Lincoln Loop

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m a digital product coordinator and data manager for a nonprofit research organization. We map girls’ education organizations and programs worldwide and manage a website that functions as a database.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Lincoln Loop?

We needed to improve the website, UX, sign-up process, and data visualization.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Lincoln Loop worked on our preexisting website to help us improve the usability and create new data visualizations. They worked primarily on Django and used Wagtail as CMS because it was already in place. Also, they helped a bit with web design and UX, making sure the flow and narrative made sense.

What is the team composition?

We primarily worked with a team of four people: two web developers, one web designer, and a project manager.

How did you come to work with Lincoln Loop?

We found them through a Google search. We were specifically looking for a web development company skilled in Django. When we found them, we did a competitive bid process. We interviewed about seven organizations and chose Lincoln Loop in the end.

How much have you invested with them?

We spent about $100,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked together from January–May 2022. However, we’re currently in conversation to keep them on a retainer, so we’ll have another contract with them.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

They improved our user account system. Since they changed the sign-up process and how the system works, we haven’t had people coming back to us for customer support calls. Before, nearly everyone who signed up needed customer support and help navigating the website. It was a huge improvement for our organization.

How did Lincoln Loop perform from a project management standpoint?

Communication was frequent; we had meetings at least once a week. We primarily used Google Meet, and Slack was our daily communication method. Also, we kept track of tickets and used GitHub and Miro for the project timeline. Overall, we were very satisfied with the project management side.

What did you find most impressive about them?

First, all of their employees had over 10 years of experience. They were great at problem-solving and had a lot of experience in the field. Secondly, we felt that they heard and understood us, so it was easy to work with them. Since they do many types of projects, they understood where we were coming from as a research organization and were very responsive in that aspect. Finally, we liked that they were mindful of corporate social responsibility. Lincoln Loop invests in different charities and nonprofits. We didn’t find that in other web developers, so we really appreciated that.

Are there any areas they could improve?

We appreciated their technical capabilities and UX/UI expertise, as well as their openness to feedback. Whenever we faced challenges with Lincoln Loop, we were able to talk it through and problem solve together.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Hire them. We’ve worked with multiple web development companies over the years, and they’re the best one by far. They were great at project management, communication, personability, and professionalism. We just felt heard and understood.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the web operations manager in a veterinary diagnostics company. We’re a global leader in pet healthcare, and I’m on the global online experience team.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Lincoln Loop?

As part of our global organization, our team is responsible for all our digital and public-facing digital properties. Initially, we engaged with another vendor that rolled out our website, but they backed away from doing additional work when things were live. We needed additional support and expertise that we didn’t have in our team to maintain our website and keep it growing.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement? 

Lincoln Loop inherited the work from the other vendor and took the reins to roll out a lot of new functionalities to the point where it was more than just maintenance. They’ve been providing us with strategy, expertise, and support when it comes to the technical implementation of various platforms that we maintain for our customers across the globe.

The primary engagement that we have with Lincoln Loop is for development support for our online platform, which is our global family of marketing websites. It runs on Django CMS — it’s a Python-based system. They work on the backend of our website so that people can understand what they're looking at.

They’ve recently helped us with some middleware PostgreSQL database migration and translation and set up independent websites to support internal functions to work within that PostgreSQL, Django and Python environment, and AWS.

What is the team composition?

Peter (Founder) and Martin (Chief of Regular Expressions) are our main points of contact. Martin is our dedicated resource. We engage with Peter for additional strategy oversight and expertise in areas where it’s needed.

How did you come to work with Lincoln Loop?

Lincoln Loop was already an installed vendor and partner when I started working in my company. I took the torch from my predecessor as far as vendor management and had their team working with me very happily ever since.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve invested around $200,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

The partnership with Lincoln Loop began in October 2018, but I started working with them in December 2019. The project is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

From my perspective, Lincoln Loop gets the work done well. Additionally, every person within the organization that has worked directly with them always says that their team is professional and great at problem-solving. They position and efficiently implement those solutions — our company considers Lincoln Loop as an indispensable and extended part of our team.

How did Lincoln Loop perform from a project management standpoint?

We use a Slack channel that’s open for our day-to-day or engagement-to-engagement communication, and we meet weekly through Google Meet. We also have GitHub for project management, which is a codebase for all our sites where we track tickets, progress, and issues.

They’ve also been great at jumping into other projects as needed. These tasks include additional capacity, especially within the development phase. We have a weekly budget for various tasks that could range from small bug fixes to large-scale implementations, such as running our AWS platform. We rely on the Lincoln Loop team to support us on all of that.

What did you find most impressive about them?

The fact that Lincoln Loop executes what they promise and does it well is impressive. They’re always very responsive and easy to work and communicate with compared to other vendors I’ve worked with. They’ve always added a stellar value to our team and have always been very clear in timelines, deliverables, and technical specifications for projects. It has been a great working relationship with them.

