A Writer’s Journey
Professionally speaking, I’m a junior copywriter. Amateurly speaking, I’m a paleontologist. And I know what you’re thinking…how do those two subjects even correlate? You see, after writing seven different NPS pages for Lake Mead’s Recreation Area website, completing alt tags for their digital museum and speaking to multiple experts within the area, you tend to learn a thing or two.
The project began when the Lake Mead Recreation Area came to our Braintrust team through their subsidiary, Get Outdoors Nevada, with the intention of bringing more awareness to Lake Mead’s Recreation Area website by introducing a digital museum and switching up their overall design. My role in all of this was to elevate their online presence through the written word, while providing a specific tone of copy that would carry throughout the site.
Our first mission; tackle the digital museum. The digital museum was a collection of fossils, artifacts, and pictures from some of Lake Mead’s most memorable moments in history. After what seemed like 300 pictures later, it was on to the NPS pages.
It started off with the Lake Mead team composing a list of topics pertaining to the area that they wanted to shed light on in order to educate and bring in more visitors. I began sifting through excerpts of documents that Lake Mead had sent over while extracting information that I believed would be interesting for our client’s target audience. For each NPS page, I made sure to keep the same theme in order to help the overall connection between each page. I would talk about the beginning of said subject, the evolution of it, and where it stands today.
In between NPS pages and approvals, I would help assist our Digital Project Manager, Chad Elder, with ideas on how we could visually elevate the copy by recommending certain images, graphs, maps – anything that would give the page that extra oomph for our visual learners out there.
Towards the end of our journey, we presented all of our hard work and left an open floor for any questions, comments, or suggestions Lake Mead may have had. They were knowledgeable, kind, and possessed fantastic insight that made for great additions to the site – helping the project to end beautifully.
Looking back, I’m incredibly grateful for this beast of an assignment. Being a Vegas native, I figured I already knew most of everything about Lake Mead – completely unaware of all the interesting information I was yet to discover. But that’s the beauty of my position here at Braintrust – it allows me to expand within my craft in the most unexpecting of ways and dive into topics that I normally wouldn’t experience within my day-to-day.