A Month in Review - A merger, a plastic mascot and a conference

By Jennifer Fedor
March 7, 2007

February was a remarkable month with a wealth of news. We’ve launched a number of great ministry sites, and re-launched our own. At the beginning of the month we joined efforts with Trinet Internet Solutions, located in Irvine California. It is a coming together of two organizations that compliment one another to offer our clients a greater depth in online expertise. This involved a lot of planning and coordination here in our office and in California. Some of our team had the opportunity to spend time with our new colleagues at the NRB Convention that took place in Orlando Florida.

Silas Man – we really enjoyed having him along on our trip to NRB this year. Incase you missed out on all the hype of Silas Man… He is our Silas Partners mascot, a short little guy who stands about 8 inches tall. Silas Man is a kind of “trophy” for competitions that we hold among our staff. He did really well meeting some of our partners and our colleagues from Trinet really took a liking to him too.

We have all been excited to share with people at NRB our new partnership with Trinet Internet Solutions. We’re bi-coastal now!.

Duncan Rein, CEO of Silas Partners stated, “This merger will allow team members on both coasts to focus their efforts in areas of particular strength. Working together, we can offer our clients greater depth of expertise across a broader range of services. As a division of Trinet, Silas Partners will retain its focus on high-quality work and excellent client service, while adding new and exciting capabilities to help our clients grow and prosper.”

Unfortunately, Silas Man was overtly liked by our west coast office, so much so that they kidnapped him. I posted “Breaking News! - Silas Man Kidnapped” to alert everyone. From what we’ve heard back here on the east coast, Silas Man has been playing foosball a lot and working on his tan.

The conference also gave some of our staff the ability to lead some of the educational sessions. Our Marketing Director, Jeff Herrity, blogged about the first educational session he co-lead with Todd Baker from Masterworks.

While we were at NRB, we had a chance to interact with some of our web ministry partners. June Hunt from Hope for the Heart held her daily radio broadcast at her booth. It was great to see her interviewing guests and having a live audience watch the production. Just prior to the conference we launched their new site, which looks great!

We were located just down the aisle from Hope for the Heart in #1131. We all really liked the setup of our booth and were thankful that a lot of you stopped by to visit.

While we were on our way home from Orlando, Michael Schafer was blogging about “humanizing the web experience.” There were a number of comments posted on Michael’s entry. His investigative reporting has just begun on where are the illustrations on the web. This post had some good dialogue back and forth with postings from people that found sites that are using illustrations and reasons why designers and clients are not using illustrations. And yes the lovable Yogurt King is mentioned.

In Rhea’s posting “Fundraising Information Ad Nauseam”, she focused on an article from Chronicle on Philanthropy titled “Give and Take” encouraged organizations to blog and use the blog to raise financial support. As I’ve done postings on the (RED) project for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, it was good to see how the “buy less” effort that (RED) is encouraging is being used to promote more donations to the charity.

Finally, Katy has been doing a great job with keeping the postings for our weekly devotionals on the blog. It is a good reminder each week as to what we’re working for. I hope that you’re encouraged by some of the scriptures posted from the past few weeks.