It has been refreshing to work with their team, knowing we can trust them to be our partners. Another vendor with a number of other clients might take their attention away, but Lincoln Loop has been very dedicated to us as an organization. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

If there’s something Lincoln Loop could improve on, I’m sure we’d talk about it. We’ve never had a conversation with them about areas of improvement. 

Any advice for potential customers?

Treat Lincoln Loop as though they’re part of your team, and they’ll be that. If you treat them as a vendor with a very long-arm approach and don’t let them fully understand the issues that you’re asking them to address, you’re probably not going to get the best result out of the engagement. On the other hand, if you bring Lincoln Loop in, trust their team, and allow them to act as they’re part of your company, they’ll rise to another level and exceed your expectations.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the director of digital products for a nonprofit organization, and my team generally works on driving engagement, donations, and advocacy through the flagship website.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Lincoln Loop?

We’re always building new features to engage our customers, so we were looking for a company to provide us with backend development, and technical leadership in the scrum team.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We have a senior backend developer from Lincoln Loop, and the services they provide are collaborating with the scrum team to work on coding, and development for the backend of the platform that we have. They code new features, fix bugs in the system, and do integrations with third-party vendors.

One of the features that they helped us develop is enabling users to efficiently search for health centers across the US. We also built a feature that helps people understand the different representatives and political opportunities they have in their state and the local area. This helps them know what their options are so they can vote for the right candidate. In addition, we also built a software that allows people to research basic healthcare questions about themselves, and educate them on their options.

What is the team composition?

We have a consistent developer that’s been with us for about 3–4 years, but the team varies anywhere from 1–3 developers during the year. They’re an ongoing presence in our software development team.

How did you come to work with Lincoln Loop?

They actually got hired before I joined the team, so I’m just continuing our collaboration with them. I wasn’t there for the initial selection, but with software developers, we tend to look at experience, recommendations, and having them go through an evaluation process.

How much have you invested with them?

We’re spending somewhere in the range of $15,000–$25,000 a month. It varies depending on the hours.

What is the status of this engagement?

I started working with them in June 2019, and the partnership is still ongoing. I’ve renewed their contract for the last two years.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement? 

For us, the quality of success is having the ability to collaborate with the rest of the team. They’re basically working as a full-time team member with eight other people consisting of other developers, a product manager, and other internal backend and software team members.

Success is all about the speed, level of quality, and timeliness of the work, and Lincoln Loop has really been a stellar collaborator for us — we love working with them. Even though they’re outside contractors, they really feel like internal team members with their level of commitment to creativity in terms of problem-solving. They’ll even take on roles where they’ll coach other team members who are new.

How did Lincoln Loop perform from a project management standpoint?

Lincoln Loop has been consistently excellent in terms of managing the project that comes through our team, and they always deliver high-quality coding. We primarily use Jira to manage the work.

What did you find most impressive about them?

We’ve been very impressed with their level of commitment — they really feel like part of the team. Our organization has a very strong mission in terms of serving communities with access to equity within healthcare, so I find that they’re equally committed to our mission. They bring solutions to our software development challenges that allow us to build experiences to meet the needs of our customer base.

Moreover, they’re very proactive and they’re equally involved in the sort of exploration of the challenges that we face — they’re solving problems and brainstorming alongside us. Their commitment to our mission, in addition to providing us with excellent software development, really makes Lincoln Loop a great partner.

Are there any areas they could improve?

We have a really good relationship with them, which is rare because we’ve had contacts without the quality relationship we have with Lincoln Loop. However, what they could do better is maybe do an annual planning or long-term thinking for our needs. That might be something that’d be helpful to do more regularly with them.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

The best way to work with them is to give them a lot of context into the problems that you’re trying to solve, as opposed to just giving them the solutions that you’re trying to build out. 

Bringing them in when the problem is still being evaluated and refined is the best way to engage them.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We are a nonprofit that is well-known for the creation of a famous internet browser. I’m the senior project manager for the support team and I take care of the support website which gets around a million visitors per day.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Lincoln Loop?

We needed help on several projects, the main one being the rebuilding of the entire website in order to make it responsive. A lot of our visitors access the site via their mobile devices but we were not yet optimized for mobile viewing. We hired Lincoln Loop for a few redesigns as well as for another project to upgrade the Python infrastructure.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We would reach out to Peter (Founder) whenever we had a new project, giving him information about what we were looking to do and when we wanted it to be done. We would then ready the requirements and specifications for Lincoln Loop to be able to give us an estimate. After reading through the contracts, we would start the work. 

The main thing that their team worked on was the redesign of our ‘ask a question’ flow. They restructured the process so that the moment a user lands on our website, they could go through a certain process first before asking a question, like searching through our knowledge base, filling in their details, or doing other similar actions. 

