By the Grace of god

One of the organizations I've recently encountered is the Grace institute (http://www.graceinstitute.org/). It's a really interesting organization that's located in the upper east side and I've been chatting with some of the people who are running the place. The mission of Grace is to provide training to women looking to get jobs in the corporate sector (mostly around administrative assistance and office help). In the constant serendipity that is my life, I just so happened to walk onto a train this morning where I encountered the following ad:



So I figured, I'm brave enough to talk about all sorts of other ads, why not talk about this ad? I mean after all, it's easy to say stuff about orgs that you'll never talk to but you gotta believe in what you say to write about an ad when the people who made the ad have your telephone number!

So what do I think? Well the ads not terrible (does no harm) but there's plenty of places to improve. So what's good: 1) It has a clear sense of the target is (clearly focusing on women) 2) I know who made the ad - Grace institute - and clear how to contact them 3) Easy, meaningful tagline - Educate.Empower.Employ.

How to make it better? Overall it's just too flat. It's hard to tell where I should look and what I should take away from this. I have some ideas (as always) to make it better 1) Put the contact information at the bottom - people read from top to bottom and left to right - people won't want to contact you for no reason, so putting the contact info at the top, before your pitch, doesn't do any good - also do you need the address? website and phone number seems like plenty 2) too much text - I like the idea of having a quote but who's going to read all of that? 3) I like the image of the woman but I'd rather have her in a more aspirational background (and office or something) not just on a white void. 4) add a logo - I think it's an easy way to remind people of your org and who it's for.

Not a terrible ad, not a great ad, could be made more aesthetically pleasing but you don't want to sacrifice the message and the mission for a pretty image. As Emerson said "Beauty without Grace is the hook without the bait".

PS: Check out my new site on the interweb www.Seamnyc.com - tell me what you think (as long as what you think is that my site rocks)