Self-promotions for In-house teams
Working in an inhouse department certainly has it’s challenges, one of them being the notion of promotion to your internal clients. This was a recent question on In-house Designers Linkedin group. While I have a bunch of suggestions, here are three favorite tried and true methods:
- Make friends and influence people. There are always a few people that really take advantage of the services of your department. Conscript them to be ambassadors making sure that whatever project they are involved in, that your group is pulled in.Check in on your ambassadors from time to time to see what projects they are working on, and where you might help. It also helps to have a few friends in every department to let you know about new projects coming down the pipeline. Bonus points for friends that work across departments like yours does.
- Be nosy. If you see anything that does nto conform to standards or just plain ugly, step in and offer your services. In some cases do the work and present them the alternative. If it is breaking corporate standards (and always say ‘the corporate standards’, as if it is beyond your control, even if you came up with the ‘the corporate standards’) and they need to get in line. It helps to provide the tools for them to use. Such as an internal wiki..
- Get a module in employee orientation. Contact HR to get some time in new employee orientation to talk about branding, the services that your department offers and the tools at their disposal. Get them early before the bad habits set in.
Finally, some people will never get it, but persistence matters, be sure to document the efforts at outreach to the hold-outs. Either they will be told to work with your department or be left behind, but you’ve done your due diligence.
Image from Raysto
