Like so many interesting and productive collaborations, this one started with what Andy Epstein, formerly with Gund and now with Bristol Myers Squibb, dubbed a ìblind date.î According to Glenn John Arnowitz - creative director at Wyeth in Madison, N.J., as well as cofounder and vice president of InSource - when a vendor heard him complaining about the difficulties of running an in-house corporate graphics department, he suggested Arnowitz meet Epstein, who had been lamenting the exact same issues.

"Despite the differences in companies - Gund is a soft-toy company and Wyeth is a pharmaceutical giant - we had similar departments and faced the same challenges," Arnowitz notes. "We thought, if we feel this way, there must be other people who feel this way, too. Our first idea was to have an event." Epstein and Arnowitz organized a roundtable for inhouse creative folks with assistance from Peter Philips from the Design Management Institute. A few phone calls and some effective word-of-mouth later, the blind date had grown into a network of dozens of people who wanted to keep meeting, talking and sharing information. Thus was InSource born.

(left) The original InSource site, developed by Lakefront Media and InSource founders Glenn Arnowitz and Andy Epstein, was a great starting point for the new group, but as the organization grew, the siteís limited functionality and interactivity circumscribed membersí ability to communicate with one another.

The Wish List
Because the mission of this nonprofit, completely volunteer organization is to "enhance the understanding, impact and value of in-house design" by sharing expertise, ideas and support, getting a presence up on the web was an obvious first step to connect all the people who were popping up and raising their hands from the back rooms of in-house creative departments across the country. The fledgling group developed a board of directors and, working with Lakefront Media, created a website.

Martin Shova - current president of InSource, formerly creative director at Kraft Foods and now a partner at One Flight Up Design & Innovation in Boonton, N.J. - notes that the group quickly recognized its potential and outgrew this first effort: ìWe needed a more dynamic site where we could post more content and provide more value and build an interactive community of creative professionals.î And because the organization was growing rapidly, it also needed a website that could be easily expanded and managed by InSource member volunteers, without having to constantly return to a web design firm to post new content.

The team pulled together a request for proposal (RFP), the drafting of which provided an opportunity to get very clear about wants, needs and expectations - which, as Shova points out, "was a long list. It got longer, too." The RFP listed the basic needs as "leveraging technologies to provide richer content and enhance the online experience for community members." Project scope included the following:

• Site redesign
• Functionality enhancements such as cross-linked and integrated content, quarterly updates, a content management system and message board, as well as member registration and showcase
• Site hosting and e-mail services
• Site management and marketing consulting

Community
But even more important than providing these hard assets were the softer concerns of the team. "The key was to build and drive that community feeling," notes Shova. "Internal design organizations are kind of sequestered from the larger organization. There's always that sense of alienation because weíre talking ideas and design rather than marketing or other functions core to the business. Youíre a support organization, but there are very few people who share your language." The other omnipresent challenge is self-justification.

"The design business is intangible. It's hard to put your finger on the value of design, so itís hard to talk to management because theyíre all about value. There are tons of different questions that come up that all in-house designers wrestle with, but thereís typically no one in the larger organization that you can turn to for help," says Shova. This is where InSource wanted to come in on the web, offering that critical, yet mostly absent support system.

The web design and implementation task was given to Morris! Communication, a cross-media branding firm. Principal Steve Morris explains that he had some personal connections to the other designers who were, or had been, on the InSource board of directors. "There was a bit of history there, and with it came a truckload of empathy," he notes. "As we began to look at the RFP and talk about the challenges and the design and how we wanted the site to function, we kept coming back to the idea of community and communication and the question of how do we build it as a pavilion for ideas and information to be exchanged."

(right) Morris! Communication developed a new site that reflects InSource values by being businesslike, friendly and inviting.

On the old site, members could only communicate with InSource itself, not with each other. The team quickly came up with the idea of setting up a forum. "The initial need for the forum came out of our desire for the organization to foster community," notes Morris. "On the agency side, there is a kind of luxury in that we have the possibility to build our culture around our business, whereas on the in-house side, that is much more difficult, as the culture is driven by the organization. Itís harder to build your own internal design culture."

Read the full article in the June/July 2007 issue of Dynamic Graphics magazine.

Thanks to our friends at Jupiter Images for sharing this great info.

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