As the firm I work for has grown the past few years, I’ve run up into a repeated problem:
I don’t have enough time to market every project.
The solution seemed obvious: another marketer. With another marketer in the firm, we could tackle it all and make it work, giving every project the marketing support required.
So, when a colleague suggested that the firm submit to more awards this year—award submissions often require long narrative responses and specific layout requirements, so have typically fallen to marketing to complete—I rolled my eyes.
“Hire another marketer?” I asked (rhetorically).
“Couldn’t you just teach us how to do it?” they asked (seriously).
Sigh. They want me to delegate—to teach them how to do it.
Could I?
The challenge, as I see it, is that this small universe of project marketing—award submissions, press releases, project narratives, blog posts—involves writing.
And writing isn’t what architects go to school for.
That’s not to say they’re bad at writing. They manage, of course. After all, it’s impossible to get by without writing—emails, agendas, proposals, design narratives, master plans.
This isn’t a universal problem: some of my colleagues are actually pretty accomplished writers. Their writing does what it sets out to do: informs the reader quickly and effectively.
Their problem is the reader.
Architects write in an insular style—if you’re not an industry peer, their writing can be hard to follow. That insularity extends past jargon, though. Their writing often assumes a reader on the inside of the project.
So, that’s now a goal for this year: figure out how to teach writing to architects, how to drop the jargon, how to get them to think outside the boundaries of a project.
Taylor Coe 