Services
We work as both consultants and implementers and our services are uniquely designed to meet the budgets and needs of social mission organizations.
Technical Assessments
Organizations can be quite different (membership, advocacy, associations, etc.) but they often share similar processes (relationship management, content publishing, campaigns, etc.). There are hundreds of options out there, from in-house spreadsheets to full-blown association management systems, and it isn’t just about choosing the best tool — you need to have the right combination of tools for your unique combination of processes. Technology assessments are where we help you figure that out.
We conduct Holistic Technical Assessments, where we look at everything from your communications systems to your backup routines and make recommendations to help you integrate technology more efficiently across the board.
We also conduct Spot Technical Assessments that look at certain aspects of technology like your communications and publishing processes and help you write requirements to create the right system for your organization.
Engagements generally:
- Begin with a structured interview process where organizational processes are documented visually
- Analyze processes against a strategic plan to refine the understanding between where the organization is now and where it needs to evolve to
- Result in a detailed matrix of observations and recommendations that facilitates prioritization
- Conclude with a concrete plan for the organization to follow, modify or fundraise around.
Strategy & Design
Understanding who you are trying to reach and where to find them is the basis of a sound communication strategy. Your audience might be huge on Twitter or it might not be there at all. We help you model your audience so you can invest wisely in places where you can have the most impact:
- Audience research
- Competitive analysis
- User prototyping
Knowing how you will reach your audience is where strategy takes form and design takes over. Print campaigns need web resources and web resources might be a website, a YouTube video or a PDF download to bring it all back to a print campaign… We work across print, web and multimedia platforms to help you build a successful brand:
- Identity design and management
- Collateral design
- Information architecture
- Web site and application design
- Campaign design and management
Product Development
We don’t just “do code too” — we build the sites and applications that we talk about… and we build them really well. We look at product development as an opportunity to breathe life into something we’re excited about rather than a problem to solve. And all of the strategic work we do up front is designed to make the products we build simple and fun to use.
To that end we’ve built full-fledged, custom Content Management Systems (CMS) that integrate site statistics into the interface and we’ve implemented open source CMS solutions both to manage content and do things they were never meant to do — two of our favorites are WordPress and Drupal, in fact. Though we generally work with open source solutions we don’t rely on them exclusively. When it comes to building the best solution, we look for the right solution and we do that by asking two questions in this order; who are we building this for and will they enjoy using it?
Technology should work for your mission… not derail it.
