Putting our energy—and creativity—into our work

As the initial shock of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent shutdown of business leads to another month of staying at home, we, like everyone else, are left worrying about the unknowns and the people we care about. But at d.trio, instead of feeling helpless we’re focusing on what we can control and do for our clients. We’re still at full force, working remotely and staying busy with a number of interesting projects. Above all, we’re thankful we can help our clients navigate the marketing waters during this very difficult time. In this issue of our newsletter, you can read about some of the projects we’re working on—and how we’re getting the word out about businesses that are still running and that have relevant products, services or content to share.

In addition, our owner, Megan Devine, had the honor of being interviewed for the Movers and Shakers business column in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Check out the article and her follow up blog post, Moving and Shaking, on what it was like to go through the process of being interviewed. Finally, in our Keep Safe and Keep Talking blog post, we offer some things that companies can do now to survive and thrive during the downturn. Stay safe and healthy!

Keeping up with our fast-changing world

The world is changing at a rapid pace these days. And your business communications need to keep up. Here are a few ways we’ve partnered with our clients to deliver urgently needed messages to their customers:

• We created two consumer information pieces for Synchrony to post on their internal portal. One on COVID-19 specifically, and the second on crisis management in general. We also moved quickly to adjust the messaging on some display banners to be more sensitive to the current market conditions.
• Elan develops a quarterly newsletter that we’ve designed and produced for many years. The current edition has required several rapid-fire updates to keep up with the fast-changing global situation.
• We were also able to assist SunTrust—now Truist—with a statement insert on COVID-19—turning revisions in a matter of hours to meet their delivery needs.

How GIFs are keeping us sane

Back in the old days, when we conducted business from a shared office space, our small group of marketing nerds used humor to get through our sometimes-stressful days. With everyone working remotely, those moments of humor and goofing around have been snatched away like the last 24-pack of toilet paper from Costco. How are we coping? With GIFs, of course. Yes, those silly animated ‘Graphics Interchange Format’ images are bringing a lot more joy into our lives than we care to admit, yet here we are.

Tim likes to send one early each day to the group as his way of saying “good morning”.

Megan, never one to leave a person hanging, always digs up a fun response.

Fred can’t help but remind us that Minnesota’s weather has a big impact on our moods.

In one-on-one conversations, they are slipped in for some added humor to break up the day or to remind each other that we haven’t lost our need to giggle.

There have even been rumors of entire conversations being had between Beth and Danette with only GIFs.

Silly? Yes. Immature? Definitely. Time-waster? Probably. But we all need humor right now wherever we can find it, and GIFs are bringing some to our little corners of the world.

AFTER HOURS

The d.trio team is finding all kinds of ways to fill up our extra hours at home.