Back in December, Cricky got an email from Steve Glynn, President of the Milwaukee-based idea incubator Spreenkler, informing me that it had received a sizable award from the WIRED Innovation Fund. In the interest of living up to the notion that I'm not a "real" journalist and therefore free from the usual obligations and deadlines of reporting--ah, sweet denial--I of course put off scheduling an interview with Glynn and Spreenkler's Director of Marketing & Client Services, Sara Gehl, for a couple of months. But now I have all the intel and can bring you this "breaking" report.
With offices housed within the confines of Bucketworks, Spreenkler has made the leap from a relatively modest champion of creative/techy types and monthly interdisciplinary meetup organizer to a full-on participant in the push to bring business into the 21st Century. How did the Spreenkler folks do this? Well, with a little pondering and tinkering they created Spreenkler the Agency, and it is for this program that they were awarded some $120,000 from the WIRED Innovation Fund.
The mission of Spreenkler the Agency is to connect creative, tech savvy college students with businesses, organizations and institutions throughout southeastern Wisconsin to their mutual benefit and to keep talented people from fleeing the area, leaving the rest of us to senselessly bump into walls out of sheer confusion.
They hire--meaning they actually pay!--college students part-time to provide creative services to real-world clients, helping them to develop technical and other highly prized skills. In turn, businesses and organizations signed with the Agency get fancy new websites, entry into or increased presence in social media, graphic work--whatever they need to get moving further into the realm of The Internets™ and out of the dreaded and oh so crowded Pit Of The Obsolete--at a reduced cost.
By working with actual clients while still in college, students have the opportunity to create inroads into the world of business, making a network for themselves that will allow them to more easily secure internships and get jobs after graduation based on their work at the Agency. The businesses, of course, benefit by having a pool of known talent from which to draw instead of tossing a job opening post out to ride on the wind of who knows where.
So far, Spreenkler has scored some pretty big clients, including International Monetary Systems (IMS) Barter Network and Trade Exchange, which had its birth in little ol’ New Berlin, Wisconsin--who knew, huh?--and The United Performing Arts Fund (UPAF), just to name two. To keep up with increasing interest in the program, they've hired two young go-getters, Dawn Zimmerman as Lead Designer and Bill Bensman as Social Media Campaign Coordinator.
Along with its creative services, Spreenkler the Agency advises and consults with organizations new to the Electronic Age on just what to expect from their newfangled ventures into MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, et al. From how to deal with nasty trolls to handling the often overwhelming numbers of good, bad and ugly comments from an interactive audience/customer base, Glynn and his team work to prepare the innocent for the experience they've yet to gain.
I asked Glynn if they also encourage businesses to offer paid, substantial internships rather than luring in youngsters with hollow promises like "Looks great on your resume!" and "Get the experience you need without all the hassles of a paycheck!" when they'll really just end up as glorified gophers. His response was yes, they do indeed advise companies and orgs to offer internships complete with actual work and pay, adding that talented people "shouldn't get lost within the company." Well, huzzah to that!
For those of you worried that all this attention to the Agency will weaken Spreenkler's original mission of networking and meetups, have no fear. The meetups will continue on, with the next one scheduled for Wednesday, April 8, beginning at 5:30PM at Bucketworks. The topic? Arts and Culture. A panel of "experts" is being lined up right now, and rumor has it that some wacko invited Cricky to be on that panel and that Kev is going to be showing some of his new paintings as well. These baseless rumors have got to stop, people! I mean, wha... Oh yeah, we are gonna be there. In that case, hope to see ya there, too!
Link (Thanks, Steve & Sara!)
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Spreenkler Scores Mayor as Guest Speaker
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