Area consulting company wins eight Communicator Awards

Cheryl Hentz

Contributor

December 16, 2024

OSHKOSH – The Communicator Awards – given by the Academy for The Interactive & Visual Arts – are an annual competition that recognizes excellence in marketing, communications and creative projects.

The awards honor the best in advertising, corporate communications, public relations and design – recognizing the effectiveness, innovation and excellence of communication in all areas.

Blue Door Consulting – which helps clients grow through strategic planning, branding, consulting, marketing, media relations, social media, website development, mobile development and technology integration – was the recipient of eight Communicator Awards:

• Two Awards of Excellence – the academy’s highest honor given to those entrants whose work demonstrates their position as the best in the field.
• Six Awards of Distinction for projects that exceed industry standards in both quality and achievement.    

In the years Blue Door has been participating in the annual competition, Consultant Heidi Strand – who co-founded Blue Door with Brenda Haines – said the company has won more than 100 Communicator Awards.

“We’ve been active in the Communicator Awards for approximately 20 years,” Strand said. “We really wanted to showcase and benchmark our work against other nationally and internationally acclaimed creatives. The Communicator Awards are a very realistic comparison of where we are in terms of our abilities, our skills and our talent, because we’re able to see how competitive the awards competition is.”

Each year, Strand said the Blue Door team decides what they want to enter based on the quality of that entry.

“The entries have a broad categorization,” she said. “So, everything from marketing effectiveness – so, how well a campaign did – to a website design to a full creative. Then they have subsets of those categories. We are very thoughtful about what we enter and where we enter it within the specific categories.”

Though some companies enter as many categories as they can, Strand said that is not a philosophy practiced by Blue Door.

“We’ve always wanted to hone in and make sure that we are winning awards for being the best in class and against the best in class,” she said. “When we selected the Communicator Awards many years ago, it was for that reason. And it’s retained its status and reputation as being one of the more premiere awarding institutions in the world.” 

Strand said all entries for the Communicator Awards are reviewed by the academy – an invitation-only body consisting of top-tier professionals from acclaimed boards, institutions and agencies, like American Express, Sony, Discovery Communications and Netflix. 

“All work is evaluated on its own merit, so it’s not like somebody gets first place, somebody second place and so on,” she said. “And not all entries receive awards.”

What the awards mean to Blue Door

Awards have different meanings to different organizations.

What they mean to Blue Door, Strand said, is pride and ensuring that the team knows they’re doing great work and that they want to continue to strive to be recognized for their creativity, their talent and the care they bring to their clients.

It’s also a celebration of working in partnership with their clients, Strand said.

“This work was a collaboration with our clients and it can’t be done without them,” she said. “So, this is very much a celebration of working together and the deliverables and outcomes that come from a great partnership.”

Lastly, Strand said the awards encourage them to continue striving to do better.

“We were awarded eight awards, but only two were for ‘Excellence,’” she said. “So, it gives us something to continue to strive for to ensure that we can continue to be excellent in all things that we deliver on.”

Furthermore, Strand said the awards are a statement about the care and collaboration that Blue Door has with clients.

“It’s wonderful to be recognized and we’re proud of the work,” she said. “But, the future of this isn’t about the number of awards. The future of this is about how we can continue to do excellent work with our clients. And this work has meaning and return on investment for them.” 

Strand said the Communicator Awards are not the only awards Blue Door has won since it began 22 years ago. 

In 2010, the company was named Small Business of the Year by the Oshkosh Chamber of Commerce.

And in 2018, Blue Door won the Company Innovation Award from the Fox Cities Chamber of Commerce. 

In addition, Blue Door has twice earned a spot on Inc.’s list of the 5,000 fastest-growing private companies.

In 2018, Blue Door ranked 3,436 on the list and in 2019, it ranked 3,261. 

Different from the beginning

Strand said Blue Door’s vision philosophy is “Seize the Day. Share the Love.”

She said it’s part of the company’s culture and is something they are always focusing on. 

“When an opportunity presents itself, we should grab hold and make sure that everybody feels that they’re cared for and that the work that we do is meaningful,” she said.

Strand said no matter the size of the client company, Blue Door gives everyone the same attention, care and consideration – something it has done since day one.

