discovered that website visitors were overwhelmingly dissatisfied with their experience, primarily due to their inability to find relevant information quickly and easily. Furthermore, the lack of a consistent layout, poor aesthetics, technical flaws, circular navigation and unclear content jeopardized the Chamber’s brand in the minds of key stakeholders.

The Florida State University College of Social Work hired Taproot Creative to asses its existing brand and develop and implement an integrated marketing campaign to raise its profile among target audiences and attract top-notch students to its on-campus, online and distance learning programs.

I’m a sports fan, not a sports fanatic. There’s a difference.

Fans don their favorite team’s colors week after week and relish in the inevitable emotional roller coaster ride that characterizes a season. Fanatics, on the other hand, experience emotional extremes that distort their worldview and compel them to think and act in ways that often defy social norms. Fans innocuously paint their faces and wear foam fingers. Fanatics subversively throw punches and set cars on fire. Fans opine around the water cooler. Fanatics call in sick after their team misses a game-tying field goal that could have ultimately landed them in the Super Bowl (sorry Ravens die-hards). Fans would agree that college football lost a great coach this past weekend. Fanatics would claim the sport lost a great man.

Again, there’s a difference.

“Where do you want to go today?” That was the slogan Microsoft used in its first global image advertising campaign. Too bad it’s also become the way many so businesses and organizations run their marketing and communications programs. You know — a quarter-page ad here, a Twitter post there, and a press release every other week because they’ve always got something “new” and “unique” to tell us about. Does this describe your approach to marketing? If so, take it from Ice Cube: You better check yourself before you wreck yourself.

Nearly one year ago this week, an oil rig located 50 miles off the coast of Louisiana exploded into flames, killing 11 workers. As a result, millions of barrels of oil gushed into the Gulf of Mexico over the course of three months, and the event became known as the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history.

The emergence of social media has opened up a world of opportunity for nonprofits to build stronger connections with key stakeholders and broaden their reach. But when it comes to going digital, limited time and resources leave individuals at many of these organizations feeling clueless and overwhelmed. If you work or volunteer for a nonprofit, and you’re serious about using social media to your full advantage, here are eight things you need to know before getting started.

The FLORIDA Channel (TFC) is a public affairs programming service funded by The Florida Legislature and produced and operated by WFSU-TV. It features programming covering all three branches of state government, and is the state’s primary source for live, unedited coverage of the Governor and Cabinet, the Legislature and the Supreme Court. TFC hired Taproot Creative to redesign, restructure and develop its website from the ground-up shortly before the start of the Florida Legislative Session.

Let’s cut to the chase: Is PR dying a slow death?

In short, no. The ever-increasing popularity of social media has the communications industry in a tizzy about the future of public relations, some going so far as to call the press release irrelevant. We say, relax.