Our Founder and Creative Director, David Gravina, was today named (for the second time) among Sydney’s top 100 most influential people by the Sydney Morning Herald’s the(sydney)magazine.

The article recognised the work of  David (and the crew here at Digital Eskimo!) on the Your Rights at Work and Raise the Bar campaigns and mentions our awesome online campaign platform, Do Gooder. The awards recognise people across a broad range of disciplines and pursuits and then categorises them accordingly, with Dave garnering a slot in the appropriately named ‘Altruist’ category.

From the article:

David Gravina’s design firm, Digital Eskimo, has driven successful online campaigns like Your Rights at Work and Raise the Bar. Now he’s giving his secrets away. In July, DE launched Do Gooder, a platform that allows other campaigners to build websites using DE’s most effective tools.

It’s already having an impact: the NewsStand campaign used its Do  Gooder site to get 3500 people emailing their MPs about a national media inquiry; just days later, an inquiry was announced. Gravina, 41, tasted his first such win when he was just 10, succesfully lobbying his local council to build a BMX track. “I hope Do Gooder will contribute to people experiencing the power i felt when the BMX track was announced”, he says.

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We’re very happy to announce that Dave Gravina, our Principal and Creative Director, has been voted as one of Sydney’s Creative Catalysts, part of the Creative Sydney Festival which runs from May 27 to June 12.

The Top 100 Catalysts list focuses on people with original, creative ideas who are giving inspiration to others in their field.

Dave has been given the opportunity to speak on 8pm, Wednesday June 10 at the MCA for the Creative Catalyst Showcase – Changing Sydney about Digital Eskimo’s project live local, a new online community resource that enables users to share their experiments in living locally and sustainably.

The Raise The Bar campaign team was also recognised for their successes in changing Sydney’s bar culture and John Wardle spoke about the campaign at the Space Race event, 6pm May 28 at the MCA. Our client, friend and bird of a feather Kate Bezar has also made a catalystic appearance in the Top 100 with her magazine Dumbofeather, congratulations!

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Just prior to Christmas John Wardle and myself were honoured to be included in the Sydney magazine’s (Top 100) most influential people in Sydney. The award was in recognition of our work on the Raise The Bar campaign in 2007/2008, so i would argue its not so much an award for two influential men but an influential campaign.

I’d like to recognise the core team who were behind the campaign as they played important roles in making it so wildly successful. They are Adele Winteridge, Jonathon Larkin, Mimi Daraphe, Andrew Cox and Damian Cerini.

As I’ve said before many, many more people (including thousands of RTB members) made this happen so once again cheers to you all.

Read the full article overleaf

The Article …
Traditionally, Sydneysiders have been quick to provide evidence of their city’s superiority over the southern pretender. The theory came unstuck, however, whenever anyone mentioned Melbourne’s vibrant, quirky, small bar scene. While we were all lamenting our bad luck over copious beers in vast, characterless pubs, John Wardle, 38, a musician and lobbyist who had toiled behind the scenes on cultural planning policy for years, and Dave Gravina, 38, founder and creative director of web design firm Digital Eskimo, were building a grassroots campaign, appropriately called Raise The Bar.

The idea was to rid Sydney of prohibitively expensive licensing laws that meant that the right to serve alcohol while providing any form of entertainment cost $60,000. Thanks to Wardle and Gravina, that same license now costs 500 bucks.

The pair met weekly to develop a strategy that included a chardonnay-sipping sit-in outside Parliament House and culminated in Wardle lobbying key players inside Parliament House just moments before the new bill was passed on July 1. Although the ink on those reforms is barely dry, Gravina says he knows of a number of players preparing to open – including a few experienced operators south of the border. “Conversations will be easier in venues without pokies, plasma screens and happy hours,” he says.

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We’re delighted to announce that last night the Raise The Bar campaign won the SMAC in Your Face award at the first Sydney Music, Art & Culture Awards presented by FBI Radio and Time Out magazine. The awards, presented at the Opera House, focus on Sydney’s creative community and are about celebrating the “interesting, the ingenious, the clever”.

From left: Dave Gravina, Andrew Cox, Adele Winteridge, Jonathon Larkin and John Wardle accpet the prize

Congratulations to all the winners on the night which represented some of Sydney’s most creative young talent (a special congrats to Fergus Linehan who pipped us at the post for SMAC of the Year!).