Having just celebrated its 22nd year, Strand said Blue Door has moved a couple of times since its inception, ultimately settling into its current location at 50 W. 6th Ave. in Oshkosh.

“We brought on our first employee within that first year or shortly thereafter following Brenda joining us full-time,” she said. “Today, we’re at 50-some people. Our team and our clients are located all across the country, though we still very much have a hub in Northeast Wisconsin. A lot of our clients are still here, and about one-third of our team is still here.”

Strand said Blue Door’s first team member lived in Oshkosh but was fully remote. 

“We would drive USB drives or CDs over to them in order to share files,” she said. “We didn’t have the Cloud like we do today. So, we’ve always had remote employees, but it was unusual to work out of your house back then.”

Strand said she even ran the company for its first two years from her home.

“I was a young mother at the time who was also working,” she said. “At times, I even took my daughter to meetings with me, which women didn’t do 20 years ago. We did things from the very beginning differently.”

Today, Strand said Blue Door has several team members in Oshkosh who rarely go into the office.

But the real shift for everybody, she said, happened during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Even though we were comfortable with hybrid or fully remote, our clients still loved having people in person,” she said. “But when COVID-19 hit, peoples’ lenses changed. They started to realize that we didn’t have to necessarily meet in person. We could save time in the car by just hopping on a Zoom call. That allowed us to recruit nationally versus closer to home.”

Up until COVID-19, Strand said the company was still recruiting employees very close to home “because we wanted to give people the option of driving to see a client in person (if that was feasible).”

“Now, they can be all over the country because COVID-19 gave everybody the flexibility to do that,” she said.

Strand said Blue Door was also ahead of the game when COVID-19 hit because while many companies had to adapt to a new way of doing business, Blue Door was able to simply conduct business as usual.

“Everybody has a laptop, nobody has a desk – that’s just not how we operate,” she said. “We’ve always operated in a mobile fashion.”

Also setting Blue Door apart, Strand said, is its long-held belief that marketing and technology should be joined at the hip. 

“Lots of marketing agencies don’t believe that,” she said. “We felt strongly that agencies should not charge a retainer. We felt that there should be deliverables based on project scope and an hourly rate. That was very different at the time.”

In terms of philosophy, Strand said Blue Door didn’t want people to think that the company was taking kickbacks.

“So, we were highly transparent,” she said. “We didn’t upcharge on any third-party services, and we didn’t partner with anybody… If and when we did things, we did them very strategically and very intentionally because we didn’t want to be known as an agency. So we chose the word ‘consulting’ as part of our name. That was a critical decision that has guided the business for the last 22 years. We truly are consultants – and that’s another way in which we are different.”  

Strand said Blue Door’s overarching corporate philosophy is like a three-legged stool encompassing its culture, mission and values.  

The company’s “Seize the Day” attitude, Strand said, is present in its everyday work. Additionally, she said the Blue Door team strives to make the most of every opportunity they have and to help clients do the same.

Lastly, Strand said the team makes sure to give care and meaning to its work and its clients, as well as its families and themselves.  

“(Blue Door’s values) are in our performance appraisals, and they’re part of our everyday conversations,” she said. 

Most of Blue Door’s work comes through word-of-mouth, but Strand said the team is also proactive in identifying clients they want to go after. 

“Our clients are all across the board in all industries, and they’re all shapes and sizes,” she said. “When we are looking to target clients, we’re looking for a certain size of clients and certain characteristics.”

Clients, Strand said, should also be a cultural fit.

“We’re looking for clients that want a long-term partner,” she said. “We’re not interested in just doing one-off projects anymore. We’re looking for long-term relationships and partnerships with clients. We’re looking for somebody who wants to scale and grow their business.”

Overall, Strand said the Blue Door team is very grateful for what they have been able to build in the last two-plus decades.

“Our clients are phenomenal and they’re very good to us,” she said. “Our team is amazing, and we could not do this work without them. We are also grateful to the communities that have supported us for 22 years, especially in Northeast Wisconsin. Oshkosh has been our home, and we’ve had so much support from Oshkosh and the entire northeast corridor. It has allowed us to grow and to see the success that we have.”

For more on Blue Door Consulting, visit bluedoorconsulting.com.