Social Driver

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Technical Assistance Collaborative (TAC) is a nonprofit consultancy that provides policy leadership on affordable housing and human services systems at the federal, state, and local levels.

As Communications Designer, I manage design, production, and Section 508 accessibility remediation of all outgoing products and client deliverables for print/digital contexts.

I also support our Communications Director with brand upkeep and assets for internal and external communications, email and social media campaigns, and co-manage the website.

I joined TAC in Fall of 2019, just as the company was migrating to a new ESP and gearing up for a major website redesign to replace the last iteration of the site in 2012.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Social Driver?

The previous iteration of TAC's website was optimized for desktop performance and predated the era of mobile-responsive design. Because we did not have the technical capacity to do the redesign ourselves to standard, my supervisor and I led our organization's procurement process for a full-service digital design agency.

In addition to site migration, we needed help customizing a CMS to our needs and setting up an app that would allow us to update large quantities of searchable housing and voucher data.

We also wanted help restructuring the site to minimize visible redundancy of links on the old site and improve user experience navigating towards our focus areas, project work, and resource areas. Although we were sold on the digital and marketing strategy, this was not our primary concern given our budget.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

Our list of possible procurement candidates comprised recommendations from TAC's partners in the affordable housing and services sectors. After submitting a proposal and entertaining bids from three firms in Summer 2020, we chose Social Driver.

Although Social Driver offered the highest bid, we felt they had the most well-rounded team for our needs, particularly when it came to updating data and making it available and searchable to our users who come to our website for resources and state-specific information regarding qualifications for housing vouchers and supplemental security income.

We also felt that their portfolio of client work demonstrated the greatest variety of design solutions for companies big and small and felt reassured that our brief wouldn't be shoe-boxed into a one-size fits all solution.

Describe the project in detail and walk through the stages of the project.

I would describe 5 major phases

1. Intake and Mockups
2. Map New Site Structure
3. Migrate Content,
4. Handle Data and Forms
5. Final Touches, Debugging, and CMS Training.

Following several intake meetings to discuss our goals, we received three initial mockups of design directions for the website including theme palette, typography, and icons.

Once we committed to a basic direction, SD's team built out assets to support that vision and mockup various "master pages"/wireframes showing those assets in context (these assets were later adapted into modular components for Elementor that we could recycle in building pages ourselves).

These designs were communicated to us through InVision interface, which gave us a good idea of how a prototypical web page would look and which allowed us to provide feedback.

In the mapping phase, we brainstormed with their UX-specialist what the new site structure should look like and used a mapping tool to help us determine how content on the old site was to be propagated under which headings and sections in the new site.

At later phases in the process, we discussed how to migrate tabular data through a third-party app, curated marquee images/ icons for key landing pages, and worked out kinks in mobile responsive breakpoints, content rescaling, and some bugs in the calculation and presentation of our data tables.

How many resources from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

Our Communications Director and I worked with a team of about 6 people including a project manager, a UX strategist, two graphic designers, and a database/data visualization specialist.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

The B2B nature of our nonprofit organization and abstract concept of our work in systems alignment requires that we keep a lower profile than ground agencies who can use images of the communities they work with to promote their organization.There were many stakeholder-defined limitations on what kind of TAC work we could promote on our website, when, and how often.

Social Driver helped us navigate our thorny self-promotion issues and accessibility concerns while creating interface solutions that empowered us to do certain in things in-house like updating tabular data (rather than keep in the possession of someone more technical than us). Social Driver brought our antiquated 2012 website us up to speed in the mobile responsive era and helped us hit our target launch date in six months.

They made our site easier to navigate for potential clients, integrate our website/request forms with Mailchimp to automatically enter newsletter subscribers into our mailing list. And stakeholders have responded favorably to the visual renovation of the site and the relative ease of finding information through the untangled maze of links.

Although we are still working on bringing up our metrics, we have seen marginal uptick in visits to our site that have resulted in several new federal grants and attracted the business of larger clients to work with TAC’s consultants in ensuring better affordable housing and health outcomes through a racial equity lens.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

I would describe the workflow as efficient yet flexible. We had an excellent and spirited project manager who delegated responsibilities through Asana and made sure everyone stayed on topic and deadline and had their opinions heard.

