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Jane Griffith
By Leah Etling on Nov 5, 2013 in People
At the heart of most talented marketing profe
ssionals is a creative and artistic sensibility.
It’s something that Tarragon Property Services’ Jane Griffith was able to express in spades with her recent work on best-selling author and leadership trainer Ken Blanchard’s “Whale Done My Wonderful One!”
The original iteration of Blanchard’s “Whale Done!: The Power of Positive Relationships” came out in 2002, and described the experience of trainers working with killer whales at Sea World to exemplify the immense power of positive reinforcement as a management, parenting and leadership skill.
Recently, Griffith had the chance to illustrate a version of the book that focuses on children and their parents. What started as a storyboard project turned into a publication agreement with publisher Harper Collins.
“It’s a mama whale and a baby whale, and the message is positive reinforcement as opposed to training by fear. It’s for adults as well as children, and teaches adults: You don’t have to yell at your child. Tell them they’re doing a good job. Catch them doing something right.”
Despite already having a demanding full time job and busy life, Griffith made the time to complete the project.
“I worked at nights, on weekends and whenever I could get the time. It ended up being really fun, and that was something on my bucket list that I never thought I’d get to do,” she said.
In her day job, Griffith is Marketing Manager for the Seattle-based Tarragon Property Services, a division of Investco. She has extensive multifamily experience, having previously served as national Marketing Director for Pinnacle.
“We have a long and extensive history of building our own properties and managing our own properties,” Griffith said of Tarragon.
The Seattle-area multifamily market has been booming as of late, and one of Tarragon’s newest projects, now undergoing lease-up, is a micro-unit apartment community called Boxcar South Lake Union Apartments. Units start at 319 square feet and go up to 667 square feet.
“We’re really excited about the micro units at Boxcar. Being able to make a lot of homes available in one beautiful community in a centralized downtown area offers so much to prospective residents,” Griffith said.
Using Yardi’s RentCafe end-to-end marketing and leasing solution, Tarragon has been able to offer online leasing, responsive marketing websites showcasing Boxcar’s floor plans and amenities, and a resident portal for online rent pay and maintenance requests. One of their property managers’ favorite features about the product is the Bulletin Board, which allows them to virtually communicate by distributing messages to residents quickly and easily about property news, upcoming events, and other items of interest.
Griffith came to the multifamily industry from Alaska Airlines, where she managed online marketing and communications for 23 years and helped build alaskaair.com into a $5 million per day revenue source.
The multifamily industry, she noted, is starting to catch up to other customer service industries in the online arena.
“In multifamily, I think that corporations are starting to embrace automation and technology a lot more,” Griffith noted. “It’s a 180 degree difference now from when I started six years ago.”
