Client: Delta Airlines, MKG

Project: Employee Benefits Booklet

Capabilities: Copywriting, Content Strategy, Stakeholder Presentations, Wireframing, Research

The past couple years have taken their toll, especially on the employees from certain industries. Delta Airlines wanted to show their employees how much they are cared for and make sure they knew about all the resources available to them.

I was brought in and handed a stack of dense, jargon-heavy, benefits paperwork. It was my job to research and review the material and find the best way to condense that into a booklet that would be fun to read and inspire the employees to take action.

Delta wanted to finish the booklet on a quick timeline in order to align it with some in-person events they had coming up. This meant we need to work efficiently while coordinating with multiple Delta stakeholders and MKG’s internal design team.

Starting with an outline

My first output was a visualized outline of the book, suggesting a specific number of pages, table of contents, and sample layout of content. I’m in the habit now of visualizing most of my work for two reasons:

1. It makes the review process so much easier as the person/persons reviewing can see how the copy will actual lay out in context.

2. It forces me to think about text heirarchy, character count, and user experience right from the beginning. It’s common to lose sight of these things when writing everything up in just a word processing software.

Jargon-free summaries

The outline was circulated with the client and approved. In the meantime, I organized all of the benefits underneath four categories, writing a short and jargon-free blurb for each one, using strong call-to-action style language.

Using stories as proof points

After several rounds of back and forth with individual Delta team leads, the blurbs were edited to ensure accuracy, without losing the fun, compelling tone.

To complete the project, I worked with the Delta team to collect several employee testimonials and then edited their stories for space and clarity. I felt the addition of actual stories would really help to bring these benefits to life for other employees.

Once we finished, the booklet was sent to print and distributed to employees in tandem with an in-person activation.

Click on the tiles below to see more from the booklet.

In summary

• Print can be a wonderful medium, especially when you want to make a lasting impression.

• I was brought into this project initially because MKG’s internal team lacked a long-form copywriter. I’m finding myself doing more long-form work, as well as projects that require a lot of review and condensing.

• The original plan for the booklet changed dramatically after my initial review and outline suggestion. I was grateful to both MKG and Delta for allowing such creative freedom.

• Getting to be a part of such a meaningful project for these essential workers was very cool.