To be honest, it has been an odd year for our company. As the year flew by (and also seemed to drag on especially long), we celebrated successes and navigated challenges. We are so thankful for the clients who have stayed with us despite their own challenges and for the new clients who decided to bring Skyline alongside their team in 2021.
Blessing #1 - Team Growth
Early in 2021, Phillip joined the Skyline team as our main website designer and digital marketing guru. Essentially Skyline’s triple threat focusing on web design, video editing, and Google Ads.
Bookending the year, Rachel joined our team as account manager in late 2021. With so many moving pieces, Rachel keeps Skyline’s scheduling, project planning, contracts and proposals organized for our clients. She is also building new relationships and helping Skyline stay connected with our community.
Challenge #1 - Event coverage
After the disappearance of events in 2020, this year has seen a mixture of events, keeping the team on our toes when it comes to logistics. With spring typically kicking off event season with beautiful weather, uncertainty stuck around from so many 2020 cancellations. We saw some returning events, some modified or virtual, and some still canceled. We celebrate with businesses who have found a way through the event uncertainty and we mourn with organizations still lacking the ability to connect in person for the time being.
Blessing #2 - Services Growth
With new team members comes new skill sets, which has expanded our offered services. Google ads and TV commercials allowed our team to reach even more potential customers for clients. We even had a TV commercial play right before midnight on New Year’s Eve literally wrapping up the year!
We also took the next step in social media with Sprout Social. This has allowed us to send more detailed reports and gain a deeper insight into the true impact for our social media clients. It has features that strengthen our social media presence and capacity by streamlining our workflow.
As our services grow, we have introduced new Partner options for our clients, which you can find out more about by clicking here.
Challenge #2 - Hiring Talent
Skyline experienced the challenge of hiring first hand, when seeking out new talent this year. Typical channels that we have used in the past were not as helpful and our team had to think outside of the box. We are so grateful for new talent who we were able to find and bring onto the team. On a larger scale, we have heard client’s challenges to meet COVID requirements while recruiting enough employees to keep everything running smoothly. We have seen this frequently, across multiple industries. While we have been able to brainstorm employment promotions for clients, it remains a challenge. We feel for businesses in the same boat and hope to see improvement in 2022.
Blessing #3 - Client Growth
2021 has been a tremendous year of growth, and our Vimeo library can vouch for that! This has been a packed year, with 134 produced videos uploaded to our account. For reference, that is a 34% increase from videos produced in 2020!
This year would not have been possible without incredible clients who have placed their trust in us to create engaging content, design/maintain their websites, and produce high quality videos to best represent them. We are so very thankful for their trust and it has pushed to an all time high for producing content.
While we worked on marketing goals for new clients, they launched projects into the community. The Santiam Canyon Wildfire Relief Fund carried on the crucial task of coming alongside families seeking to move or rebuild after the 2020 fires. They have already served more than a thousand families providing household items, gift cards, generators, and so much more. On the other side of Salem, R3stored moved their Christian counseling team to Independence. They have been meeting the need for counseling as well as training other counselors. The desire for biblically based counseling continues to grow, especially when faced with the stress of the last two years. Santiam Teen Center has expanded their programs investing in the lives of community teens with after school programs, despite COVID challenges.
We could keep going about all the other exciting client growth and community involvement that has occurred this past year. But we will have to tell you about projects like the orange puppet educational video (an editing first) another time - stay tuned 😉.
Key Takeaways:
As Covid-19 continues to ripple through our community, it remains a challenge for many local businesses. This has resulted in many unique hurdles for us and for the businesses we serve. Thankfully we have found some methods for surmounting these obstacles and they tend to center on one crucial component - humor. When we are faced with an obstacle in life (and there have been many in the past year) we are left with two options - to be indefinitely stalled or to laugh in the face of it and find a solution.
Here at Skyline we strive to find humor in the little absurdities of life, and as we enter the new year, life looks as though it will be no less absurd. So we invite you to join us—to not be held back by obstacles but rather face them head on with a spirit of determination. The process may be difficult but the lessons learned and the tool sets gained may be a blessing in disguise in the end.