The UX specialist on our team was also very affable and reassuring when it came to mapping out the migration process from the old and getting us set up with Google Analytics. We are also grateful to Social Driver’s design team for entertain several iterations of a design concept to better hit the brief.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

We think that the women-led team made the Communications Director and I feel welcome at the table. Who would have imagined, programmers and designers with people skills makes a huge difference. They could have laughed us out of the room at several points, but they were very accommodating. They worked effectively as a team, kept the mood upbeat, participatory, and always demonstrated that they had listened to or incorporated our feedback even as they nudged us towards better alternatives.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

The one area where internal stakeholders expressed some disappointment was the loss of more granular tracking for Google Analytics. We had ways of tracking downloads at a more granular level on the old site and engagement and queries from specific states, which must have got sacrificed in providing a Google Sheets workflow that let us perform the data updates in house.

Second, after the initial contract period expires, the quality of customer service during the infinitely long and expensive maintenance period drops slightly because you are entrusted to the care of someone who was not there during the initial process and may not feel as emotionally invested or attentive as those on the original agency team who are with you from the start of the project.

It would be nice if Social Driver delegated one person from the original team to hang on during the maintenance period rather than disappear cold turkey, but since we are in the midst of talks for a new project with Social Driver, our opinion may change.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I work as an impact manager for a housing equity fund.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Social Driver?

Our first business challenge was to create a whole new website. Our original website was tied to a series of blog posts and wasn’t very cohesive, so it didn’t have great functionality to meet our needs.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

The website was built from scratch using Webflow, and Social Driver also assisted us with design work. We provided them with branding guidelines from our parent company, like fonts, sizing, and colors, but other than that, we gave them creative freedom to design options for us to pick from. We ended up combining a few options they presented to us, and Figma was used for the designs. Social Driver is offering website maintenance. 

Social Driver helped create our individual brand from scratch because we didn’t have anything for them. When we brought in another company to really hone in on the branding, that vendor used a lot of the ideas that Social Driver had initially come up with while they were creating the website. 

What is the team composition?

We worked with a project manager, a few developers, a designer, and an account manager. 

How did you come to work with Social Driver?

Social Driver was working with my team before I started, but I know that other teams at the company used Social Driver to develop their own websites, and that's most likely how we found them.  

How much have you invested with them?

We invested around $93,000. 

What is the status of this engagement?

I started at the company in June 2022, but the project ran from May–September 2022.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We’ve had a lot of positive feedback, and they blew us away with the final product. Social Driver methodically went through our wish list to explain what was feasible within our time limit and got everything done for us. They were always able to meet our expectations, and we trusted their work and judgment fully.

How did Social Driver perform from a project management standpoint?

We had biweekly meetings to get everything out on time. They were very clear about limitations and laying out expectations, so we were never surprised by anything. We got out of meetings with them and were always impressed with everything they brought to the table. They understood our limitations because we have a small team, and they were accommodating. 

Social Driver was responsive and worked outside of normal working hours to get things done for us. We had a lot of roadblocks throughout the process, and they were able to get through them seamlessly. We communicated via Google Meet and used Google Workplace for a lot of project management tasks. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

We have nothing but praise for the Social Driver team because they did an incredible job and kept us on track as well. We didn’t have any design or development background, and they held our hand throughout the process. They were patient and helped us to make decisions from a functionality standpoint. 

Social Driver took the time to explain the process and go through it step by step. They acted as a partner throughout the entire engagement in a way that we haven’t experienced with a lot of other providers They drove the process for us, made everything easy, and we trusted them fully because it felt like they understood what we were looking for. There’s no reason for us to go anywhere else in the future because they went above and beyond for us. 

We walked away from the entire experience incredibly impressed; they were worth every penny we spent. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

We were in a time of transition when I first started, so it might have been nice to have a clearer explanation in those beginning phases, but that isn’t their fault by any means. Sometimes we struggled a little with scheduling as well. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

If it’s in your budget, you should absolutely work with them. Without them, our entire process could have been a disaster, but it all worked out because of Social Driver. 

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

The Education Trust is a national education advocacy nonprofit seeking to increase educational opportunities and improve outcomes for students of color and students from low-income backgrounds. I am the Associate Director for Digital Communications overseeing all our online work from website to social media to email marketing.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Social Driver, and what were your goals?

