Communications Committee - Regular Meeting

Recording in progress.

Call to order the April 21st, 2026 communications committee meeting. Roll call, please.

Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here.

Next on the agenda is the approval of the agendas everybody had a chance to take a look at the agenda and any changes That anybody would like to see if not No, no objection to approving by acclamation We will it'll stand approved Next on the agenda is the citizen comments anyone online or Okay I'll close citizen comments and next is the report of the committee chair and members. I have no report. Alderman Plufka? No report. Carrie Wege?

No report.

Lois Truman? No report. Greg Pennington? No report. And Rod Wright? No report. All right. Moving right along. It doesn't appear to be a city administrator report. Is that correct? Okay. So next up is the department report. Michelle? Michelle?

Good evening, everyone. Last month, we didn't do a department report. We had some other pressing items that took precedence over that. So we're back to it today. I did want to touch on something that I don't know. I know people who had an at brentwoodmo.gov or .org. I don't know where I got gov. .org email last Monday potentially got an influx of past issues of the Brentwood Bulletin, our weekly e-newsletter. If you were for some reason on the receiving end of that influx of past issues, it was an internal issue with our email censoring our email security features. They were somehow holding up all of those emails in our quarantine bank. And so when our IT department realized what had happened, not just the e-newsletter, but a variety of other emails, they batch released them all. Oh, wow. And we did find out it did only affect people who were on our server. So the Alder people have that issue because they have emails coming from their remote server. So likely you didn't experience that, which is good. It was an internal issue. But I did just want to put it out, let people know in case they did and thought there was an issue with our email newsletter, anything like that. It wasn't an issue. There was nothing that we did wrong. I verified that with our IT department that there's no changes that need to be made. to the practice that I have of sending it. It was an internal security thing because they are making some updates to our to our email security. And so that shouldn't happen again. I did want to let you know that I am still dedicated to looking into our e-newsletter and answering some of the questions that rose I think earlier in the year when we kind of discussed that moving forward. Other things have taken precedence, you know, focusing on the logo branding project. And so I am still diligently working to kind of get some answers and determine the best ways to kind of continue moving forward to better continue improving upon our e-newsletter and the practices there. I really appreciate those people like Craig, you sent me some really useful information in terms of e-newsletters and things like that. So I'm really taking that all in and in the future, we'll hopefully have a little bit more to update on in terms of the e-newsletter and how we plan to streamline that moving forward. Now delving into social media, it's been a little bit of a slow month, not a ton going on. However, since I prepared this report last week, we've seen quite a bit of engagement. We've had just quite a few things going on in the last week that seem to have really garnered a lot of attention on social media. We had quite a few community events. We had the Chamber of Commerce, Heart of the Community Awards. We had... The eager road cleanup. So a lot of things that people really seem to be engaging with on Facebook. So I anticipate next month's numbers will hopefully be up. But overall, we're remaining fairly steady. So there's nothing that I'm too alarmed with on there. Seeing some good increases on LinkedIn, so that's always nice. Yeah, so seeing a little bit more engagement on LinkedIn, especially our post-link clicks. If you'll see, that's 106% increase over the last 30 days. I know Bola is one of our big proponents on LinkedIn, so I have to give her some appreciation for that. I'm very happy with that. Nextdoor, it's actually really difficult to obtain analytics from there, so I'm looking into that a little bit more, but I did kind of give some of our popular posts over the last month, things that seemed to really speak to our audience. Key takeaways, as we've seen, numbers can ebb and flow, but it's not ever an indicator of like, oh, things are going really far south. They're not. It's just a slower time for us. We're kind of ticking into late spring. We're going to be getting summer. The water feature at the park is going to be opening. One thing that I have really noticed that people really seem to engage more with on our social media, specifically Facebook, is privacy. what i call posts that seem to humanize the people who work at city hall uh... for instance we did a post we've been doing a ongoing wellness months for city halls the city staff and we did a go yoga event and we had some pictures from that people loved it uh... we saw some really good engagement with the picture for cardinals opening day when we had city staff dressed in their opening day gear. So people really, yeah, and Lois, and so people really seem to respond to those types of posts. So I'm really trying to focus more on those. I actually went through the entire calendar of like, the national weeks, national months, national days to celebrate and I'm really focusing on highlighting those. Tomorrow is Administrative Professionals Day, tomorrow is also Earth Day, we've got Arbor Day later this week so I'm going to be hopefully shadowing one of the arborists to get some maybe some good video clips or things like that. I'm really kind of focusing on that while still making sure that we're maintaining the posting of those business-like posts, meeting schedules, things like that, just interspersing some more of those human interest stories, if you will. Lois, turn on your mic.

