Meet Cat Prill, our new Content and Experience Designer!
We are super stoked to announce that our new Content and experience designer, Cat Prill is starting with PJC today! Cat (She/They) comes to us from Lancaster University as a Campaigns Officer, as someone who has personally worked with Cat before… I for one, cannot wait to work together again!
We asked Cat to answer a few questions for you to get to know them a bit better. :)
Can you tell us a little bit about your career?
I started in higher education about a decade ago. Initially I worked in programme administration and dabbled in recruitment support. Whilst I loved working with students and helping them thrive I felt stuck creatively.
I started a few side hustles and some volunteering projects; community and campaign management, copywriting, email marketing, a bit of everything. Much of this work was for friends and family who needed to boost their business, in later years I reached out to businesses I liked the look of, usually small, lgbtqa+, women or minority owned, basically; people who I wanted to be mates with.
I’m dead proud of this early work and it’s helped me realise that it’s important for me to care about what i’m doing, if my heart’s not in it my head won’t be in it for long.
After making the move into Lancaster University marketing as a maternity cover and I was thrilled when I was given the opportunity to continue in the team. From there the move to digital content was really natural, working with some incredible members of the digital content team at Lancaster we produced some campaigns and content that i’m really proud of. I’ve loved honing my skills and becoming a confident marketer and digital content professional within that team. In my last role with Lancaster i’m pleased to have created space for marketing and digital content to work more holistically, often bridging the gap between campaigns, marketing, communications, web, social media, print and other channels.
In the past three years i’ve turned my side hustles into a busy freelance venture and I get to work one day a week on my own thing (something i’m chuffed to be able to continue at PJ). I’ve worked on projects in charity and arts as well as keeping some of my old small business clients and i’ve loved having this space to develop new skills, explore new directions, methods and strategies and get to know different sectors.
What has been the most interesting project you have worked on?
An absolute passion project of mine was the World Obesity Day Hack, a campaign I led for an arts collective, Scottee + Friends.
The goal of this campaign was ‘hacktivism’, we wanted to flood the hashtags, feeds and timelines of people negatively affected by diet culture (that’s everyone, by the way).
We used influencer marketing techniques, UGC, live broadcast, comedy, paid targeting and some ‘kindness trolling’ to reclaim content being pushed for World Obesity Day, a day that demonizes fat people and paints them as lazy, drains on public money who need to be cured. The campaign focussed on uplifting fat narratives and showing World Obesity Day supporters that not all fat people want to be thin, many are thriving just as they are. Hopefully spreading a message of solidarity and hope to those struggling with their own body image.
The response to this campaign was amazing, we prompted over 500 pieces of glorious, fat, user-generated content over three days and the counter-campaign topped the official WOD campaign hashtags (and still does). Search for #WorldObesityDay or #WorldObesityDayHack on Instagram, Twitter and Tiktok to see some of this brilliant work.
The campaign was picked up by several globally recognised influencers in the fitness and entertainment sectors and received unexpected media attention and comment from a Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson.
I’m most proud though of the responses to my favourite element of this campaign; boosting fat-positive user-generated content in areas that had thriving slimming world locations and postcodes deemed ‘obesity hotspots’ by our government. One comment on a piece of content targeted at the UK’s most popular weight watchers meeting location reads “I put on [weight] this week, I hate myself. After seeing this, I think I deserve to not hate myself, it’s time to cancel my membership. Thank you”.
What is the biggest goal you want to achieve at Pickle Jar?
The biggest goal I set myself these days is to spend more time with my dog, Bean. I already know that Pickle Jar will support me in achieving this goal and I couldn’t be happier about that.
Professionally, I want to feel valued, challenged and like my work is helping to create better and more effective experiences.
What sort of content inspires you?
Content that prioritises margianalised voices.
Good content design is inclusive and that means it must serve and champion diverse experiences, identities, celebrate differences and address sensitive topics like disability, neurodiversity, sexism and systematic racism.
It’s 2022, There is no excuse for performative allyship. We must do better.
What is something new you have learnt over the last year?
I love learning new things, every day is a school day. I’ve always enjoyed printing and recently i’ve been playing with cyanotyping, a really old photographic printing process that produces a deep blue colour when exposed to UV light. I like messing with found objects and one of my favourite pieces features a pair of my grans glasses.
Now for some quick single word answers….
- Cats or dogs? BOTH
- Mornings or evenings? Evenings.
- Favourite season? Late Summer/Autumn. In a word: September.
- Favourite app? Tiktok.
- Favourite food? Bread.
- Biggest pet peeve? Rudeness.
- Job you wanted as a child? Pilot.
- Favourite font? IvyPresto
- Most used emoji 👀
Cat welcome to the Pickle Team, we can’t wait to work with you!
If you read this and you are eager to work with Cat, let us know!
