Anna Pickard Email & Phone Number

Freelance consultant and strategist, working with companies, arts organisations and the museum sector to develop, refine, evolve and scale their Voice and Tone

Lead writer on a project with The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC, developing topline narrative and copy for the opening of their Museum space in collaboration with the Folger team.

Working with the Content and Product Marketing teams to update, evolve and simplify existing Voice and Tone and bring them in line with updated messaging.

San Francisco Bay Area

3-month project for IGG, conducting a fixed-term assignment with Apple Product & Design.

Series of discovery interviews, documentation audits and workshops focused on helping the team update and redefine the brand voice to align with the evolving company values, product line, and marketing.

Responsible for developing, scaling and evolving the voice of Slack as the company and business grew. Worked across product, content design, editorial, brand, marketing, social, and communications to ensure that at every touchpoint, Slack was able to create human, authentic connections with the user. Coached and mentored individuals and teams on creating content that demonstrated best practice in conversational tone while maintaining the highest levels of respect and admiration for whoever was on the other side of the conversation. Created principles, style guides, and onboarding sessions on voice and tone, culture, and communication. Specialised in building out the concept and materials that show that rational, reasoned, surgically-precise moments of delight are not arbitrary, but instead things how one can use them to build brand loyalty, good products, engaging content and happy people.

Remote (Brighton, Uk, Then Sf)

Worked with small games studios as the embedded lead writer on games (mainly STEM, with some literature/vocabulary, aimed at grades 3-7) and interactive curriculum materials for an educational software company. The games still exist, though the software (and company) does not. Twelve a Dozen is probably the most successful game, being BAFTA-nominated. And really cute, even though it's about math.

Remote

Tiny Speck built a game called Glitch and I created characters and wrote stories and built worlds and wrote dialogue for pigs and chickens and trees within those worlds. In 2014, 18 months after the game had folded, I went back to work for the same company. Though by that point they had pivoted to a far less interesting, but more lucrative, venture into workplace communication software.

London, Uk

Wrote features, lifestyle and travel pieces for print and online editions, and maintained a weekly column, Pickard of the Pops, for Guardian Music. Pioneered the questionably-braggable practice of liveblogging live TV on the website of this award-winning and internationally renowned newspaper, starting with the Royal Wedding (Charles and Camilla Edition) and moving on to many strains and series of reality TV, elections, Eurovision and other events that I have been grateful not to have to watch since.

Master Of Philosophy - Mphil, Dramaturgy

Bachelor Of Arts - Ba, Drama/Theatre Arts And Stagecraft