I thought it was on. Sorry. Are we still having the minute we're not doing that anymore? I missed that. What was the hang-up on that?

It was completely voluntary in terms of staff that participated. And I think we exhausted the staff that were willing to participate. So we're pivoting. We're now focusing on highlighting different city services. You saw that we did a video with the street sweeper when the street sweeper was coming back into action. I have a video in the tank that I just have to finish up of the trash truck in action and I'm going to focus on, you know, just reminding people of the different ins and outs of putting out your trash and there's a few different things that Public Works wanted us to remind them of. Hopefully tomorrow or Thursday I'll be gathering some video of a sewer lateral job as it happens and then give some information on that. So we're focusing now on 60 seconds with city services. So, you know, it was a really great endeavor, but not everybody is comfortable being on camera or being featured on the city social media, and that's absolutely okay. We thank the ones who did participate, and now we'll pivot to another avenue to continue sharing city good news.

Or we could do our alderman board at some point.

Yeah, we could absolutely do elected officials.

Just to keep in front of people.

Yes.

I think that's very important.

Yeah, she just wrote that down. So that's a great idea. Absolutely. I'm sure our board would love to be featured.

I'm always more comfortable behind the camera. No, I think that's fair. It's a good point. I also think that as over time as we see other municipalities doing similar things, people get more and more comfortable because they see you're not being, you know, the lights pointed at you and, you know, you're going to have.

Absolutely.

Other people doing it.

I will say our public works department, they seem to be the most willing to participate in videos, which is good because a lot of the city services that we want to highlight tend to fall in that category or our parks department employees. So that's lucky. But yeah, I want to, you know, shine a light on, continue shining a light on the city workers, even if it's not specifically at the workers, but the work that they're doing.

That's great. Comments on analytics of where we are performance-wise?

Not really on the analytics. And I'm sure you're sick of hearing me say that I walk in the new park a lot. But every time I'm down there anymore, someone's got questions about Brentwood. And I'm wondering, you know, they'll come up to me. I guess I look like I might know something. And I was just wondering if we shouldn't have some kind of, I don't want to junk up the park, but some kind of if you're interested in the city of Brentwood call kind of number. Because I don't think there's anything down there like that.

A QR code that goes to a landing page.

Yeah, or something where they can get information other than somewhat as stupid about things as I am. But it's kind of amazing to me how often I get asked. I'm down there at usually 4 or 5 in the evening, and there's tons of people there with kids after school right now.

What are their questions?

Oh, I'm sorry.

What kind of questions do they ask you?

It's every... I'm sorry. It's everything from where to buy a house, questions about the park, what's life like, how diverse it is. I mean, it's a wide range of questions. And the park is attracting a lot of people from outside of Brentwood, obviously. And because the park is the way it is, people are interested in playgrounds. I got a question about schools the other day. I didn't have a lot of answers about that, but It's everything you can imagine from somebody that's attracted to the community, I guess.

That's an interesting idea.

So we do actually have somewhat of an answer to that. Eric Gruenfelder and the Parks Department have been developing a... It's not a trifle, but it's a three-sided sign that will go up at the park that has information about Brentwood. So... We are working towards something like that. We also, kind of speaking more to the housing and things like that, we do have an economic development brochure that was created for the city, and that's here on hand at City Hall.

With Civic Plus, do we have access to being able to create landing pages that are not necessarily within the main navigation, but standalone landing pages that we could put take some of that content that you're talking about that's printed material and actually make a website of it but then create a qr code and then maybe in the in the park there's a scan for more information i mean we can create a qr code to an individual web page within our website absolutely that goes directly there i just didn't know with our hosts whether or not they have landing page templates that we can create

would bound, so we should be able to do it with this.

It might be interesting to think about taking some of that content, printed content, and just digitizing it.

I had a resident stop me the other day and said, Lois, you do stuff with the city. I said, well, I'm a resident. She said, if you could tell somebody that we don't have enough shade structures in the park. I said, okay, well, I can pass that along, and I will do that to Eric, but it's, I guess, a place for people, like, where they could input questions or something.

Well, you know, there are a number of sources for that already. Right, we have that, but they don't have it. It's the Alderman, it's coming to City Hall, it's posting on Nextdoor.

But if they are at the park, and they are... not aware of any of that, which there are people, unfortunately, that are, because I say to them, have you looked at the website? That's usually my first thing I say to them, but just, we need to I guess make information readily available, like with QR codes or the way.

It's something we can look into. I mean, I will say no matter how many times we say it and no matter where it is, some people might always just kind of ask. But that's okay. So I think that might be an interesting new outlet to think about.