I should take this opportunity to thank all of those wonderful people who made the campaign such a huge success – and forgive me if I forget anyone .. our members who sent over 7,500 virtual drinks, gave money and made hundreds of calls to Liberal leader Barry O’Farrels office the night before the vote in Parliament, Clover Moore, Graham West MP, John Thorpe (ex AHA President, aka the villain!), FBI Radio, Spanton Media, Walter at Melt and Cedric at Cafe Lounge, Tom and the team at Mooball, Kate Bezar at Dumbofeather, Two Thousand, Kripy, Musicland, James Squire, Burrundulla Wines and of course all the RTB crew who put so many hours into the campaign.

Which incidentally isn’t over, stay tuned shortly for the next phase of the campaign …

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We walked away with 2 Finalists awards for our Hey Joe campaign at the Australian Graphic Design Association’s 2008 Biannual Awards recently. The campaign has been a great success; ensuring we stay front of mind within our community and has delivered a steady stream of very talented and capable people to the igloo to have a crack at becoming digital eskimos.

The awards honoured creativity and execution and were for Self Promotion and Promotion to the Creative Industry. Special mention should go to Penny who oversaw the project, Chris Gaul who designed the ‘Babushkimo’ dolls and the campaign look and feel, Anja on flash coding/animation, the team at Mooball, led by Tom Cameron who coded the backend referral engine (we can track who forwards to whom to confirm who to pay when we hire someone) and Duncan Underwood who heads up the HR activities here at Digital Eskimo.

Apologies to Eskimo Joe for the blatant name rip-off …

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It was a nice surprise this morning to receive an email from our client at the ACTU, which our alert (but not alarmed!) readers will know commissioned us to create the Your Rights at Work website, to let us know we’d won another award for the site (that makes three!).

This time it was from Labour Start, for Labour Website of the Year. In their words:

“The winner this year is Your Rights at Work (Australia) — a website that contributed enormously to the ouster of the viciously anti-union John Howard government a few weeks ago. Congratulations to the Australian Council of Trade Unions on a great campaign and a great website.”

We were pretty happy with our award tally last year receiving two awards (having not entered any awards ourselves that was pretty good – some agencies have teams of people applying for awards and through sheer effort pick up a few each year, we’re a bit busy doing great work for our clients so tend not to bother).

Though we love the accolades I can’t help but add that the greatest reward of all for us on this project was to know that it played a pivotal role in the resounding defeat of John Howard and his right wing Liberal Party in the recent Federal Election.

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Last night Dave and I presented the freshly-minted Raise The Bar Campaign site at WebJam. The site was well received, resulting in our presso being voted third favourite. Big thanks to WebJam and SitePoint for the prize and for everyone that voted for us!

Congrats also to the other winners, especially Dmitry for the Optimus Microformats Transformer. The project is a great contribution to the standards community – and he was sooooo pumped about winning the prize (which included an iPod Touch contributed by Binalogue)… it was a delight to see.

WebJam will be posting videos from the night to Viddler shortly. But in the meantime, Priscilla, who attended the event on her birthday – happy birthday P – has posted a note about the campaign (and why she’s supporting it) on her blog.

The media interest in the campaign, plus getting the site up and live and ironing out the bugs have prevented us from writing about the site here. Hopefully Dave will have a few moments in the coming days to write a bit more about the campaign and the site…

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Politics Online have announced nominees for the “The Top 10 Who Are Changing the World of Internet and Politics“. We’re very excited to see the ACTU, one of our clients, appearing in the list for the Your Rights at Work website. We designed and built the site (with our good friends and tech team Mooball) a few years ago as a hub to the ACTU’s very successful campaign and continue to provide strategy, creative and technical support for it.

If you get a moment, check out the nominees and cast your vote (for us!)

P.S. congrats also to our friends over at GetUp!, who have also been nominated.

This is an international award often presented to projects with much bigger audiences and budgets, so it’s great to see Australian representation among the nominees. And although we’ve already won an Effectiveness award from the Australian Graphic Design Association for the site it’s still exciting to be up for another!

**UPDATE: We won! We’re very excited to hear that the campaign site was awarded first place. Watch a video of the award ceremony

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