Whether as a marketing tool or as a pre-design tool with clients, it only seems ‘logical’ that architectural firms will begin to consider the pros/cons of adding blogging to their communication arsenal.

Me, I’m biased, but there is much to weigh and each firm must think it through on their terms. For school design firms, it seems even more advantageous given the nature of needing community feedback and buy-in over the conceptual and schematic phases of project development. Forget only having the 1-day design charette with kiddos with crayons and lots of big rolls of paper; try that coupled with an on-going blog that captures the entire communities thoughts — from kick-off to schematic — and you can only begin to imagine the power of blogging for what we all do on a daily basis.

I’m thinking about this a lot lately as I begin to finalize my upcoming CEFPI presentation entitled “The Transformative Power of Blogging for School Design Teams” that I’ll be giving in Texas at the beginning of April. Without going into the details here, I am extremely curious about the potential impact of blogging on ‘how we all do business’ (beyond this very blog of idea-sparks in general).

To that end, I received an interesting email from a colleague of mine in a western state who is really trying to explore the idea of blogging in his firm and with an upcoming school design project. They are only in the early stages of discussion, but from the following, you can really tell the level of inquiry they are digging into…

As for our progress toward blogging: I gave my ownership the AIArchitect article about Krasnow [and design teams blogging] just yesterday AM for them to review and generate questions prior to our in depth discussion about our potential online forum next week. One person’s initial comment was something to the effect of “I don’t know anything about these, but my initial question would be how does this fit into our company vision/marketing plan, and will it increase client contact?” My initial reaction internally was “of course, otherwise I wouldn’t be wasting your time and mine!!!” But I refrained, needless to say. I think I have that issue pretty well covered in my “pitch.”

One reason I’m really chomping at the bit on this is because we have a project about to kick off that this would be perfect for. It’s a K-5 that will be a merger of 2 schools. The forum will allow the two school communities a space for their input, the District a space to disarm the self-admitted lack of trust in their decisions and information dissemination (a lot of folks have the impression that the District will be tearing down all of our community schools and ringing the city with mega schools), but also for the 2 separate teaching and administrative staves to collaborate more completely than a joint meeting of two appointed committees.

FYI — Consider another great discussion article from AIA that also covers “Architecture and Blogging”

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So, what do you think the potential is? The risk? The reward?

And what will we be saying 5 years from now?