Marketing Scholarship 2017 – We help local businesses together!
Our fourth-quarter team-building event has always been about giving back to the community. After a few years of swinging hammers and wrapping gifts, it occurred to us, “Why not use the skills we ACTUALLY have, instead of nearly killing ourselves with power tools?”
That’s when we developed the GetUWired Marketing Scholarship. Every year, we choose a few worthy local businesses that need a marketing upgrade, and we give it to them … for FREE!
This year’s winners
This year, our winners were the Lumpkin County Sheriff’s Office, The Dahlonega-Lumpkin County Chamber of Commerce, United Karate, and Warrior Farms.
We chose these four deserving organizations out of the submissions we received from all over Lumpkin and Hall Counties. Our overall goal was to find businesses that could really use our help, and didn’t need more or less help than we could provide in one jam-packed day. Most importantly, we were looking for people with the determination to take what we did for them and run with it after all was said and done. Through a rigorous entry, interview, and vetting process, we narrowed down our list of fabulous entrants to these four winners. Then we got to work.
The Big Show – and Snow
Our 4th Quarter Team Building day is something we plan for months in advance. To say it’s extreme is a drastic understatement. On this day, our entire staff comes together to pull off marketing miracles in eight short hours, all in support of helping small businesses in our community reach new heights.
To add to the pressure, we woke up that morning to a “blizzard.” Please don’t laugh at us if you’re from up north. This is Georgia. Snow is scary here. But cancellation was totally out of the question. Come rain, sleet, snow or hail … we deliver on our promises! No amount of bad weather was going to stop us!
In the end, it all felt really quite festive. We and our guest-winners hunkered down, turned on the fireplace, and got to work!
Warrior Farms
Warrior Farms is a veterans’ service non-profit that helps vets who are suffering with PTSD. Through agri-therapy, which in layman’s terms is “farming as therapy,” Warrior Farms helps veterans use their PTSD as motivation, not a disability.
Warrior Farms founder Chris Dorsey is a U.S. Army veteran who suffers from debilitating PTSD. When he returned to civilian life, he quickly found that returning soldiers didn’t get the support they needed and deserved from the currently available resources offered to veterans. So Chris took matters into his own hands and developed Warrior Farms.
For Warrior Farms, our goal was to help Chris and his wife, Ainsley, get the word out about their incredible program, which is still relatively new on the veteran’s services scene. To that end, we built a gorgeous and easy-to-navigate website, wrote his first set of blogs, trained them to write their own blogs, set up email marketing and a newsletter, and helped them with social media management and a content calendar.
Dahlonega-Lumpkin County Chamber of Commerce
Our purpose is to help small businesses succeed. And we figured, if we want to help small businesses succeed, what better way to do that than offering a marketing scholarship to a local organization with our very same goal – the Dahlonega-Lumpkin County Chamber of Commerce?
The Chamber does SO MUCH for our local businesses and economy, and on a shoestring budget, no less. So we wanted to help them accomplish their goal of bringing more tourists to our beautiful mountain town. We set up an easy-to-use mailing system for them and created more than 20 ads and landing pages, targeting tourists from all over the southeast in an effort to increase the number of visitors to Dahlonega. We’d like to say it was super hard, but it wasn’t. We love our mountain home so much, it was easy to wax poetic about its charms.
The Lumpkin County Sheriff’s Office
What better way to help our community than to assist an organization committed to keeping it safe? When the Lumpkin County Sheriff’s Office came to us in need of a new website, we were happy to oblige.
Until now, the Sheriff’s Office only had a single page on the Lumpkin County Government website with bare-bones information. Basically, if you needed anything from the Sheriff’s Office that couldn’t go through 911, you had to call them on the phone like it was 1992.
Also, there was no way to disseminate information to the community about all the programs they offer, such as the Victim’s Advocate program, which provides ongoing services to those who have been a victim of a crime.
The majority of our staff banded together to build the Sheriff’s Office a beautiful website that’s easy to navigate and showcases all their community programs and resources. Now, their phone lines won’t be clogged with non-emergency calls, and the community has access to a lot of great programs and information they may not have known about before. Check out the website at www.lumpkincosheriff.com.
“It’s always an honor to be able to help a local organization such as the Sheriff’s Office in their quest to protect and inform the community and provide resources so people can get what they need easily,” said Project Manager Chris Johnessee, who led the project.
United Karate
United Karate, with locations in Dahlonega and Dawsonville, came to us in need of a total marketing makeover. We were bowled over by owner Brad Bowelle’s enthusiasm and spirit, and we loved the United Karate motto “Building leaders, one black belt at a time.” We were moved! So we put the wheels of expert marketing into motion for Brad.
Our total marketing makeover included a brand-new website, new logo, all-new web content, Google calendar setup, email marketing setup that automatically integrates with his newsletter, SEO, social media advertising, and more.
Not only was Brad a blast to work with, he even gave us an awesome shout-out on Facebook, too. (And coined the term “Web-Dev Master Black Belts.”)
“What an awesome experience working with GetUWired ‘s uber-talented team of Web-Dev Master Black Belts! These folks were consummate hosts who donated their time and talent to help bring about a massive digital marketing makeover. Today’s workshop was filled with a website revamp, a logo redesign, a billing software integration with communication tools, and business organization tool building … all done while weathering an early winter snow storm!
“Their day of service was fantastic. They even served breakfast and lunch – Elizabeth’s chili is the bomb-diggity! It is going to be exciting to have these vital business tools updated and sharpened and put to better use to make our studio locations grow. A huge and humble thank you goes out to everyone who worked with me today. Thank you Melissa and Dobbin for donating your organization’s time to support the United Karate Studios Dahlonega and Dawsonville.”
Check out Brad’s awesome new website at www.bradsunited.com.
The aftermath – We battle blizzards together
All day we had watched nervously as the snow kept coming down. About 5 p.m., we started heading home one by one as the “slippery road anxiety” got to be too much. Most of us made it home, but several employees ended up on the side of the road to be rescued by their loved ones … and our CEO Melissa Allen and her husband, Developer Chris Allen. With their 4-wheel drive vehicles, they saved a couple of our developers and brought them home for a storm-weathering sleepover.
If you want to know what the GetUWired culture is like, that’s it. We’re all more than happy to stay late, in a snowstorm, to deliver amazing products to our clients. And our CEO will leave her warm, dry house to rescue us on the side of the road, then welcome us into her home to keep us safe.
Like our Core Values say: We _____ together!
Work with us (but please pick better weather)!
Get started with a FREE 1-hour consult by giving us a call at 877-236-9094 or visiting us online at www.GetUWired.com today!