They're all really great opportunities for education pieces.

Yeah. Great, good idea. All right, next on the agenda is the consent agenda, which contains the minutes from our March 17th meeting. Has everybody had a chance to review that? Unless there's any objection by the committee, we can approve that by acclamation, right? Any objection to approving that by acclamation? Okay, so approved. Move on to old business and take up the logo and branding initiative update.

So I would like to thank everyone for your diligence and patience during the last meeting. I know that was a long one, but I think it was really important for us to be able to, everyone to be able to hear the presentations from those final three firms. And I appreciate you all getting your scores to us. Based on the evaluation process and including the presentations that were done for the committee at the last meeting and the review committee made up of staff, assessment of all of the firms, staff is recommending that we move forward with contract negotiations with Destination by Design. So if approved, we'll initiate contract negotiations. In those negotiations, we're really going to focus on refining the project scope, the timeline of their submission to better fit the city's needs and priorities. And then we're, yeah, like I said, we're gonna give particular attention to the timeline, the task breakdown, and different ways we can streamline or consolidate those tasks.

Alderman Blufka? This is actually something that our chairman

Is your mic on? I can't hear you very well.

It should be.

There we go.

Yeah, so this is something, in addition to what you're talking about in terms of negotiation, would you be taking on different aspects of their bid? For instance, they have, and again, this is something that Jeff actually came up with, the brand launch and marketing plan

Yes.

So that's something that you do.

Correct. So that's where, when I, when I mentioned the task breakdown, that's where we're going to really focus in on and I'm going to come to them with, um, in collaboration with Alderman Gould and discuss areas where they maybe have tasks written out as part of the scope of the project that are not necessary, don't really meet our needs, or we have the ability to do here in house. And so I've taken a really hard look at their task breakdown. I've evaluated areas where I think we can maybe consolidate and really make it the most efficient as we can.

I have some comments about that. I delved into where they've been, what they've done. According to everything I can find online and in their proposal and everything, they have only done rural kinds of areas. And one area that gives me pause is we lived in Maryland and Easton, which is Talbot County, which is, that gave them one of their highest ratings, four point something. None of that, in fact, none of the sites that I visited that they have done compare to the demographics of Brentwood in any way. So that was a red flag to me. Easton that gave them the highest rating And in that County that was when we lived there that was purported where the KKK Grand Dragon lived and we all knew everybody at that time knew that area was to be avoided by people of color. I literally was with a group of ladies that had some women of color, and they asked us, please don't go there. We were going to a ladies' conference. So I just, the more I started looking into this, the DEI piece of all of this, which we are very strong here, and it just gave me pause that, and then I looked up on the AI checker, Some of their proposal that they sent us is AI written. I don't know if that bothers any of you, and I know AI is a good tool, but for our purposes, and then I looked up Glassdoor rating, which is where employees, are you familiar with ratings on Glassdoor? Okay, they got a three point something rating on that, And then Yelp gave them like three something below four rating. And I'm thinking something doesn't add up. So I looked because they said in their proposal that they were a 4.7 or something. And they only have six ratings on Google, six. So they've either weeded the others out because it doesn't jive with the other kind of profile. So I'm just concerned about all of that. I don't know. I should have been doing this before now, but there was something about it that bothered me when I was watching them, and I couldn't put my finger on it. And I feel like it is not Brentwood. Sorry, that's just... And I honestly, when I went back and looked at the six that were proposed before these three were brought forward, I'm just wondering if you have any notes or could tell why Dovetail was not included in the final three. I don't know if you have a record of that or what happened that Dovetail was not included in the final three. three because they are local they've done multiple comparable types of branding right here in the area very familiar with our setting and yet they didn't make the final cut so i was that was another question i had

There's a lot of there's a lot there to unpack yeah, I'm not sure You know I mean I think there's accusations of things that I'm not sure what is real or not It's just research that I gathered but so I I don't know. Anybody else on the committee? I mean, I looked into every one of the submissions, all 22 pretty in-depth. And while there were other firms that I felt were close in comparison, I also Respect the work that the staff Selection committee had done yes, and there were others that I would have you know that I in my evaluation I said you know if we needed to This this firm might be somebody to consider bringing back in and having it and that's if we felt we didn't find the right fit yet and So I mean, I think we can all kind of go through and say, well, I think this one or I think that one. And again, ultimately, I think we have to rely on our staff to do the work and vet the firms. And then part of even if we were to move forward with a recommendation, you know, that process, that vetting process would still be happening through negotiations. So maybe some of those concerns could be raised.