We've partners with Social Driver since 2014 and a number of projects. This project specifically was to re-envision our State of Education Funding Equity data tool that we have been producing in various forms for over 20 years. The specific challenge here was two parts: 1. Updating the tool to current best practices for accessibility and web technology, and 2. Redesign it to handle an exponential increase in data, specifically newly available individual school level data

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

We chose Social Driver based on both the proposed approach to designing the tool, budget and timeline considerations, and long standing partnership or excellence.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

The scope of work was building a brand new data visualization tool from the ground up that incorporate pieces of previous versions that were popular, and building new functionality for new data sets available.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

The Social Driver comprised a team of at least 7.

• In the initial phases we worked with Ryan K., vice president for accounts(?) on scoping out the project, building the timeline and budget.
• In the wire-framing and design phase we worked with Creative Team led by Casey D. This is the third data visualization tool that Casey and his team have designed for us, and each time we've always be really happy and impressed with what they are able to pull together from a spreadsheet of text :-).
• During the build phase we interacted mostly with Development team led by Dylan F. Dylan has been working on the development side of EdTrust.org since 2014 when we was the lead on our website redesign. He is top of his field for Word Press development and hosting, and his institutional knowledge of the site means we don't have to worry about unforeseen bugs or conflicts with the base code.

And then throughout the project our Account Manager, Alexander K. was just fantastic controlling the updates and timeline in Asana, following up on deadlines and questions (from both sides) and making sure that all the little details weren't missed. The Social Driver project approach is another of it's great strengths, and something they are constantly investing time into improving.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

The project was a wonderful success. It's garnered over 3,000 unique visitors in the first 30 days and profuse praise from our network of state and local advocates for it's usefulness and easy of use.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

Social Driver and The Education Trust both use Asana for project management, so that was a seamless interface with clear tasks, timelines, and full conversation history. The Social Driver team consistently meets set out timelines or communicates as soon as possible when a deadline is shifting and why.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

Their quality of work has always been the biggest selling point. From the first project in 2014 through numerous microsites and data tools, the Social Driver team has upheld the highest standards or professionalism and technical expertise.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

There was a little breakdown in communication around the data mid-project that led to some confusion. A call should have been setup earlier than it was to get clarity and move forward.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the head of digital at an international administrative agency.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Social Driver?

We hired Social Driver to lead digital marketing training sessions. 

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Social Driver led two virtual training sessions through Microsoft Teams for the US network of our agency. The first training focused on three dimensions of people-centered brand strategy. Social Driver showed us previous clients who had yielded great engagement results from their storytelling techniques. The second was about mastering LinkedIn. Social Driver’s team taught us how to use our existing network to build out our messaging and how to use various LinkedIn features. 

We worked directly with Anthony (Co-Founder & Chief Strategy Officer), who led our training after evaluating our priorities and what we wanted to convey to our network. We went back and forth on presentation drafts before he began each training. 

What is the team composition?

I worked with Anthony, two teammates from Social Driver's finance team, and an administrative assistant. 

How did you come to work with Social Driver?

We met Anthony at a previous engagement, and he told me about his interest in international affairs and his experience working with international communities. 

How much have you invested with them?

We spent $10,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

Our engagement lasted from February–March 2022.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

The social driver team was really flexible to our needs — we weren’t able to do in-person meetings, so everything was done virtually. Anthony was really good at finding ways to get everyone engaged with the materials, even though we were in a virtual setting. Many teammates returned for the second training session, which is a testament to Social Driver’s work. I’ve also seen individuals from the training be more creative in their digital content and share more on LinkedIn. I’m 100% satisfied with Social Driver’s work; they did a great job. 

How did Social Driver perform from a project management standpoint?

I provided Social Driver with our budget parameters, and they were able to give us everything we needed within it. Typically we communicate through email, phone calls, and Google Meet calls. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

Social Driver’s ability to connect with the attendees really stood out to me. Often during training, instructors will talk off a sheet, but Social Driver did an excellent job tailoring the training to an international audience to ensure everyone was engaged.  

Are there any areas they could improve?

I wish we could’ve had the training in-person, but Social Driver worked within the limits of a virtual training as best they could. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

I’d advise customers to speak to Social Driver early and be clear about their goals for the training — customers should provide Social Driver with a list of desired outcomes.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the executive director of a nonprofit organization that provides affordable housing.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Social Driver?

They provided video production services.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

They provide two animated videos and an infographic. The videos were 90-seconds each. All of them were developed for internal and marketing purposes.

