Sharon Tallach Vogelpohl, principal and president of MHP/Team SI: “Everyone’s scrambling to reinvent how they’re doing business.”
As businesses across the state struggle to stay afloat, Mangan Holcomb Partners/Team SI and the Little Rock Convention & Visitors Bureau have launched an online resource to provide information on Arkansas businesses, restaurants and service providers.
The website UpliftArkansas.com is a community-wide hub that allows businesses and nonprofits to reach consumers and donors in real time. “Users can quickly and easily claim existing listings or create new listings to keep communities informed about the efforts of local organizations during the COVID-19 pandemic,” the Little Rock marketing agency and the LRCVB said in a news release.
In an interview with Arkansas Business last week, Sharon Tallach Vogelpohl, principal and president of MHP/Team SI, said that the pandemic had revealed to many companies that they lacked needed digital infrastructure. “In the situation in which we find ourselves now, as everyone’s scrambling to reinvent how they’re doing business and how they can keep things moving forward, there are a lot of protocols and tools out there that are no longer nice to have; they’re really more have to have,” she said.
The UpliftArkansas.com is a free website offered as a community service, but MHP/Team SI is also working with paying customers to help move their businesses online.
The agency has been able to transition its business to online during the pandemic fairly easily because a lot of its technology is cloud-based, said Alex Hood, the company’s chief technology officer.
But that’s not true of many of its clients, so the agency has been working with them to shift their internal business functions to online, consulting with them on setting up online meetings and video conferencing, for example, and helping them with appropriate software and hardware.
In addition, MHP/Team SI is helping clients interface with their own customers online. “One of our clients is a jewelry retailer and obviously people cannot come into the store like they could in the past,” Hood said. “And so what we’ve done is consulted with them and set up an online chat that’s live. It allows their customers to connect with the people that actually work in the stores.”
MHP/SI is also helping its clients move functions like file storage to the cloud, put up banners and statements on their websites related to the pandemic and develop their e-commerce efforts, such as setting up online stores.
Many people, Vogelpohl said, associate her firm just with marketing, “and we’re really part a tech company, and there’s a lot of expertise that a lot of folks don’t know that we do.”
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