Why Crossman Communications
A mid-sized municipality in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) hired Crossman Communications to write content for the city’s bi-annual newsletter. They needed a reliable researcher and strong writer who could get along well with municipal and elected officials while consistently meeting deadlines. The task was to research and write approximately 24 articles for three of the city’s six wards.
A Few More Details
The municipality was growing like gangbusters and used the newsletter to highlight city news in each of the town’s six wards. The newsletter was available at City Hall and online, and it was mailed to every home in the municipality; 165,000 copies of every issue were printed. Article topics might be anything from road widening and public park upgrades to updates on projects relating to the repurposing of land that formerly belonged to the local school board or provincial government.
As many as 30 interviews needed to be conducted for each newsletter issue, and the approvals process involved coordination with between 30 and 40 people.
How the Project Unfolded:
Crossman Communications organized an editorial schedule to establish deadlines for each aspect of the newsletter’s production. We worked closely with municipal councillors to identify topics and organize editorial line-ups for each ward, and we kept the councillors informed of our progress.
We conducted substantial online research to obtain as much information as possible about each topic area, and we interviewed municipal staff in order to get the most recent facts. We then drafted the articles and coordinated approvals with municipal and elected officials before submitting the articles to the Communications Advisor at the municipality for review.
Results:
This was a big project and it required an enormous attention to detail. It’s not just the writing that matters in a project like this: you need a strong ability to filter through large volumes of information and extract the important details, as well as great project coordination and the ability to get along with people. The result in this project was a large package of accurate, well-written, copy delivered on deadline, that told the municipality’s stories with accuracy and aplomb, and demonstrated to taxpayers how responsibly their tax dollars were being spent.