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Our Clients: CEI Architecture

The marketing department of CEI Architecture has a math problem. It goes like this:

Assume that CEI's prolific staff has created over 2,000 projects so far, and that they have 65 employees creating as many as 50 new projects a month. Assume also that there are more than 3,000 contacts related to those projects that need to be tracked and kept up-to-date.

Now, let's say CEI wants to do a simple but important mailing, like a change of address notice. How many of those 3,000 contacts are going to be returned to sender? Later, when they're drafting a new proposal, how can they quickly find out which of their old projects involved ice arenas? And who would be a good reference from among those clients?

OK, so maybe it's not a math problem. Maybe it's a data management problem. Whatever it was, CEI needed an answer. So they called Oak Bay Softrends.

"We're the marketing department," says Mary Kellough, marketing and communications manager for CEI. "What we had before [for contact storage] wasn't designed by marketing and so it wasn't useable for marketing's needs."

Kellough talked to a number of consultants before hiring Oak Bay Softrends. "[Those] developers talked over our heads and made us feel uncomfortable, like we were going to get taken advantage of. We couldn't talk to them."

"Other consultants gave us solutions that were way up and beyond what we needed. Oak Bay encouraged us to try a very simple solution now, and promised to be there while it scaled upward," said Dusko Cvijic, marketing coordinator. "It's already growing. Once you start using this thing, you start to think of new ways it can be used."

The initial interface design was conceived by CEI, but Oak Bay had interesting suggestions for formatting and work flow. "They'd rein us back in-they really pushed for the simple solution. They asked us a lot of different questions about our objectives. That was great for helping us find out what we were trying to accomplish," Kellough said.

Working with Oak Bay was easy, Kellough said.

"Meetings were fairly quick-meetings were often only 10-20 minutes, where we itemized what needed to be changed. We like Peter [Oak Bay's lead man for this project] a lot. He's able to understand our 'lack of knowledge.' "

Now, Kellough says, "We get so excited when we have to look up a contact in the system Oak Bay built-we just use the search box and it pops right up. It's really the foundation of any marketing department."