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Matthew Berger
CONTENT DESIGN
Work · About
CONTENT STRATEGY / UX
Style guides / brand voice
User education / onboarding
Information architecture
Notifications / errors / ads
Product strategy
Chatbots
Personalized content
Product-generated emails
MARKETING
Blogs
Success stories / case studies
In-product marketing
Emails
Reports / white papers
EDITING
SQUIRRELS
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Success stories
& case studies
We love doing a little bit of everything, but if we had to pick just one speciality it would be success stories/case studies. Due to our journalism background -- well, my journalism background, although Mad does like to sniff out a good story -- we put stakeholders and clients at ease while interviewing them about projects, quickly track down all the other info we need, and put together stories that are as engaging to read as they are informative. We've been producing these sorts for stories for eight years now:
Airbnb
A week before its 10-year anniversary, the home-sharing giant had a plan for a series of 10 stories about its first 10 years. But those stories still had to get written. That's where we came in. Helped by some interviews and preliminary research the marketing team had already done, we crafted articles that showed not just how far the company had come but how far the hosts and travelers and partners that use the platform had come along with it. The result was a package of stories that showed a community growing up along with a company. They're here.
Rudolph + Sletten
Looking to turn past successes into future ones, the general contractor reached out to have us write a few case studies for its magazine, which goes out to past and potential clients. We read up on building lingo, interviewed a couple people who worked on the projects and wrote up tight articles that showed the firm facing down the inevitable challenges and creating innovative new buildings.
Some samples:
A modern courthouse for a modern downtown
Bioengineering building sets UCSB up for future
SL Environmental Law
Requesting "a New Yorker-style article," the San Francisco law firm contracted us to write a 3,000-word feature that would tell the story of one of their cases from the perspective of their client, a small Central Valley town. There were a few problems though: all the lawyers who had worked on that case had moved on to to other firms and there was only one person we could interview. But with a little extra research and a lot of creative storytelling, we spun a story about sweet potatoes, consumer protection law and microscopic worms that is as fun to read as it was to write -- and showcases the firm rushing in to help save the day. You can read it here.
Marine Stewardship Council
In a previous life, I wrote my master's thesis on fisheries policy at the London School of Economics. Later in that life, the sustainable seafood eco-certification label MSC reached out to have us use that expertise to write a series of articles about the impact for fisheries who had been certified. If you also have an odd expertise in fisheries, it won't come as a surprise that not all of the fishermen we talked to had good things to say about the MSC. But we acted as intermediaries and made sure they felt they were heard and understood, and then got them to remember the positive benefits. Here's a sample from that work.
Center for Clean Air Policy
The NGO wanted to help increase funding for projects that helped developing countries decrease their greenhouse gas emissions. The EU had helped fund some recent projects. So they got us to write a series of case studies about them -- interviewing people all over the world, researching the economic and environmental impacts they'd had, and writing it all up in concise, engaging copy -- with the hope that the success stories would gin up enthusiasm for new projects. They were compiled in a report and was distributed at the UN's climate change summit in South Africa in 2011. Here's a handful of the stories.




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