I wrote this script while working at RocketWheel Productions.The script and video were finalized and delivered to the client in July, 2017.

Cyber attacks dominate the news and the boardroom.

Attackers are savvy and persistent. To defeat them, you have to be even smarter.
Do your cyber defenses measure up?

They will. With Synack.

Synack’s crowd sourced penetration testing platform reinvents how enterprises and government agencies think about security.

How do we do that?

We pair the world’s best hackers with the most advanced scanning technology to find critical security issues that other solutions simply cannot detect.

The Synack Red Team consists of the top security researchers in the world who think like adversaries but are highly vetted and act as allies.

Synack’s proprietary scanning technology, Hydra, constantly scans all of your assets, and alerts the Red Team of any attack surface changes or suspected vulnerabilities.

All testing activity is routed through our secure gateway, Launch Point, enabling real-time monitoring and auditability.

The Synack Mission Ops team analyzes and prioritizes all vulnerability submissions so all security intelligence passed to your teams is realistic and immediately actionable. And we help your team verify that patches have been applied.

These four pillars make up the Synack solution and empower you to face security issues head on.

Synack’s web-based client portal provides real-time visibility into testing activities, intelligence from the Synack Red Team, and detailed reports on when, what, and how your assets were tested.

Why do customers choose Synack?

Efficiency.

An assessment can begin within 24 hours. With the world’s best hackers on your side, you’ll find and fix critical security issues faster and more effectively. And you can easily scale your testing programs as needed.

Visibility.

Synack provides a dynamic client portal with on-demand insights instead of just static reports.

Results.

Synack reduces business risk and increases resilience to attack. A realistic view of your security weaknesses ensures you can be proactive, not reactive.  

Discover.

Prioritize.

Remediate.

Adapt.

Let Synack show you the better offensive approach to security.

Trimming the fat. We do it to meat, we do it do our diets and organizations and governments try to do it to their budgets.

When it comes to explainer videos, we need to trim the excess fat from scripts. This isn’t just because of our shrinking attention spans. That’s a factor, but we should want our scripts to be lean and mean because it makes for better videos.

My friend, screenwriter and screenwriting instructor, Madeline DiMaggio, always tells her students that when writing for television, every word needs to count and must move the story forward. If it’s true in television, it’s even more so in explainer videos.

In an earlier blog post, I mentioned the importance of crafting an outline before writing that first script draft. The outline provides a helpful structure as you write the first draft.

In the first draft, you’re not concerned with trimming the fat. In fact, we often write the first draft fatter and then the fat trimming happens in the subsequent drafts. Even these fatter first drafts still tend to be leaner than they would be if we didn’t have an outline as our guide.

Now we can work with the client on trimming. First, we just cut out extraneous words by finding a simpler, more efficient way of saying the same thing with fewer words. This is the wordsmithing phase. We’re not making wholesale revisions that change the meaning of the narration at this point.

Depending upon how close the script is to the target length, the client may decide they like the flow and agree to keep the longer length, or we start making tougher decisions about what bits of narration have to go.

This can be a difficult exercise when there are a lot of stakeholders on the client side who all have their favorite features or benefits they want in the video. This is often when the client works internally on revisions to gain consensus. When we get the script back, we review and if necessary clean up via wordsmithing or suggest additional, more substantial edits.

Once the script is as lean as it can be, the storyboarding process starts. Sometimes minor script changes arise as the visual elements come together, but the fat trimming is complete. Now the magic of bringing a client’s story to life can really begin.

I wrote this script while working at RocketWheel Productions. The script and video were finalized and delivered to the client in June, 2016.

Every constituent in your database, every attendee at your annual gala, every casual constituent for your cause has the potential to be so much more.

Like Marc here.

Marc could be your next monthly constituent, major giver, or chairman of the board, if you just had a solution that helped you know him as a person, customize his communications, and understand what resonates with him. 

