Building solid business relationships

Halfway In

It’s June, officially Summer, and we’re half way through the calendar year.

In this post I thought I’d take a look back at the first six months of the year and talk about some of the highlights and notable projects I have worked on. 

Not so quiet

The first few months of the year – January to March – are traditionally quite quiet. But this year it really kicked off in March, and I worked on at least half a dozen major events in that month alone.

I looked back at my calendar, and the tally of events I have personally worked on so far this year includes 4 events in Brussels, 3 in Bucharest, 3 in Spain, plus events in Geneva, London, and Luxembourg.

Drawnalism has over 130 customers – not bad for a small company – and it’s gratifying that we have built strong relationships with many of them.

Digital Newcastle

For example, I’m currently working with Newcastle City Council to illustrate their digital vision. I wrote about some of the amazing work that they have been doing – and how we have been supporting them – it in an earlier blog post: Tooning up for a vision of digitalness. Since then, Newcastle City Council have received the #DL100 Smart City of the Year Award, which is brilliant news!

Jenny Nelson, who leads the project at Newcastle City Council, kindly tweeted this photo just a few days ago.

WHO in Geneva

And in another example from last week, I spent several days in Geneva covering a major event for the World Health Organization (WHO). We have previously covered live events for the WHO, and provided a series of illustrations, which I wrote about in WHO can stand under our umbrella.

It’s really satisfying when a piece of illustration we create continues to be used.

European Cluster

Just the week before that we were in Bucharest for the European Cluster Conference. Matthew wrote about that in his recent post Roaming Romania.

FI-Compass

Our third event in Bucharest – in early June – was for fi-compass. Drawnalism has supported fi-compass at five conferences so far: annual events since 2016, and a Macro-regional event in Tallinn. We have also provided a series of high quality illustrations.

Médecins Sans Frontières

At the end of May I was in Brussels for Médecins Sans Frontières Operational Research Day.

This is another really positive ongoing relationship with a client and we have worked with them on lots of projects over the years, including five annual events. I wrote a bit about that in Europe is (not) a Foreign Country (but they do some things differently there). I’ll also shortly be working on an infographic for them.

Interreg

Another event in Bucharest was for Interreg, who we have worked with many times over the years on numerous events, big and small; plus some large illustration projects.

As is often the case at major events, there was lots of interaction on Twitter. On this occasion we were providing digital Drawnalism, with the drawings projected ‘live’ on a large screen:

That’s all folks

Well, that’s enough for this blog post. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading it.