I mean, in all honesty, the people that I put as my number one when I delved into them more, because I didn't, that's on me. I did not do the deep dive that I should have done before the scoring. I apologize for that, that's on me. And even then, I'm thinking, oh, well, that's, they might not be the best after I did that, because maybe they're smaller in their scope of performance, you know, ability or whatever. I don't know, so I'm not saying it, I just feel queasy about us putting that particular thing forward without doing a little more research. Because I don't feel like it is who we are.

Go ahead. Yeah, so I mean, with all due respect, Lois, I just really wholeheartedly disagree with you on a number of topics here. The first one is that I've been in the city of Aiken, South Carolina, many times. I have a good friend that lives there. Aiken is quite a bit like Brentwood. It's actually a little bit bigger. It's about 26,000 people.

I'll just clarify. I meant who they present, where they have done their work. Was Aiken one of them?

Yeah, Aiken, South Carolina was one of them.

Oh, I apologize.

They're a suburb of Augusta, basically, just inside of South Carolina. It's a horse community, so it's a little bit different than Brentwood. But it is a pretty suburban community. We're a pretty suburban community. Right.

No, I didn't see suburban. I saw out in Oregon a little place. I saw in West Virginia.

Oh, and in Manteo, North Carolina.

You might be thinking of a different firm because this firm's done a lot of work. for a lot of different size municipalities. In fact, most of their work was very diverse sizes. Some of it was tourism, but some of it was just counties and municipalities of various sizes in and around suburban areas. One of the other candidates, You know, I would maybe agree with you. There were some examples that weren't really close to what represents what we are. But that's why I'm confused. Maybe you're thinking of a different.

Well, it was destination by design, right? That's who I was looking at. And these ratings. Oh, okay. What was the location? Oh, see, I'm confused. I have destination up there. It's Chandler thinks. I'm sorry.

All right. I'm sorry. That's why I'm confused.

Oh, my word.

So Chandler thinks is not what staff is recommending.

Okay. No. Okay. That is my bad totally.

All right.

Thank you, Craig. The very first word up there, destination, I guess I just tricked my brain over. Okay.

Okay, any other questions related to the recommendation by staff? And again, the recommendation is to, is this committee doesn't, just as a reminder, we're a recommending board to the Board of Aldermen. What we do is we recommend what we think to confirm or direct staff to do, take certain steps to ultimately then take it to the full Board of Aldermen for final consideration. And some of our direction can include In addition to contract negotiation With scope of tasks and pricing and all that it can also include capabilities. So if there are things that you think are Yes, maybe this is the right recommendation but i'd like to see more about what their capabilities are in certain areas that's certainly something we can provide input on but again we're recommending body of. To staff to then ultimately the the so don't don't feel like, even if we recommend to move forward in a certain way. that that's the final decision. It's just helping guide the process. Is that, Bola, am I kind of covering that correctly?

Couldn't add anything else to it.

Okay. Should we have as the context for our discussion, should somebody put a motion up

Yeah, I would entertain a motion if we can do that, if someone would entertain a motion to direct staff to begin contract negotiations with Destination Design as they've recommended. And then if everything checks out, take it to the full Board of Aldermen. I'll make that motion.

I'll second it.

So it's been moved and seconded is there now we can Now we can get into the meat of the discussion of this if there is any additional clarification discussion or guidance that Before we vote on that motion You know I recuse myself because I knew one of the bidders so well, so I didn't score things But I did look at all 22 proposals.

I commend anybody that waited through all of those. I think it's an outstanding choice and I thought the proposal was incredibly well done. I thought their visuals were really attractive. One of the things I looked at was just how well the proposal was presented in terms of visuals, because I think that really reflects on the company a lot. So I think it's a great choice. And I'm very enthusiastic about seeing them get to work and maybe even go visit them in Boone, North Carolina. That looks like an attractive place.

Yeah, I echo your sentiment on that. I think one of the things that I liked about them is that they you know they they seem to elevate the ask and not just deliver a logo but a suite of of graphics and then they you know I think demonstrate some variety of finding unique ways to articulate each of the cities and municipalities that they've worked in so that's again we're looking for not just a logo but just more of a comprehensive branding that Ultimately can send the test of time for you know 25 30 years hopefully That we feel confident building some equity around so I I have another question on this score sheet readout thing that we all received Is this correct that Chandler thinks received 63 points and

Creative Entourage 100, and Destination by Design was 56. Where did this, where did that come from? I mean, I have no idea.

Might be on a particular question or something.

No, it's the score sheet that we did. Is that your score sheet? No.

Where did that come from?

It's printed. It's printed. And it says score sheet, it's on the Brentwood paper thing, and it says score sheet comprehensive logo and branding initiative.

