A Freelancing Organization

This past Wednesday Pass-Ed held it's weekly strategy meeting. During the meeting I made the following point: One way to think about Pass-Ed is as a freelance organization. In other words, as an organization we do what freelancers do but on a significantly larger scale. I then challenged my staff to consider what differentiates us from individual freelancers.

Two important points came up:
First, we have resources available that individuals simply could not have. Rather than asking a single individual to do everything we divide up the work according to expertise. So, if we have a project that calls for both writing and animation, we'll divide the work appropriately. Furthermore, we always seek advice as to how to improve our content development from practicing our teacher associates, practicing classroom teachers whom we've contracted with to specifically fulfill this advisory function.

Second, the same resources that make us a valuable partner to publishing houses and other organizations needing K-12 educational content, makes us a great place to work for developers. We ask them to work to their expertise and they're supported in other areas, collaboratively. Furthermore, unlike so many freelancers who must spend a large portion of their time looking for new business, our developers don't have to do this. Instead our sales and marketing team gets the business for them. This means that they get more time to do what they want to be doing.

I'm in the process of developing a tri-fold brochure about our organization. (We have rented an exhibit booth at the Association for Educational Publishers' annual summit, in early June, in Washington, D.C. and we'd like to be able to distribute this tri-fold.) Well, after writing this blog post, I think I've just written the first draft for one of the tri-folds. It seems like a useful explanation of what we do.