Lincoln Loop also helped update our Python codebase.

What is the team composition?

Peter was our main point of contact, but we directly communicated with 1–2 frontend engineers for all of the projects.

How did you come to work with Lincoln Loop?

My manager recommended them. We decided to work with Lincoln Loop because I was told they were great. 

How much have you invested with them?

We invested around $120,000–$150,000. 

What is the status of this engagement?

The first time I started working with Lincoln Loop was in July 2019, and the last project we had with them was completed in March 2020.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

The development that Lincoln Loop took on worked really well. Before, a lot of people wanted to ask a question but didn’t manage to do so because they were dropping off the super complicated flow. However, we’ve improved this aspect by 20%. After the implementation, users were able to find their way through the webpage and ask their questions. 

How did Lincoln Loop perform from a project management standpoint?

I mostly handled the project management myself, but the Lincoln Loop team was super prompt and super helpful. We could approach Peter if there was anything we couldn’t figure out on our own, but there was never a problem. The communication went very smoothly. 

We had moments where we were close to hitting the budget and had almost consumed the working hours we paid for. When we negotiated with Peter, they were very accommodating and flexible. There was never a struggle even though our work was very chaotic in nature. We changed things a lot and often took a long time to make decisions, but they put up with us, which is why they were so great to work with.

What did you find most impressive about them?

It was really easy to work with Lincoln Loop. They’re very accomodating, and people from my team communicated well with theirs. 

Another thing that sets them apart is their expertise. The engineering that they did was really good. The engineer that we worked with didn’t simply take on the project and implement it, he also offered his own ideas about how we could better execute the responsive design. We had a very good working relationship.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I don’t think so. If we have more projects in the future, they’re the first agency that I would think of working with. They have really good people.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Try to have clear tasks for the project you’re working on to avoid a lot of back and forth with Lincoln Loop. Do the research and planning on your side first before passing the work. At the same time, stay flexible and open to new ideas and changes, because the Lincoln Loop team are experts and can offer a different perspective on the problem as well.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the director of information systems at a nonprofit educational institution. I oversee an entire team of software developers, network engineers, and customer service resources.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Lincoln Loop?

We hired their team to optimize the customer search capabilities on our website.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Our institution made a conscious shift from selling people our online courses to selling them a spot on the course they prefer. To make this change possible, Lincoln Loop organized the backend of our system and implemented our UI vision for its frontend.

We used Django CMS for our Python shop and the backend of our website. Lincoln Loop helped us implement both, and they assisted us in the coding and web running stages. Their team also did end-user training for our power users to maintain the system.

Since our user community was predominantly mobile-driven, Lincoln Loop made sure that the design of our site was mobile-friendly. They upgraded the infrastructure and helped us understand the underlying technologies to make sure that we got the design we wanted. Additionally, they worked within our Github profile to help us push packages so that we could do regression testing and increase our deployment speed.

What is the team composition?

We worked with Lincoln Loop’s project manager, frontend design lead, backend architect, and two of their primary partners who oversaw the entire process.

How did you come to work with Lincoln Loop?

Since we were a Django CMS shop with a Python backend, we wanted a small team that had ample skills and experience in that area. We were happy to hire Lincoln Loop because they possessed what we were looking for.

How much have you invested with them?

We spent about $175,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

The project ran from September 2019–March 2020.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

Working with Lincoln Loop was always a mixture of challenge and excitement. It was a pleasure to work with a team that challenged our assumptions and led us down to other avenues for investigation. As they challenged us to revamp the search process for our courses, we successfully pivoted to a more streamlined approach to product selection. The keyword searches implemented by their team put our brand at the top — that was something that we anticipated but still had been very valuable to us.

The metrics were mainly driven by our internal processes, so there weren’t any numbers or percentages. From my perspective, Lincoln Loop really helped us upgrade our infrastructure effectively. Their team really worked with speed to deliver quality results that were worth our money.

How did Lincoln Loop perform from a project management standpoint?

Lincoln Loop ran a sprint methodology, so we really appreciated their level of organization. They set up and managed our meetings, gave timelines, and helped themselves accountable to all necessary deliverables. When they said we would get something by Friday, they would definitely give that to us by Friday. It’s a streamlined project management process that was deeply ingrained in all of them.

What did you find most impressive about them?

What sets them apart from others is their good blend of technical understanding and operational business understanding. It’s rare in the field of software to encounter a team that knew how things worked, and at the same time, could alter those and base their work according to our preference.

Are there any areas they could improve?

The only thing they could work on would be their availability. We’d love to have their services more readily available, so I hope they could expand their small shop.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

It’s always good to have a strong and clear brand vision, so you can have a cohesive framework. It’s not always an option, but having that prepared will make things easier for you and Lincoln Loop's team.