Social Driver handled every aspect of the videos: scriptwriting, audio, editing, mixing, voiceovers, and more.

What is the team composition?

There were at least 3–4 people involved, maybe up to half a dozen, including a project manager, a voiceover actor, and a scriptwriter. There was also someone doing the storyboarding and laying out the titles and the look of the video. Our final assigned resource was an account manager.

How did you come to work with Social Driver?

They’d done our website, but we hadn’t worked with them to upgrade it because their proposal wasn’t the most compelling one. They did have more bandwidth and video expertise, however, so we went with them again.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent a bit over $100,000 with them.

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked together from October 2021–April 2022.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We’re pleased with all the feedback on the video, as well as with the quality of the production. Social Driver did a very good job taking complicated subject matter and turning it into visuals. The videos will certainly help us in terms of explaining who we are.

How did Social Driver perform from a project management standpoint?

They did very well with the project management and used Asana. They didn’t allow for an alternate platform, so I trained one of my staff on it. We also had periodic meetings to go over product deliverables.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They were very good at communicating their process and laying out how they work. This allowed us to fully understand how we would move from concept to final product. Their discovery process was also very good, leading them to have a clear understanding of what we do. They really demystified the process.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I think that they were really good. There were a lot of touch points, and I can’t think of anything off the top of my head in terms of what they could do better. They were able to take and incorporate our feedback. I give them high marks for listening and understanding what we were trying to produce.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

They were good and clear and understood what they were doing. They did very well in terms of the videos.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the chief communications officer at Zero to Three, a leading nonprofit organization focused on the health and well-being of babies and toddlers.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Social Driver?

We’ve worked with Social Driver on several projects, including developing two websites for two of our programs.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Social Driver has helped us redesign the website of our program HealthySteps, a program that supports our work in pediatric settings across the country. This redesign's primary goal is to better showcase the breadth and depth of what our program offers to families and the impact it has on babies.

Social Driver has also been helping us build a website for our professional development programs, where we provide training to professionals in the early childhood field across many different disciplines.

Additionally, we’ve worked with them to build a very dynamic website for a policy report that we put out annually called State of Babies Yearbook. Given that the report is issued annually, they’ve helped us put out every edition since 2019. We’re currently working with Social Driver to launch the 2022 edition, which will be published in about a week.

This website is filled with data on how babies are faring in every state within the US, and it includes all types of well-being indicators.

In addition to the website design and development, they work on our social media, helping us drive engagement to our site through social media videos and ads to support the yearbook launch. They provide us with the creative assets (the videos and interactive ads), and our internal team places those across our different social media platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin.

Social Driver has developed the HealthySteps and the State of Babies Yearbook sites from scratch, whereas the professional development site has been a unique project. They haven’t developed it from scratch, but they’ve taken over the project after a different vendor wasn’t able to create a backend integration of that site with our e-commerce software. We haven’t launched this site yet, but we’re very close to doing it.

What is the team composition?

We’ve worked with various people from Social Driver across our different projects. We regularly work with 6–7 core team members, but other developers and designers have worked in the background as needed.

How did you come to work with Social Driver?

I’ve worked with Social Driver for several years across different organizations. Thus, I was already familiar with their work when I joined my current team, and we had had very successful collaborations. This time, I was very excited to bring them again for these larger projects.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve invested over $500,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

I’ve worked with Social Driver since 2016 on other projects for other organizations, and our engagement is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

The State of Babies Yearbook site is very dynamic, allowing users to really engage with the data. Additionally, Social Driver has brought their excellent technical development expertise to bring the professional development site where it needed to be.

How did Social Driver perform from a project management standpoint?

Social Driver does a great job at providing a project roadmap from the beginning, and they also provide us with tools to monitor and be aware of timelines and deadlines. They have very clear communication around timelines and deadlines.

Additionally, they’re extremely responsive to questions and concerns. I can always be heard and get my questions answered by anyone from their team, from the project manager and the account manager, all the way up to the company's president.

We normally communicate in three ways. When we’re actively working on a project, we have recurring check-in meetings. The second way we communicate is via Asana, where I can see the project timelines and any notes associated with the progress. Finally, the third way we communicate is via email, through which we send longer-form notes or urgent requests.

What did you find most impressive about them?

