We’re not as great at shouting from the rooftops about success and awards as we are about people who park in our parking stalls. Moving forward, we will do better. We’re starting by celebrating Dog Jogs and our recent IABC Gold Quill Award of Excellence for their website.
When we first started working with Nikki and Steph from Dog Jogs, we constantly typed and said “Dog Jobs” which led to many conversations about which jobs our office dog (Penny) would be capable of.
Hint: not very many jobs at all.
We’ve experienced intense growth at Kick Point since we started working with Dog Jogs in September 2017. We have 400% more dogs now!
The four-legged growth we’ve experienced is nothing compared to how Dog Jogs has grown over their first two years. What started as a “side hustle” has become the go-to for pet services in Edmonton. Nikki and Steph built their brand on the foundation of an excellent website and their genuine care and compassion for the pets and pet families of Edmonton.
At the time of writing, we’re living in COVID-19 pandemic times and Dog Jogs has been diligent and careful in keeping up with Alberta Health Services recommendations. They’ve updated their protocols and processes to maintain physical distancing recommendations, and set up sanitization procedures for their team. The majority of their services during this time are for first responders, health care workers, and other people fulfilling essential roles.
Pet care is an essential service, and Dog Jogs’ commitment to providing care for essential workers has been celebrated by their clients!
We recently updated Our Process page to include a ‘how to be a perfect client’ section that is based in part on our experience working with the Dog Jogs team. Nikki and Steph made a choice to trust us and that respect continues to pay off for both of our teams.
We have a website that we can point to as an award winner. Not just because of its fun design (it’s really not hard to make a website look good when they have such great, seasonal dog photos), but because it performs consistently. Organic traffic is up 86% year-over-year, and before COVID-19 slowed things down, Dog Jogs was averaging over 500 services per month.
Our team hasn’t done a very good job of (publicly) celebrating our wins with Dog Jogs. Sure, we message in our shared Slack channel to announce the wins, but it feels a bit lacklustre.
Our lack of rooftop shouting and dancing has largely been a symptom of someone’s (their name rhymes with Sven) personal feelings about “humble bragging” and the (often unfair) belief that many agencies seem to celebrate award wins and website launches without consideration to whether a project actually helped a client do better.
What our team and the Dog Jogs team have accomplished together should be celebrated though! If we weren’t physically distancing right now, we would have gotten together for some sparkling cheer. Instead we exchanged “bottle with popping cork” and “clinking glasses” emojis.
To be honoured with an IABC award, entrants must demonstrate strategic alignment and tie the creative process and measurable results to business objectives. Submitting our work to award programs that focus on actual, proven results that prove clients truly achieved their objectives is very important to our team. It means that we built a solution that made our client’s business better.
Dog Jogs IABC Awards
- 2019 Capital Awards, Award of Excellence: Communication Skills
- 2019 Silver Leaf, Award of Excellence: Communication Skills
- 2020 Gold Quill, Award of Excellence: Communication Skills
Our local Edmonton IABC chapter facilitates the Capital Awards and puts on a great award show as well, Silver Leaf is Canada’s premiere professional awards program celebrating excellence in business communication, and IABC’s Gold Quill Awards have recognized and awarded excellence in strategic communication worldwide for 40 years.
We’re proud of our partnership with Dog Jogs. We love their brand and all the pieces of their visual identity that we built together. We are thrilled that this partnership has been recognized as a success close to home and internationally, and we’re thankful to Nikki and Steph for putting their trust in our team.