So initially on the website, I think after staff, the panel that did the initial individual review before they did the collective review, so the scores changed between those two. So what you're referring to may have been the first one. That's on the website. They're not on the website?

Well, I mean, I have it in my stuff because I print stuff out. I'm still old school. So I printed that out.

The name of a reviewer on it or anything? I don't know where you would have gotten it. No, date and reviewer. It's not in this packet.

It's not in this packet, but it's probably on the website. Oh.

So we've got preliminary scores that were reviewed by the review committee. We had preliminary scores that were done by the review committee before we even came together to discuss. Those scores were adjusted after in-depth discussion regarding every one of the 22 submittals and their submissions as a whole. And then we narrowed it down to six and then it was narrowed down to the three.

And this is the scores for the three, so I don't know who did that. There's no attribution of where that came from and whose that is. I mean, that is my question.

Can we come up and take a look at it? Sure.

I mean, I promise you I did not make that. Guys, that was on the website somewhere because I printed it off of there. That's why it was also... On the Brentwood website? Yeah, it's on the Brentwood paper.

We'll take a look.

I don't know. Because we're not...

No, I don't think it is. It's comprehensive.

It's not, though.

Oh, I see what you mean.

That's an individual score sheet.

If it was comprehensive, it would have been a collective number, right? It would have been all of the reviewers added up.

I don't know. That also gave me pause when I saw that on that score sheet, the one we're recommending had the lowest numbers.

Lowest?

Yes.

This is your score sheet.

That is my score? No, that's not the person I...

It is your score sheet.

The person I selected was the creative entourage. That is not my score sheet. I have my score sheet. Okay. Well, it just gave... I just... Okay, well. Thought it was from the committee.

There is a motion on the table for the recommending, you know, and this committee can vote how they want to vote. And if a majority of the committee feels the way the motion was made, then, you know. how it will go. So are there other comments or concerns that anybody on this committee would like to share about that?

Well, I did want to know why Dovetail was not in the final, what How do we know how the criteria or what the criteria was?

The staff put a lot of time and they have a sub-selection committee that made those selections. I don't doubt that. What I don't want this committee to feel like we're doing is now circumventing and then questioning that process that they spent so much time doing.

I'm not questioning that. I'm asking can we see the criteria

that made the final- It's the same criteria that was used for all the submittals. And so it's a collection of all of that that staff, the panel, reviewed it and were able to identify the top six for your consideration and then from that to the top three. So it was the same criteria. Do they fit what was asked in the RFQ? Their breadth of experience, is it relevant to what the city would like to see? And so it's those same criteria that was in the issuance document. that was in the scoring sheet that the panel used to make a recommendation to this committee.

If you recall, at the last meeting, they had the full 22 list of scoring sheet. But again, that's... Those were preliminary scores. With preliminary scores that were prior to... having individual conversations and presentations. And so those scores evolve as staff learns more about, and maybe it's comfort level of working with them, something about the interview that didn't go well, that maybe on paper looked great, but maybe didn't check out. So again, I wanna trust, we weren't in the room, we weren't on that panel. I wanna trust that staff's done the due diligence especially narrowing it and bringing to this committee uh... three and ultimately six available for us to consider and the three that we had present presentation uh... you know i'm unless unless the the rest of the committee feels otherwise i i'm not i don't think we're at a place of questioning that level okay i'm just always biased to going local if we can

And so that's, if we can find what we need locally, I would always vote for that. So that's another reason I was looking at Dovetail more. Okay. All right.

You know, I don't want to comment on any proposal in specific, but I went through all 22. There were a good chunk of them that were very boilerplate. It was like somebody had dusted off our logo proposal or our branding proposal and sent it in. And If I had been reviewing them, those get to the trash can awfully fast. I was surprised by the three that we reviewed last week as the top by staff. They didn't fall into that category. And the company that we're recommending, they've done a tremendous amount of work. I was delighted to see them bid on something. You know, we're 8,800 people. We're not, you know, Anheuser-Busch or Pepsi-Cola or Coke. And we saw samples in the branding work for companies of that size. So, again, I really liked, you know, what I saw.

Okay. Well, I guess unless there's any other comments, we'll entertain a roll call. Any other comments last? All right. Roll call, please.

Terry Wege. Yes. Lois Truman.

No.

Alderman Plufta.

Yes.

Craig Pendleton.

Yes.

Brad White.

Yes.

And Alderman Wood.

Yes.

Yes.

Thank you very much. Oh, sorry. All right, now it's on. Thank you.

No, no one online.

No one online, okay. All right, well, seeing no further business, this meeting is adjourned.