What makes Social Driver stand out from their competitors is that they focus upfront on understanding the project’s goals. They’re hyper-client-centric, so they always try to do what’s best for us. They’re also very flexible in their approach, which ultimately serves the client and helps achieve the set goals.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I don’t have any constructive feedback for Social Driver, but it would be good if they built more room for the unknown. Clients always have expectations, and those expectations can suddenly shift, particularly in the nonprofit sector.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Establish a thorough project scope upfront and keep track of timelines. Additionally, ensure that any critical milestones across the project timeline are also communicated upfront.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I was the PR manager of NGLCC.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Social Driver?

We needed someone to provide us with web development and design.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

The web development project started with a discovery period where we learned about our challenges and needs. We went through interviews not only with the leadership, but with the staff and various audiences that the chamber was attuned to.

We also interfaced with community partners in the diversity and inclusion space, the Women’s Business Chamber, and the National Supplier Diversity Minority Chamber.

The website came in two phases, one was the redesign phase where they provided us with graphic design, content creation, SEO, and the development of a CMS.

The entire website was then developed through Drupal.

What is the team composition?

We worked directly with Anthony (Chief Strategy Officer & Co-Founder) and Thomas (Co-Founder & CEO).

How did you come to work with Social Driver?

Social Driver responded to a proposal we put out in the market.

How much have you invested with them?

We invested around $50,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked together from April 2011–February 2014.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Since partnering with Social Driver, we’ve increased our website engagement and unique visitors by 300% from 2012–2013.

How did Social Driver perform from a project management standpoint?

Anthony and Thomas were incredibly intuitive and effective leaders. They listen to their clients and were able to circumnavigate and rework some of our challenges.

We typically communicated through text, call, and email.

What did you find most impressive about them?

We were impressed with their team’s singular vision and how they provided us with incredible value through their services — they understood our company’s position and gave us the best product we deserved.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I don’t have any constructive feedback as we thoroughly enjoyed working with them.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Social Driver is highly flexible and innovative, so I would highly recommend working with them because they’re the leading edge of digital marketing.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the former director of communications at a civic and social impact applied research center. 

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Social Driver?

My former company had a multi-year grant funding work focused on the future of higher education. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, our ability to engage with individuals in the higher education community also changed. So, we reached out to Social Driver to help us get more engagement with decision-makers in higher education, which include administrators and leadership at colleges and universities, nonprofits, state legislators, and federal regulators. 

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Social Driver provided my former company with communication strategy services using digital and video survey services. Those surveys were sent out to various stakeholders in the industry. Their team helped us reimage our communications and marketing strategy in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Social Driver delivered reports based on the online reports and questionnaires they conducted. They presented a living document and new strategies to reach our audience. Those strategies included email campaigns and changing to a hybrid storytelling website. Social Driver’s team also provided input for LinkedIn Showcases, newsletters, and the ilk. They also helped us determine how to reach media outlets that primarily work in higher education. 

What is the team composition?

We worked with ​​Anthony (Chief Strategy Officer & Co-Founder), Megan (Director of Communications), and a project manager. 

How did you come to work with Social Driver?

Social Driver was recommended to my former company by an internal teammate. I believe their company also came up on a list of diverse suppliers that had several companies we’d worked with before. 

How much have you invested with them?

I believe my former employer invested over $100,000 with Social Driver. 

What is the status of this engagement?

My former company’s partnership with Social Driver began in March 2021, and it’s ongoing. 

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

I loved working with Social Driver. As a communications professional, it was nice to collaborate with a communications firm — it was validating to hear that they were facing similar challenges to our internal team. Social Driver delivered what they set out to do — they provided new ideas and strategies that transformed our communication strategy. However, I don’t have any specific metrics because I am no longer employed by the company that hired Social Driver. 

How did Social Driver perform from a project management standpoint?

Social Driver had excellent project management through Asana. Typically, we communicated through email and video meetings. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

I was impressed with Social Driver’s presentation of their holistic plan of attack to improve engagement. We were targeting external engagement from a specific audience, and Social Driver delivered concrete steps on how to do that. They showed me how to build relationships with our target audience. Social Driver were great communicators and always followed up with us to ask what else they could be doing to help us. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

I may have something for Social Driver to improve if I was still working with my former employer and had specific metrics about their implementation performance. However, at this point, I have nothing for ​​them to improve. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

I’d advise future customers to have an internal consensus about their definition of terms. It’s essential for everyone to be on the same page on what building and telling a story means for their company. 

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m an executive at an events company.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Social Driver?

