Buzz in Baltimore: News from Fastspot, Clapp Communications and Firedrive Marketing

Baltimore interactive design agency Fastspot announced new hires: Anne Petersen is the agency’s new director of user experience; Julie Higgins holds the newly created role of director of marketing and communications; and Yianni Mathioudakis has been promoted to director of design after ten years at the agency.

Also at Fastpot, Lucas Roe, user experience designer, joins from Columbia-based ACGI Software, where he was the lead user experience designer. Prior to that, Roe worked for No.inc and R2i in Baltimore as a UX designer. Bryan Stoner, Fastspot’s new developer, joins from idfive, where he was a front-end web developer. Abigail Pendergrass was named Fastspot’s new project manager.

Baltimore-based marketing and public relations firm Clapp Communications announced Better Business Bureau (BBB) of Greater Maryland as its newest client. Clapp Communications will be providing public relations services in addition to acting as a marketing consultant for the firm’s upcoming 2017 centennial celebration event. The agency is headed by Barb Clapp, president and CEO. Headquartered in Baltimore, BBB serving Greater Maryland is a non-profit organization that was established in 1917 and serves 18 Maryland counties and Baltimore City.

Firedrive Marketing, headed by Donna Balinkie, served as market research partner helping Maryland Technology Development Corp. with a custom market research study to learn how TEDCO was doing, how customers felt about it and how it could improve services.

“One of the things we heard from our customers and potential customers is that it’s a little confusing to navigate the kind of alphabet soup of programs,” TEDCO CEO John Wasilisin told the Baltimore Business Journal. “People didn’t know which programs to apply to or they didn’t know who to talk to.”

In response to that feedback, the organization decided to initiate a kind of “TEDCO reset,” the BBJ reported, to restructure and simplify how it interacts with entrepreneurs, starting at the point of application. Starting in November and based on insights from Firedrive’s research, a new application procedure was adopted to streamline the process, according to the report.