Earlier this year, Thornley Fallis & 76design worked with the Office of Consumer Affairs at Industry Canada as Secretariat for the Consumer Measures Committee to design and develop a new online presence for the Canadian Consumer Handbook.

Launched in April 2010, the handbook provides users with a searchable and easy-to-navigate platform as well as the option to build a customized handbook that only contains information they are interested in.

The Handbook is intended to help users become better-informed and more confident consumers. It offers information on a wide range of topics such as online shopping, contracts, housing and home renovations, identity theft, collection agencies, and much more, to help users build their buying skills.

Along with consumer tips, the Handbook includes a directory of government and non-government contacts useful to consumers.

The Handbook was created and is updated by the Consumer Measures Committee. This Committee is a joint federal/provincial/territorial committee which provides a forum for national cooperation to improve the marketplace for Canadian consumers, through the harmonization of laws, regulations and practices and through actions to raise public awareness.

Over the past few years, there have been a lot of high-profile campaigns against drunk driving. Whether it be through outreach in schools or various advertising campaigns in the media, the message has been hammered home: Don’t drink and drive!

With the introduction of so-called “hands-free” laws in a number of provinces, the issue of texting or using your phone while driving has gained significant traction. In fact, there are more similarities between this issue and inebriated driving than one might think. Driving while distracted is like driving after having four beers, and distracted drivers cause 8 in 10 accidents.

Armed with these facts, Thornley Fallis and 76design developed a Greater Toronto Area pilot campaign for Allstate Insurance Company of Canada aimed at sensitizing young drivers to this critical issue.

The campaign, Action Against Distraction, encourages teens to take the pledge against distracted driving and share it with their friends via social networks. Allstate is also giving away an iPad to one lucky pledge-taker.

To support the campaign, we produced a video that asked teens to tell us the craziest driving distraction they’ve ever seen. Some of the responses surprised us, including that of one teen who said his relative eats a bowl of cereal while driving.

Hundreds of teens have already taken the pledge, and you can too

In order to reinvigorate and revitalize downtown Ottawa businesses hit hard by the recession and the bus strike, Thornley Fallis and 76design  conceived, developed and executed the Picture it Downtown campaign for The City of Ottawa, where residents were encouraged to go downtown, snap a photo and share it online.

Point, shoot, share – a simple concept to get Ottawa excited about all it has to offer. The “Picture It Downtown” concept we developed served to visually promote downtown Ottawa as a whole, but also the eight specific areas being promoted:  Byward Market, Downtown Rideau, Sparks Street, Bank Street, The Glebe, Chinatown, Preston Street (Little Italy) and Wellington-West Village.

Residents could participate in the campaign contest to win daily ($50), weekly ($250) and grand ($500 to $1200) prizes by taking pictures of downtown activities and uploading them to the campaign website.

The campaign included a media launch event involving the Mayor, a website with a list of downtown activites, a description, videos and photos of each area, contest rules and regulations, a photo gallery for people to submit and view photos, and YouTube videos, featuring all that’s cool in several neighbourhoods, print, radio, online and transit advertising, weekly news releases and ongoing online outreach using other social media tools including Twitter and Flickr.

Thousands of people participated and competed for prizing provided by local businesses.

The campaign was to remind Ottawans of all the diverse experiences and excitement downtown Ottawa has to offer, and entice them to visit downtown — ultimately spending money while engaging in the various activities highlighted in the eight main areas being promoted.

For the City of Ottawa, running a marketing campaign with a heavy online and interactive component was not only a smart business and communications decision, but its creativity generated a lot of buzz within Ottawa and got people sharing ideas and photos of great things to do and see in the city.

The fall 2009 campaign resulted in over ten thousand unique visits to the campaign website, more than 1300 entries (photos uploaded to the website), significant earned media in targeted outlets, photo and video assets for future use by the City, and a general buzz across the City about the creativity of the campaign, particularly by government.

Picture it downtown would not have been possible without our lead technologist Brett Tackaberry, senior developer Steve Lounsbury, our superb designer Steve St. Pierre, the ad campaign led by Laura Mindorff, the videos by Ryan Knuth, writer and producer LeeEllen Carroll and our SEO expert Shaun Scanlon. Special thanks to our GM Keelan Green, who has a knack for assembling the best teams to deliver outstanding results.

Thank you IABC for the recognition. It’s nice to bask in the spotlight… and great to share successes. As I used to say in my former journalistic career, you’re only as good as your last story. So that means back to work. Right now.

In an attempt to reduce the cost of its annual report, The Ottawa Hospital (TOH) engaged 76design and Thornley Fallis for our unique concept of a paperless report. Highlighting achievements and documenting successes,  World Class Care (TOH’s 2008-2009 Annual Report) contains a special feature allowing readers to create their own versions of the report including only the sections and stories appealing to them.

For some, those stories include the 6808 hospital births, the woman who was paying it forward by donating her kidney to a stranger because her own husband was receiving one from an anonymous donor in Ottawa – who had selflessly stepped forward to transplant hope, or the CF soldier, blown to bits in Afghanistan after coming into contact with a land mine. He died. Twice. The second time he was resuscitated during his evacuation flight. He arrived at TOH doped up on morphine. Months of therapy and compassionate care in the Rehabilitation Centre got him back on his feet- running in fact – he recently took part in The Olympic Torch Relay Race, with a new ‘bionic’ leg.

