These personal growth projects challenged me to learn new tools and skills and demanded dedication, perseverance and thinking outside the box.
DeLaval public website
Managing a public website was a new endeavor for me, Episerver (CMS) and Inriver (PIM) were unfamiliar platforms to pick up and ultimately become a skillful and efficient site manager with these tools. I was responsible for the United States and Canada websites, with Canada being a dual language site. A revamped USA website went live on April 1, 2017, Canada went live the following year on March 9, 2018. The website was “refreshed” to be device responsive, a user friendly structure and showcase strong visuals. New content for our customer testimonials and newsletter articles were added.
My role was to collaborate with the online team based in Stockholm, Sweden to champion the project for our North America market. I lead the project on all levels for our market - bringing in stakeholders to review and edit their areas of expertise and choose new content to be added. The website content was moved to the new site through my hands. The project presented many challenges with schedule delays, platform hiccups and unforeseen road bumps. I stayed focused and we adjusted where need be and kept moving forward with the project.
The priority project was not done yet and I had more work to do. In June of 2021 the USA website “upgrade” went live. Canada’s dual language website “upgrade” went live in February of 2022. The upgrade allowed local markets in a global company to have more flexibility. The homepage content could be tailored to our campaigns, promotions and product highlights. The Learn section reflected the largest rework of our two websites. We had more freedom to feature content that spoke directly to our local customer’s needs and interests. We cut back excess material and presented relevant information and customer highlights - video farm tours.
The time and commitment to the website were reflected in the Google Analytics - the first seven months showed a steady increase in the United States website traffic.
82,087 Sessions = Up 84% compared to previous year
63,392 Users = Up 76% compared to previous year
178,261 Pageviews = Up 54% compared to previous year
Annual DeLaval calendar
Each year our Marketing Communications team produced a printed wall calendar that featured our local dairy farmers. It was a demanding process to gather the high quality photos, farm data and equipment details while avoiding the repeat use of featured dairy producers. Our team had to balance the milking equipment evenly to showcase each category and divide the country regions equally. Our channel network of dealers would order and distribute the calendars to their local customers. The calendar footer was customized with each dealer logo and contact information. Distribution timing was important for the dealers as well.
The details and process of the calendar were many to juggle and ranged from the strict schedule to meet the printing and shipping deadline, collecting the order information in a timely manner, late edits, late orders and proofing the months and holidays of the calendar (all artwork was designed from scratch). These items were handled by the MarCom team and we came together each year to tackle the project head on. My hand was always in the design of the calendar and I worked with a trusted freelance artist to divide and conquer the layouts. We produced the calendar in both English and French and endless proofing rounds were repeated to get it perfect.
When I first joined the MarCom team we found it difficult to attain high quality photos for the calendar format. We addressed this by traveling to the farms ourselves across the U.S. to collect the photos we desired. Along the way we gathered more information from our farm visits - additional images for our marketing materials and conducted interviews for customer testimonials. This was a fantastic opportunity for me to get out from behind my desk and step onto the dairy farms to see for myself and interact with the cows and farmers first hand. Important note, wear tall rubber boots. I very much enjoyed my travels to the dairy farms across the United States.
In 2019, we held a photo contest to try something new and depart from the standard process of farm visits and team travel. The new format was met with dissatisfaction and feedback asked for the calendar to return to the previous version. Even in a digital world of social media, the dairy community enjoyed seeing other local farmers and learning about them in the printed DeLaval calendar.
The year of 2020 provided its own tough hurdles. Local photographers near the dairy farms selected were hired to take the high quality photos. Virtual farm tours had been introduced by another team in DeLaval to bypass the shelter-in-place rule. We added a QR code for the virtual farm tours to be featured. This added another aspect to highlight the farms and keep our audience engaged.
The annual calendar proved to be an ever evolving project and a chance to be creative with the solutions to our challenges. I appreciated the teamwork and synergy with my MarCom colleagues but also with other groups in the organization. My time visiting the dairy farms proved invaluable to my understanding of dairy farming and the dairy community.
Images of DeLaval® are owned by and reproduced with the permission of DeLaval Inc. and its affiliates.