Monthly Update: July 2018

This year’s American Institute of Architects (AIA) annual conference was in New York City, a high-profile opportunity where Think Wood’s striking new pro-wood displays showed what’s possible in wood construction to a highly engaged audience of architects, builders, and developers. Think Wood helped create a unified wood presence, capturing quality leads for WoodWorks, American Wood Council, NELMA, WWPA, and SFPA to assist and provide detailed answers to specific project questions. High-profile, in-person events continue to be another a strong driver of building trust while maintaining awareness and open lines of communication across these SLB-funded programs.

Think Wood hosted a first-ever Expert Hour that proactively brought together 20 experts with experience in building and planning prominent wood structures. This group of architects and engineers discussed and shared their current projects and lessons learned with each other, media, and attendees. By bringing together a high-caliber group of pro-wood experts from the design industry, Think Wood continues to play a role in nurturing critical professional collaborations to seed the design teams that are critical for getting innovative wood structures built.

Think Wood facilitated numerous media interactions, including discussions with ArchDaily to provide story ideas for potential upcoming features and The Architect’s Newspaper to serve as a follow-up to its initial mass timber issue.

In a continued focus on deck season, Wood, Naturally is partnering with contractors and designers to create credible and authentic content that refutes false competitor claims and highlights wood’s benefits. In June, Jen Woodhouse, a third-party influencer engaged by Wood, Naturally, published a blog post, $10k Deck: Wood vs. Composite, that illustrated in a side-by-side comparison the affordability of a pressure-treated wood deck relative to a composite deck, which was only half the size. Wood, Naturallypromoted it on Facebook, resulting in16k engagements. Her Facebook post drove the most responses of any branded posts in June, as people shared their own wood decks and expressed love for wood over composite, with comments such as “love this! However—never composite—ever” and “I’ve seen far more dissatisfied customers with composite decks than I ever have with wood.”

The campaign also worked with Sandra Powell (“Sawdust Girl”) to publish video, blog, and social content on How to Build a Deck With Pressure Treated Wood. Her content was viewed 295k times and drove 16.4k engagements among her audience, all without any paid support.

Recently, AWC organized and hosted a Twitter chat on building resiliency. With #AWCResilienceChat as a “handle,” the Q&A format allowed responses from an invited panel of experts to highlight how to protect homes and communities from extreme weather and natural disasters. For this chat, the panel included experts from the International Code Council (ICC), National Institute of Building Sciences, Simpson Strong-Tie, and AWC’s Vice President of Technology Transfer, Buddy Showalter. The chat quickly reached 25,005 individual Twitter accounts, with 297,512 impressions (number of times tweets from the session were seen).