Allow me to cast the awards spotlight on other members of our talented team, who took those stories and turned them into an attention grabbing report: writer Bradley Moseley-Williams, who’s never met an adjective he can’t love, web developers and code masters- Brett Tackaberry and Steve Lounsbury, Mr. Shaun Search Engine Optimization Scanlon, ‘video is the new media’ Ryan Knuth, Resource and Account Manager Laura Mindorff, video killed the radio star LeeEllen Carroll, and top 40 under 50 SVP and GM Keelan Green.

A very special thanks to TOH’s CEO Jack Kitts and VP Nic Ruszkowski for renewing their investment in TF and 76 by inviting us back to partner on their next online annual report.

Here’s to more success stories for The Ottawa Hospital, Thornley Fallis and 76design, our peers at IABC and everyone in our communications community.

Overview

This first round of 76design Skunkworks gave us (Jordan Boesch and Shaun Scanlon, both web developers) the opportunity to utilize the Twitter API to create a fun project.

We decided to try to integrate Twitter with Mozilla Jetpack.  According to the Jetpack website, Jetpack is “a newly formed experiment in using open Web technologies to enhance the browser, with the goal of allowing anyone who can build a Web site to participate in making the Web a better place to work, communicate and play.”

What this means is that Jetpack is an API which allows the average web developer to develop add-ons for the Mozilla Firefox browser using languages they already use on an every day basis.   This was an attractive feature of Jetpack as web developers.

Project Phases

Concept Development / Brainstorm
After some brainstorming we decided to develop an unobtrusive twitter feed add-on in the style of a sports highlight ticker.  This was to be a collapsible bar at the bottom of your Firefox browser which could display new tweets and past tweets.  The tweets were to scroll in a manner similar to a sports or news ticker.

Design Concept
Jordan applied his design skills to develop a concept in Photoshop.

During this phase we came up with the idea of a news flash for new tweets.

Prototype
The work for this phase was shared between us.   It involved taking the Photoshop mockup and converting it to a regular HTML/Javascript/CSS file to be used in a regular browser.    We were able to get the basic logic done in creating the prototype.

Jetpack Integration / QA
We found this was the most difficult phase.   Jetpack has specific JavaScript hooks that are used to set the status bar icon for the add-on and to handle the initial loading of the JavaScript.

Within the scope/context of Jetpack a few of JavaScript’s default variables (such as “window”) were not accessible so we had to look for alternatives.   We also tried to extend the basic functionality of the prototype.   The extension of functionality required a lot of additional quality assurance time.

Challenges

• Jetpack development must be tested in the browser
  • The Jetpack plugin allows for development of the browser which is great because we can use common web development debugging tools
  • All code must be entered within a tiny textarea box on a webpage
  • This is very cumbersome because it is next to impossible to read an entire plugin within the box
  • We had to essentially work in a separate text editor and copy and paste into the box on the website
  • This makes for a frustrating debugging process

• Working on a single JavaScript file in a team environment
  • A Jetpack plugin must be self contained within one JavaScript file
  • The Jetpack library does allow access to the JQuery JavaScript library which allows for easy manipulation of HTML and CSS
  • Even with the ability to use JQuery, this set up does not lend itself well to team development
  • The fact that there is no separation of logic and visual layers into separate files makes it very difficult to contribute to the file without conflicting with teammates’ changes
  • As well, Images must be hosted on a separate server and linked to from the JavaScript
  • This makes for a cumbersome development process
• Jetpack is really only JavaScript-like, it’s not pure JavaScript
  • Because of the scope of being within the Jetpack API we found out the hard way that not all of JavaScript’s built in variables (such as the “window” variable) are accessible
  • This required us to revamp code to work around these unexpected roadblocks

What is next?

We could:

• Extend the current functionality to finish off the “news flashes” feature.
• Add some more spark to the animation and effects.
• Re-brand this type of concept to be used for client projects.    Some clients may be interested in having a Firefox plugin to market their brand.

Conclusion

Jetpack while an excellent concept probably needs some work to allow for easier development.   Editing a huge JavaScript file in a small textarea box on a webpage isn’t very realistic.

Other plug-ins, such as those created for Windows Sidebar or Google Desktop, are comprised of several files (similar to regular web development) and are then added to a Zip archive file.  This concept is a much more realistic development scenario.

We would not recommend Jetpack development for group projects, but could be useful for single developer projects.

I am pleased to announce  the launch of  Thornley Fallis & 76design’s new online presence.

Our new websites, conceptualized, designed and developed by  our team of creative masterminds and technology all-stars, exemplifies our capacity to push the limits of innovation  in the world of social media and digital marketing.

Thornley Fallis & 76design is made up of individuals with fun, smart and professional personalities; personalities that have all contributed to the success of marketing & communications projects. To fully demonstrate  the range of personalities, talent and intelligence our  team has to offer, we’ve done something  a little outside the box.  Something very brave… or maybe something very stupid – we’ll let you know ;-)

We’ve created a live LifeStream for every one of our employees. This is more than just a standard funny profile picture and biography.  It is an aggregate of their work and online profile, intended to paint a picture of who they are, what they do, what they think and what they are interested in.

To explore the diverse and unique characters at Thornley Fallis and jokers at 76design, take a look through our people profiles and find out who you could be working with on your next project.

Not only is our team exceptionally talented (and good-looking), we are experienced & passionate about the work we do.  While adventuring through our People pages, zoom over to the Work & Services sections to see what Thornley Fallis & 76design has to offer.

My colleagues and I hope you enjoy perusing through our new sites.

Oh and one more thing… if you like what you see, don’t hesitate to call us, we’d love to hear from you!