Designed for nonprofits with built-in best practices from for-profit companies, OmniPoint Enterprise Marketing Suite is an integrated set of really, reeeally smart marketing tools.

And not just any really smart marketing tools, but the exact tools needed to tackle the unique challenges faced by marketers at non-profit organizations today.

Challenges like data quality assurance and data integration across multiple channels…

…campaign segmentation…

…message personalization and timely marketing automation…

…and visual insight into campaign performance.

With this single, comprehensive solution, you can significantly strengthen your marketing efforts. Because OmniPoint brings together data from across your organization, you can see your constituents as people, not pieces.

Suddenly, Marc is more than just another name in your housefile.

He’s a constituent who’s given annually on “Giving Tuesday” for the last three years.

He’s a fundraiser who ran a marathon to raise money for your cause.

He’s a passionate supporter who prefers to get personalized updates from you over email, not snail mail. 

OmniPoint gives you a more complete picture of who Marc is, so you can create and send customized messages that matter to him, when and how he wants to receive them.

Because when you know Marc on a “first-name basis” instead of a [FirstName] basis, you’ll bring in more dollars and support for your cause. Know more about your marketing campaigns. Know your constituents better. Know how to boost your results. With OmniPoint.

One of the main responsibilities I have here at RocketWheel is writing scripts for the videos we produce. I work very closely with the client and our animation team to refine and communicate the client’s vision.

Every industry has it’s own special jargon. This isn’t a bad thing per se because jargon can be an effective way to communicate with people in the same industry. Where jargon gets problematic is when it’s overused to the point where it loses any real meaning or influence.

Two articles, written three years apart, have made me examine my use of jargon and I hope it does the same thing for you.

Ann Handley, one of the foremost thinkers on digital marketing, reminds us in this post that context is everything. We need to know if we’re using certain words to show we understand our client’s world or if it’s just easier to not look for a better word or phrase.

Forbes published a list of the “most annoying, pretentious and useless business jargon” back in 2012 and the list is still relevant today. I was dismayed to see many words I’ve used in scripts, or clients have pushed for in scripts, on this list, including, “Scalable”, “Best Practice”, “Leverage”, “Drill Down” and “Empower”.

It’s not that these words are invalid; they are just overused to the point of becoming irrelevant. Running close behind these words are two phrases that I’m hearing and seeing much too often: “Paradigm Shifting” and “Disruptive Technology”.

Aside from overuse, the main reason that these phrases bother me so much is that they seem to ooze hubris. All clients love their products or services, as they should, but a little perspective is needed. For the most part, a client’s product or service isn’t solving global conflicts or curing a disease.

So, do we have to junk the jargon completely? I doubt that is realistic or completely necessary. But what we can do is promise ourselves that we’ll start being more conscious of the words we use and why. This self-reflection can only make our business and personal communications more truthful and powerful. And who doesn’t need more of that?

I wrote this script when I worked at RocketWheel Productions. The script and video were finalized and delivered to the client in February, 2015.

Managing maintenance can sometimes feel like navigating through rough waters.

Do you have enough information to stay ahead of maintenance and keep your boats up and running with certainty?

Are you worried about staying compliant as regulators and customers demand more and more reporting?

Sure you could use software to help solve these problems, but it’s often hard for your people to use and just gets in the way of them doing their job.

Can’t someone make this easy?

Someone did.

Introducing Helm CONNECT. Your easy-to-use maintenance and compliance solution designed specifically for workboat crews and engineers.

It’s web-based so you can use it onshore and on your vessels but your data is always secure and accessible even if you lose your internet connection.

Through configurable templates and checklists, you can build a standardized maintenance program for all your vessels.

And all of this information is recorded in a single place for easy reporting across your fleet.

Helm CONNECT’s simple, yet comprehensive system enables you to be more efficient so you can be proactive, not reactive.

Streamline how you manage workboat maintenance and compliance with Helm CONNECT.