Bospar wins Best Micro Marketing & Most Innovative Recruitment/Retention Initiative
CHICAGO—February 13, 2020—Bospar, the boutique PR firm that puts tech companies on the map, announced it won two innovation SABRE awards from PRovoke, which recently rebranded from the Holmes Report. The Innovation SABRE Awards were selected from nearly 550 submissions, showcasing agencies’ ability to navigate and thrive with insight and innovation.
Bospar won Best Micro Marketing for their work with Unisys (NYSE: UIS) and Most Innovative Recruitment/Retention Initiative for its near-zero turnover in five years. These awards come as Bospar celebrates its five-year anniversary.
Unisys tasked Bospar with securing broadcast coverage for its annual Security Index. With less than a month to act, Bospar found a compelling angle that tied Unisys’ data to the midterm elections. Bospar produced a video news release (VNR), media-trained the company’s CEO, prepared a press conference to be broadcast-ready, and executed a PR plan that secured 145 broadcast placements.
Judges described the campaign as a “creative solution to a common challenge. Accomplished an impressive feat for the media and client.”
MOST INNOVATIVE RECRUITMENT/RETENTION INITIATIVE
Bospar employs a lengthy hiring process, including interviews with all managers and leadership as well as writing tests. With this extensive process, Bospar ensures that everyone hired is the perfect fit for Bospar and for our clients. Even more impressively, Bospar has had almost zero turnover in those five years, proving that Bospar has created a working environment that people overwhelmingly prefer over the average 35% annual turnover of traditional brick-and-mortar organizations.
“Our recruiting and retention program is something we take great pride in, and this award vindicates what we’ve believed for a long time – that we can only produce award-winning results when the full team enjoys the work we put into it and sees that it translates to everyone’s shared success,” said Bospar principal Tom Carpenter. “We take great care to plan our staffing thoughtfully when we agree to accept a new client bid, and we structure that in a way that ensures a career trajectory for everyone involved. I’m personally proud of the work we’ve done to attract the talent our clients need, and to ensure we remain at near zero turnover because people love being on a winning team and are happy with their clients and passionate about the partnerships we create.”
Some of the innovations Bospar has put in place include:
- A series of individual and group mentorships that weave everyone in the firm into at least three levels of ongoing touchpoints for everything from professional development to emotional support.
- A “communications cocktail” that combines video, phone, email, text and Slack to put each method to the best use, with each supporting the others.
- A Fun Committee comprised of all staff levels that keeps a close eye on communications and support needs and designs quarterly plans that include regular company-paid regional and virtual get-togethers, quizzes and games to develop personal relationships, and “culture box” mailings.
- A Bospar Today newsletter that serves as our virtual water cooler – providing photos of employees’’ kids, pets, vacations and other special moments; special weekly activities; PTO plans; and anything people would like to share. We also use Zoom for weekly all-staff meetings.
- Formal groups by level – VP, manager and associate – which meet several times a month to provide input into how we work – with all levels given equal weight.
- A third-party, all-company extensive staff survey led by our team-building consultant, including 360s of the leadership team, with “next steps” plans that map to findings.
- Formal third-party profiling and teambuilding done by the same consultant – who people know and trust.
“Our primary goal when we launched Bospar on Jan. 1, 2015, was to create a boutique tech PR firm that could take on the toughest jobs and deliver the most spectacular results, all of it powered by the right mix of senior leadership and up-and-coming talent,” said Bospar co-founder and principal Curtis Sparrer. “That’s exactly what we’ve done right up to the present day.”
About Bospar
Bospar is a boutique tech PR firm featuring a team of highly seasoned professionals who exist to put tech companies on the map. Bospar’s principals include a long-time PR and tech industry guru, a former broadcast TV producer and award-winning media maven, a standout PR agency manager from the corporate side of a leading global law firm, and an experienced executive with both agency and public company credentials. Bospar’s larger team includes experts in both social and traditional media, as well as financial and analyst relations and public affairs.
