The Souls In Action Team at one of our volunteer days.
The Need:
When I began at Souls In Action things were just starting to get off the ground and the company was mostly a vision in the founder Lulu Clair's mind. She had a vision for an events promotion company that focused just as much on giving back to the community as on the events they put together, and to bring this vision to life she needed a website. It had to meet several key criteria: showcase the Souls In Action artist collective, convey their brand as tastemakers in Denver, let their audience know about upcoming social activism events, integrate seamlessly with social media, and be easy-to-use for their team of content creators.
The Remedy:
I worked with Souls In Action's lead designer, Brandon Painter, to build a Wordpress-based website that would meet the above criteria and look damn good doing it. We began by customizing an image-heavy template that would be visually captivating no matter what the latest content had to say. We laid out the structure of the website to give easy access, and equal weight, to five key areas: the artist collective, the blog, the events, photo coverage, and social activism.
The homepage of the Souls In Action site.
Souls In Action represented a team of, genre-bending artists from around Colorado as managers, booking agents and publicists. On the Artist Collective page we showcased all this talent but also let their individual pages serve as digital press kits, making it easy to keep things updated and refer people to the right place if they needed more info on an artist.
The Artist Collective page.
Individual page for SIA artist, Turner Jackson.
Next up was the company blog, but that's a bit of a misnomer. This running publication would serve as the lifeblood of the website and indeed of Souls In Action itself. Much of the day-to-day work of SIA, and myself as their Marketing Director, was the creation of branded content to publicize our artists and our events.
Having a simple blog wasn't quite enough to define the brand as the tastemakers in Denver. So I cultivated and managed a team of content writers, each a specialist in a certain type of music, culture or social activism, to create their own branded blog series. Series like "Hip Hop Anonymous", "Style Secrets", "The Groove" and "That New Nu" quickly became some of our top performing content. They also opened new opportunities for co-branded content between the writers and our events to target key audiences. You can learn more about how we did this for the Arise and Snowball music festivals.
The ever-evolving Souls In Action blog.
Finally, I brought together the “In Action” page used to showcase the social activism events and initiatives that are so much apart of what sets Souls In Action apart. Over the years this page has been used to get our audience involved with everything from fundraisers, to food drives to field days, all to support great causes around the Denver area. These initiatives have always been a great source of personal and professional pride for me, and I hope to work with more companies who value giving back as much as SIA does in the years to come.
A sampling of our social activism initiatives.
Due to the company’s need to have a large number of content contributors on the site I set up the back end of the website, using Wordpress, to be as easy-to-use as possible. Then I made a series of training materials so that even the least web-experienced writer on the team could easily create compelling content that fit-in on the site and looked great.
The Results:
Since launch, soulsinaction.com has supported hundreds of events in Colorado and beyond, an ever-growing roster of artists (now 16 strong), and a multitude of activism projects. While the website has undergone key updates since we first built it, the underlying easy-to-use Wordpress architecture remains in place and continues to enable members of the Souls In Action team- old and new- to run a top notch business.
