working with Virginia Ingram & Associates

for the Philadelphia Water Department

Yay! I’m excited for Our New collaboration!

We have a contract for Communications Support and Capacity Building for the Public Affairs team at the Philadelphia Water Department. The work we are doing for the water department is collaborative. The Water Department always sees anyone on contract as an extension of their team. We’ll work together to define projects, timelines, and budgets so we can deliver work for the water department that we are excited about.

Project leads. Virginia and Karen are the project leads. Typically Virginia will be the main contact for accessibility and customer service initiatives and Karen will be the main contact for science communications. Even with that designation, there will likely be a lot of overlap on the projects.

Contract year. Our first year on the contract is the 2020 Fiscal Year which began on July 1, 2019 and goes until June 30, 2020. Since it won’t be approved until February or March, we are going to be doing all of the work in a short time this year. This contract, with this team, will be renewable up to three times (which would be 7/1/20 through 6/30/21, 7/1/21 through 6/30/22, and 7/1/21 through 6/30/23).

Financial. We’ll agree to a budget for everything we work on. The water department is billed monthly, on the first of the month, for all work conducted the previous month (i.e., on October 1 everything from 9/1 to 9/30 is billed). It typically takes them 30 days to pay (but sometimes they can be slow). Money will be deposited into your account as soon as they pay. We’ll need to make sure I get your account information soon so we can have everything set up when you do work.

Recording time. We use Harvest to track time. Please make sure your time has been entered by the last day of the month so the invoice can be sent on the first. We’ll put project fees in Harvest so you can keep track of how you are doing against your budget.

per diem

Traveling. Virginia will book and pay for all of your flight/rail reservations and make your hotel reservations. You don’t have to keep track of your expenses when you are traveling, she’ll just deposit a per diem into your account before you go.

Per Diem. You’ll get $64 per day plus an extra $48 on your first and last day. This will cover all of your meals, incidentals, and travel within Philadelphia. Don’t forget your water bottle and coffee cup!

Buying stuff for PWD employees. Don’t do it! They’re government employees so it’s not something we can do. If we have a meeting we can order modest food and/or snacks for the meeting to keep the meeting going. If you break for lunch, then everyone has to pay for their own meal. The PWD employees know this and don’t expect anything.

Who all is on the contract? You’re probably curious about who else may be working with you. I have put together a little intro to all the people I included. Read bios.

Virginia Ingram

Karen Ingram

Ariel Cintron-Arias

Christie Nicholson

Ellen Jorgensen

Heidi Miller

Leslie Kang

Olivia Hecker

Paul Fugazzotto (our Client)

Scott Reston

Steven Keith

Wythe Marschall

Previous work. Virginia has been on three contracts for the water department. There are a few projects that could be relevant for you, depending on what you are working on.

The Philadelphia Water Customer and Overall Digital Trends - Created in 2018, this has trends relevant to the Philadelphia Water Customer and how they use digital. It is very relevant for understanding life in Philadelphia. There is also a baller infographic that came out of this work.
Personas - Personas for all of the Philadelphia Water Customers.
Accessible Web Guidelines - This is something those of us who are focusing on accessibility will be using as our foundation.
PWD Public Affairs Strategic Plan - I put this together with the help of the Public Affairs managers.

Not created by Virginia Ingram & Associates, but worth a look. Public Affairs does an annual Customer Satisfaction Survey.

How do we like to work? This is a process document I created for the Public Affairs team at PWD. This goes over a lot of the processes and stuff we use when working on projects. The most important things to know about when you are getting started are SMART Goals and The RACI Framework as we use for all of our projects.

Office Norms
Project Process
The RACI Framework (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) — you’ll hear about this a lot.
Media Toolkit
SMART Goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic or Relevant to the strategic plan, Timely) — you’ll hear about this a lot. We typically make goals for meetings and presentations to make sure we aren’t having pointless meetings.
Digital Habits of the Philadelphia Water Customer
Personas and Scenarios
Decision Process
Content Core Model and Content Mad Libs
Taxonomy
Links to Tools + Templates

Tools used. If you’re using these accounts please share your handle with us. :)

Harvest. This is where you will log your time. You don’t have to send me invoices; we’ll just use this.
Google Docs. With a distributed team we use Google Docs for collaborating on our work. Some people have a PWD Google/gmail account so personal email accounts don't get clogged up with PWD information. You decide what works the best for you; just make sure you have something Googly we can use. Additionally, you’ve been added as an editor to the Working File folder we use when working with PWD.
Trello. We use Trello to manage projects. At some point you may get added to a board.
Slack. We use Slack to chat with the PWD team.
Workflowy. We use this list-based tool when planning websites. Here’s an example of something we created when a new team member started.
Zoom. We use Zoom for video conferencing. I frequently use this address when I set up a Zoom: https://zoom.us/j/9194757706.