In early March 2020, when the realities of COVID-19 were just dawning on the US, 32% of consumers said they planned to eat at restaurants less often, according to Technomic. In December 2020, CNN reported that 10,000 restaurants had closed in the past three months. A year later, here’s an update from Technomic’s September TIndex, […]
Yes, the supply chain came up at SmartBrief in November
November flew by (don’t I say that every month?). These are the stories I ran across in my work that kept me thinking long after I pressed “send.” BoardSource The smallest things can make a difference when trying to secure contributions to nonprofits. This article describes why an “anchor” (“simply prefilling the donation field with […]
3 Essentials of Tiger-Lean Writing
I am elated to welcome Jesse Stanchak, creator of Micro Flash Fiction (@MicroFlashFic) and author of “The Tyranny of Sand and Other Tiny Stories: The Best of @MicroFlashFic” as a guest blogger. Jesse’s microfiction stories, which he has been publishing three times a day for four years on Twitter, often reverberate in my head long […]
“You should get married”: This policy makes no sense
My friend, Yolanda Gordon, gave a TEDx talk (“The Poverty Pandemic”) in Rock Hill, S.C., on Nov. 13. Yolanda described her personal experiences as a single mother of three children, two on the autism spectrum, juggling as many jobs as possible with medical appointments, school meetings and all of the duties any mother faces. “I […]
Don’t let your mind wander!
WANDER: If you’re letting your phone give you directions on the back roads of middle Georgia, that’s fine (usually). However, if the voice says, “get left to prepare for a turn,” make sure there’s actually a second southbound lane when you decide to “get left.” Otherwise, you’ll end up where I was today: driving on […]
Why are there kids in the Darien Gap? And other SmartBrief stories
The upside of having a job where the main goal is to distill complex stories into two-sentence summaries is that my teams and I have to find the priority concepts in each one and be as clear as possible when we present them. The downside is that the two-sentence limit makes us cast off details […]