We wanted to create a social media campaign to speak to our local soccer audience to form a large coalition of people that see the opportunity to host a sporting event in our city.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Social Driver did social media marketing for us; they developed a plan to generate content and reach key audiences and stakeholders that would want to join our movement of bringing a large sporting event to our city. Their efforts also involved content development for our social media channels and influencer engagements that can be posted through Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. In addition to that, they also helped us accelerate photography and video material production.

What is the team composition?

We engaged with 3–4 members of their team, including an account manager, which was our main point of contact throughout the process.

How did you come to work with Social Driver?

We’ve worked with them in the past, and we chose them for this project because they had the strongest proposal for it.

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked together from July–October 2021.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We reached our goals regarding engagement rates and percentage of follower growth — all those results exceeded our expectations for this project.

How did Social Driver perform from a project management standpoint?

Their team was very responsive and met with us to listen to our vision, create plans, schedule follow-up accounts, and send reports. In terms of tools, we used Zoom and email.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their capability to adapt and understand our needs to deliver tailored solutions through their expertise was outstanding — they were always innovative and flexible.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I would’ve liked to see a quicker implementation of the plan early on in the project. Despite that, everything worked out fine.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Be as clear as possible with your initial vision and requirements; they can deliver a targeted proposal, but the more information you provide, the better work they’ll do.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I'm the communications director at the Data Quality Campaign, a nonprofit advocacy organization. We advocate for changes in policy and practice on education data advocacy.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Social Driver?

We hired Social Driver to help us ensure our website thoroughly explained our company to users. We've always had issues with site visitors assuming we work with data even though we're an education data advocacy organization.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

First, Social Driver helped us refresh our brand. They helped us create an entirely new logo and developed creative assets for the website that followed our new branding guidelines and tied into the logo. 

Then, Social Driver redesigned and developed our new website using our new branding guidelines. We provided our requirements and our recently updated strategic company plan. Social Driver used that information to build a site to help us achieve our strategic goals. They helped us change the language we use to explain our work and made templates to ensure our messaging was very direct — the direct language was meant to help us effectively communicate with site users. Social Driver's team also translated several key site pages into Spanish to ensure the site's accessibility. 

What is the team composition?

We worked with a large team from Social Driver, which included several graphic designers, a project manager, and content development and accessibility teammates. 

How did you come to work with Social Driver?

I've had a working relationship with Social Driver for almost a decade. They helped refresh a lasting website for my previous company and had already completed my current company's website. However, for this project, we did a complete RFP process. Social Driver's commitment to delivering a cohesive website that works across multiple platforms made it obvious that they were the firm we needed on this project. 

Also, Social Driver's commitment to accessibility was terrific. We hadn't been able to achieve that before on our site, but Social Driver walked us through that process during the hiring process and showed us how we could make our site accessible while still ensuring it reflected our brand. 

How much have you invested with them?

We invested $70,000–$80,000 with Social Driver for this project. 

What is the status of this engagement?

This project with Social Driver was from March–November 2021. However, we're still engaged with them.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

I've worked on several website redesign projects over the years, and I've never experienced the kind of positive feedback that we've gotten from the new site. The new website is very visually different from our last one, and our partners are amazed at the new design. Additionally, I've given out Social Driver's information to several interested companies. 

The new website from Social Driver feels more mature and reflects the company we are now, not the company we were. Social Driver's work has really helped us mature our brand so it reflects the scope of our offerings. The new website has a concrete focus on our organization's goals for the future, focusing on everything from early education to workforce development. We now use the images that Social Driver has added to our site for our social media — our branding is extremely cohesive. 

How did Social Driver perform from a project management standpoint?

Social Driver assured us during the RFP processes that we'd never have to worry about falling behind on our timelines, and they were right. We had to adjust our timeline a few times, but it was clear why our changes were altering our project timeline. Their team was great about setting clear deadlines and communicated them well. We felt supported by Social Driver's project manager throughout the project, but still had access to individual team members to ask questions related to their piece of the project. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

I'm always impressed by Social Driver's creativity and listening skills. It's easy for web developers to recommend only what they know, but Social Driver's strength comes from listening to our needs and working to find creative solutions to match them. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

I have nothing for Social Driver to improve. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

I'd advise customers to be clear about their objectives and communicate them clearly with Social Driver — they can't help customers succeed if they don't have all the information they require.