OMNI Youth Services

OMNI Youth Services, a youth developmental organization serving the greater Chicagoland region, awarded me a marketing vendor services contract in mid-2011 to plan and produce a major brand redevelopment overhaul on all of its web, print, event, and internal marketing materials to be immediately followed by a 40th anniversary marketing campaign in 2012. Their website was a decade old, ASP/HTML driven with little content management and server support.

Their identity even moreso dated back to the early 1980s. Developing OMNI’s new website on a CMS platform—Wordpress—was decided early on to allow their staff to eventually learn how to create and manage their own content by early 2012, at the expiration of the 2011 contract. It was known from day one that I had one year to produce all rebranding channels, media, and collateral tasks initiated by Steve Baldwin, OMNI’s then-Director of Marketing (President of Guerin Prep, Chicago, and President/CEO of Summit School Inc., Buffalo Grove), in order to transfer all services to the internal staff for CMS responsibilities to be implemented into the business processes.

Rebranding efforts were part of a larger campaign aimed at being prepared for their 40th Year Anniversary Fundraising Event in Chicago, April 2012. The anniversary event was hosted by Jay Leno and Ex-Governor of Illinois, Pat Quinn. All marketing materials, event invites, ads, posters, web banners and ads for advertisers, publishers, web and TV channels were produced with multiple OMNI advertisers and vendors to assist Marketing Director, Steve Baldwin, pull off a successful rebranding and 40th anniversary campaign.

I spent the remainder of my contract tutoring OMNI’s internal staff on content development for managing their website internally. One of the more successful accounts I’ve worked on where the client allowed me complete freedom to pull off a ton of work spread out over 12 months, and meet key deadlines in order to influence the success of the 2012 campaign, which I was contracted for again. The site’s redevelopment in 2011 for a 2012 anniversary rebrand launch still allows OMNI to control their marketing costs and content management internally as of 2022, cutting major budget and hiring expenses over the course of a decade!