In 2011 I worked closely with the Financial Planning Days Consortium (FPD Consortium)—the Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards, the Financial Planning Association, the Foundation for Financial Planning, and The United States Conference of Mayors—on a complex, multifaceted project over several months to produce marketing materials and other print collateral for their nationwide initiative. Materials were produced and customized for 31 individual events hosted in cities across the United States, including flyers, event programs and signage, an advertisement in a national magazine, and other custom materials.

Flyers

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The first task, and the one that set the tone for the rest of the project, also involved trying to get the public to attend these events in the first place. I produced a series of four flyers in English and Spanish showing people of various backgrounds at different stages in life: college, marriage, family, and retirement. A fifth flyer, also in English and Spanish, requested by the FPD Consortium, combined the various photos into one flyer.

Programs

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The next task involved guiding attendees once they had arrived at the events. I produced a program book for each of the 31 cities involved in the initiative. The small booklets, individually customized for each event, typically included a welcome letter, a schedule of workshops and other activities, a directory of the financial planners who volunteered at the event, a list of topics, and acknowledgments of national and local supporters, among other content.

Signage

Banner

Acknowledgments

Straight arrow

Directions

Diagonal arrow

Registration

Reverse arrow

Schedule

Wayfinder

Workshop

Above: Signage for Baltimore Financial Planning Day, 29 October 2011.

In addition to programs, customized signage guided attendees at each event. But this element of the project was perhaps the most complex: not only did it need to coordinate with other materials, but it had to be able: (a) to be used in a wide variety of venues across the country, (b) to be further customized by local event coordinating committees, and (c) to be reused from one year to the next (in an effort to reduce printing costs). The end result was this series of signs and arrows that welcome participants, acknowledged supporters, provided a schedule of the day’s events, and pointed attendees where they needed to go—and didn’t get thrown away at the end of the day.

Ad in Kiplinger’s

Getting the word out was essential, since the success of these events relied both on getting the public to show up and on getting professional financial planners to volunteer to staff the events. When Kiplinger’s Personal Finance came on board as national media sponsor, the magazine offered the FPD Consortium space for a full-page ad. I worked with the consortium to rework the flyer featuring all four photos into an ad, which ran in Kiplinger’s October 2011 issue.

Additional elements created for this project are available on my Scribd page.