Our approach
To kick off the project, we held a brainstorming meeting with the Michigan Laborers team where they listed all of their article ideas. After the meeting, we took their ideas into consideration and came up with 5 key content categories that could repeat in each issue of the magazine–Industry Partnerships, Community Contributions, Politics, Training, and Legal/Financial issues. From there, we selected a timely and interesting topic in each of these categories for the first issue.
We wrote two of these articles by attending Michigan Laborers events to photograph and report on the highlights. We edited two articles submitted by in-house staff. And for the fifth article, we interviewed one of the client’s industry partners, crafting an informative piece.
At this point, one of the client’s main concerns was ensuring all areas of their organization were included in the magazine. Michigan Laborers is a parent organization that oversees 7 regional union branches in Michigan. They wanted the magazine to have an article from each branch, but were concerned that staff at the local branches would not take the time to contribute articles. We came up with a great solution– a member of our team set up interviews with the manager at each branch. We used this information to write a series of mini-articles highlighting unique news from each of the 7 branches.
Next, we created a series of creative ads for the Our Union Stories social media campaign, which we were developing alongside the magazine. We featured a longer-form version of an interview that was shared on the OUS social media pages. These pieces of content helped unify the Labor Union’s print and digital communications.
Next, we added all of the relevant organizational information—a motivational letter from Michigan Laborers management, an “ad” for their social media channels, and an easy to navigate staff directory.
We put extra time and attention into creating attractive front and back covers, and we coordinated with the client’s preferred union printer to ensure our design was print-ready. All-in-all, our efforts resulted in a beautiful 16-page magazine full of interesting content.
