Spotted Lublin is a local news outlet with a twist. It started as just one of many local “Spotted” pages on Facebook, this one being centred around Lublin, a city in south-east Poland.

If you’re not familiar with the concept, imagine that you just met someone interesting but you were too afraid to ask for their phone number. You might never see them again. So you run a small classified ad in a daily newspaper that you hope they read, in which you ask them to get in touch with you. ”Spotted” communities started a bit like that, but on Facebook. Now they gather thousands of people doing shoutouts for various reasons. This proves very useful if you’ve lost your keys, a wallet or a pet.

The team at Spotted Lublin managed to evolve their Facebook page into something even better: a local news portal. Their website reaches hundreds of thousands of Lublin’s inhabitants a day. They sponsor large, public events. They uncover local politicians’ dirty laundry. And they make a decent living doing that. That’s no small feat.

We met through a mutual acquaintance. The team needed some consulting on how to move on from where they were. This resulted in a few months of intensive coaching, mentoring and strategy work that transformed everyone involved. And I mean everyone.

For consulting, we met weekly for an intensive workshop. At the workshops, we focused on areas such as:

• The team’s long-term vision
• Brand values
• Possible futures
• Audience needs
• Group dynamics
• Conflict management
• Evolving past “just news”
• New product features
• Strengths, weaknesses
• Opportunities, threats
• Working agile and lean

The work resulted in a radical change in the team’s mindset and helped Spotted Lublin go towards a future that’s a bit more understandable, predictable and optimistic.

Though you might not see it here, we aimed to minimise all documentation. No lengthy reports that noone will need. Just the records of what we worked out at meetings. Because the project team was so small, we didn’t have to worry about efficient knowledge transfer. It was already there.

Attracting advertisers

Advertising is what keeps most media afloat. Spotted Lublin is no different.

Once we were done with the strategy work, the team asked me to design a landing page aimed at attracting and converting advertisers.

I started by designing initial wireframes and writing new copy.

Graphic design

Once the wireframes were ready and accepted, I could move on to designing hi-fi mockups.

The landing page is currently being implemented.