IX Use Case: White Rhino Gets More Ideas In One Day Than In A Typical Week
Teri Sun, Chief Strategy Officer at White Rhino
“I personally am thrilled with how this process went. We got more great ideas in one day than I get in a week with the traditional creative process. What I love most is that I can put exceptional creative minds on a single challenge and I can see the power of team, of shared responsibility, and of encouragement as these multiple perspectives collide. It’s fun to watch unfold.”
White Rhino dives in.
Our second beta test was with Boston-area advertising agency, White Rhino. They were the first to use the full functionality of the platform. The job was handled by the agency's Chief Strategy Officer, Teri Sun. Here is their story.
Zoom Zoom
The agency had a client in the tech space (you've heard of this company) who wanted to redefine a category, a big category. I looked over Teri's shoulder using a Zoom screen-share as she on-boarded White Rhino as an Ideasicleˣ customer, opened up a new job, and searched the database of freelancers, which at that point was limited to our existing Ideasicle Experts from the “old” Ideasicle. She reviewed the many people, their expertise, and their bios, and selected a team of four using the platform. Each of those Teri selected were auto-sent emails notifying them.
Below is a screen shot of the powerful freelancer search tool:
Briefing the team.
Next was building the Idea Stream, where all the idea "action" happens, by uploading a video briefing and a pdf of the creative brief. Everything worked perfectly. One learning from the freelancers was that the briefing video went a little long. That's something I've faced with the existing Ideasicle as well. Best practice I've found is video briefings are best when under 10 minutes long. Lesson learned.
Managing the job.
At first, Teri wasn't entirely sure she was "doing it right." She gave me visibility into her job so I could see how the freelancers were working and how she was engaging with them. I have to admit I was really impressed with Teri. She was very encouraging of the freelancers' ideas, seeing the possibilities vs smacking them down, yet also wisely redirecting when the freelancers went a little off track. And that’s an important benefit of Ideasicleˣ - as the job organizer you not only have visibility into the freelance team’s creative process, you can contribute your own ideas with the hope of inspiring more ideas from the team.
The output function to PDF, where all the ideas from the entire session are output to a nice, clean pdf including the original idea posts as well as all the builds and riffs, was finished by our developer on the day Teri needed it and, by God, it worked! Still needs some formatting tweaks but overall it was functional.
Payments to freelancers.
Even the payment functionality was working...mostly. We found an issue with the integration with Stripe, our third-party transactions vendor, that we have since fixed. But each of the freelancers were both paid and rated by Teri for their performance on a 1-10 point scale against three measures: participation, quality of ideas, and teamwork.
not just beta, but better.
This beta was by far our most comprehensive yet. The heavy-lifting functionality of the platform worked perfectly. Still some glitches here and there that we’ve since fixed, but all-in-all I was thrilled to see it work so well. I only asked White Rhino to do one beta test, but I spoke with White Rhino’s CEO, Dan Greenwald, and he said Ideasicleˣ has transformed how they work as an agency. They’ve since conducted multiple idea projects for multiple clients.
Postscript:
Since publishing this post we got even more feedback from Teri. Here’s what she said:
“As I’ve done more Ideasicle X projects, I’ve realized the value of having such a diverse set of freelancers to choose from. I’ve been able to really find a nice mix of talent for varying project needs. It’s also been nice to put people with different styles on the same project. The multiple viewpoints really pushes the work further!”
“First 50” Promotion
I will soon be offering 50 annual subscriptions to Ideasicleˣ at half price. Only 50 so we can make sure the platform scales with utmost elegance. Everyone on our email list gets first dibs. Sign up below.
Will Burns is the founder and CEO of Ideasicleˣ. Follow him on Twitter @WillOBurns.