A Cloud Guru

I was smitten with A Cloud Guru from the start. After nearly two decades in agency land, I was eager to settle in with a brand and make a difference over the longer term, rather than on a single project or campaign. And I happened to find one that was committed to something bigger - teaching the world to cloud. It's the kind of mission that lets you sleep easy at night and feel like you're doing some good in the world. 

Even better, ACG already had a refreshing voice. Relatable. Human. A little bit quirky. 

As Senior Copywriter and then Copy Team Lead, I've defined and shepherded that voice through the last 2.5 years of meteoric growth, multiple rounds of funding, the acquisition and integration of Linux Academy, and most recently A Cloud Guru's acquisition by Pluralsight.

Maintaining and evolving the A Cloud Guru voice has not always been easy. As with any startup in rocketship mode, pressures mount. Different teams have different priorities. An increased focus on B2B threatens to drown out B2C. Headcount rises, and pockets of shadow copywriting pop up. 

In addition to my day-to-day duties of writing copy and managing the copy team, I took several steps to ensure that the ACG voice stayed, well, the ACG voice:

• Created the voice and tone chapter of our brand guide, which gives extensive direction on not only how we write, but why. 
• Built and led copywriting workshops as part of our Brand Camp initiative, helping teammates across the organization learn to write like a guru. 
• Worked with project management to establish voice and tone reviews on outgoing materials. As a copy team, we don't have the bandwidth to write every single thing that goes out the door. By reviewing copy and identifying opportunities to inject more humanity, we not only ensure copy consistency, we also provide mentorship that pays off in lighter and lighter review cycles over time.