Past Events

At our October workshop, Zuula will share insights about the impact clarity has on business results. They'll explore how organizations are using plain language to achieve that elusive win-win: helping the customer and meeting company goals.

Zuula will also provide writing and content tips for bringing your plain-language messaging to life.

About Zuula

We’re not just communication professionals — we’re clarity fanatics. Whether we’re training financial advisors, branding communications, or editing-away legalese, our goal is to help you use language to create the ultimate sophistication.

We’ve seen the difference that clear communication makes for people, businesses, and society. And we’re on a mission to rid the world of confusion, one client at a time.

Synopsis: In Design Disruptors, enter the world of 15+ industry-toppling companies—valued at more than $1 trillion dollars combined—with one unifying secret advantage: the transformative power of design. The film chronicles the true nature of design and the design-driven business revolutions being shaped around the world through the designers’ eyes. Get a never-before-seen look into the perspectives, processes, and design approaches of leaders at industry-toppling brands and discover how these companies are disrupting billion dollar industries through design.

About Justin

Justin is a video producer, director, and editor. He's led on-location video shoots across the country and has extensive experience making video content for marketing campaigns, customer testimonial videos, and product videos, as well as social video. Prior to joining The Martin Agency, Justin was the Marketing Manager, Video Production at Snagajob.

About Christina

Christina began her career at The Martin Agency, developing social strategies and building communities for Kraft’s Cool Whip and Stove Top, Walmart, GEICO and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. She went on to work on the social media team at Capital One and and then to Big River, where she built a social media and content strategy offering and worked on the sweetFrog, Virginia Farm Bureau and Wicked Taco accounts. She is also an adjunct professor at Virginia Commonwealth University.

About Ladies That UX

Ladies that UX creates a space for women from all levels to engage and talk about their experiences and get support and inspiration from their peers.

In a field dominated by men, Ladies that UX is all about giving women the chance to support each other, push the UX boundaries, and promote female skill and talent.

For September, our host is James Shea of C3 Media Lab. He'll be leading a discussion about how to think like a journalist and use journalism best practices to create effective, engaging digital content.

About James

James is an award-winning journalist and web marketing professional. For more than ten years, he worked as a newspaper journalist. James has a knack for turning complex topics into simple, easy-to-understand prose. In 2014, he left the media world and started C3 Media Lab, a web marketing and content writing company where he helps his clients find better ways to communicate--and grow their business.

“I can’t find what I need!”

“What’s that mean?”

“I don’t understand.” 

Typically, usability is pegged as the culprit of these problems. But, usability problems are often understand-ability problems in disguise.

Imagine if information could feel like a personalized conversation, removing the ambiguity that causes users’ confusion and frustration.

You can do that, and content-first design is the way. In this talk, Alicia will share how designing the content first and then creating the structure can help. A content-first approach can help you nail down the natural language, use cases, and contextual relevance before you address structure and design. Ultimately, content-first design can help your team reduce unnecessary delays and rework and create a product people will want (and actually be able) to use.

About Alicia 

Alicia Lane is a UX Content Strategist at Capital One. On a typical day, you’ll find her helping product teams find the human language for a feature they’re building, conducting empathy interviews, running content tests, or mapping a customer’s experience. She does all of this with the goal of designing experiences to feel like personalized conversations. Alicia is also a co-founder of RVA Content Strategy. She loves green smoothies, gardening, and her cats.

While we haven’t got Beelzebub, but we do have an expert ready to shed light on your toughest questions. June’s workshop will be led by Jeffrey L. Cohen, the Director of Content Strategy at Oracle Marketing Cloud (so he knows a few things).

Jeff will be sitting in the hot seat to help solve your problems. Bring your hardest content questions and challenges that you need help with. They can be about strategy, creation, goals, metrics, tools, or whatever obstacle is getting in your way.

But be warned! This is an advanced session, so key takeaways will be very specific to the questions and audience.

About Jeff

As Director of Content Strategy at Oracle Marketing Cloud, Jeff oversees an award-winning corporate blog and the production of award-winning content campaigns with an unwavering focus on driving MQLs. He previously led the content marketing team at Salesforce.com. He’s also the co-author of The B2B Social Media Book, in addition to the Co-Founder and Managing Editor of leading marketing blog SocialMediaB2B.com, that, at its peak (#61 in the world), regularly beat MarketingProfs, Eloqua, Marketo, and Forrester blogs in the worldwide marketing blog rankings.

Please get to ShoreDog by 7:30 to order food and drinks. We'll kick off at 8:00 sharp.

Please get to ShoreDog by 7:30 to order food and network. We'll kick things off at 8:00 sharp.