Taoti Creative

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We are a nonprofit organization working in international education. We believe that education transcends borders, opens minds, and enables people to go beyond. We’re building connections in their university or workspace, and promoting a peaceful vision of the world. I’m a senior program officer for the program. It is basically a platform where we catalog opportunities. It’s an online clearinghouse where we catalog educational opportunities for displaced and refugee students, to offer them an opportunity to reconnect with educational opportunities, specifically in higher education.

We’re currently focusing on Syrian students, due to the devastating impact of the Syria crisis, also the unprecedented number of Syrian youth who are now not attending higher education but were enrolled before the conflict erupted. We do a lot of scholarship management, management of international leadership programs, and really focus on education emergencies, but also empowering women, all in the sphere of international education.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Taoti Creative?

We were looking for a 3rd-party website developer who was able to develop our site and also the database for students to access and learn about opportunities.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We have one main point of contact, and additional people were added depending on the stage of our website development. All of Taoti’s team were available to provide their expertise, to ensure that they delivered what we had in mind. That said, I think it was great to know that we have one central contact person, who then pulled the people we needed into the project. We spoke to designers and developers as necessary. We had one designer pulled into the project, who we mainly worked with, and the same for developers. They made sure we had direct access to developers and designers, as well as their business team, so that our various questions could be addressed efficiently.

The audience we’re targeting is Syrian students, and many of them live in areas without high-speed internet access. The majority of our target audience is accessing the website through mobile devices. We wanted to build a website that is accessible for low bandwidth and for mobile devices. We recently had a meeting with Taoti during which we looked at Google analytics on loading times, who’s accessing the website, and with what type of device. They were very successful in building a site that is easily accessible for students on cellphones, as well as low bandwidth. They provided us with guidance on how to come up with a site that still has an appealing design, while not compromising on the loading times.

We’re still working on website enhancements, adding new features and pages. We knew the three months was a very short timeline for the end product we had in mind. It’s a constantly developing initiative on our end, so the needs of the website also constantly change. We will continue working with them on maintenance as well as building out new features.

How did you come to work with Taoti Creative?

We had a very competitive RFP process, and several developers submitted proposals. Taoti’s proposal really stuck out. We felt that they obviously had a lot of technical and development experience, and we also saw that they had worked with agencies similar to ours. In their proposal, they already understood the goals of our program. We didn’t expect that, as we’re in two very different fields of work. They really got what we wanted to achieve, and they had great experience and expertise. Taoti is in Washington, D.C., and we’re in New York City.

How much have you invested with Taoti Creative?

We’ve spent about $150,000 so far.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working in December of 2016, and the work is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

I don’t have the stats in front of me. We had a somewhat similar website that generated traffic of 10,000 per year. Within the first two weeks, the new site we built with Taoti had more than 20,000 users. We’re now able to track where our users are coming from, and we’re specifically targeting Syrians. Our top ten countries are mainly in the region, as well as top hosting countries, such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany. We see that we are reaching the target audience. We now know that the majority of our users access the site via their cell phones, and we have the numbers to prove that. The new site has a much lower bounce rate for mobile users, which is exactly what we expected to see.

The website has only been online for six or seven weeks, so we’re still in the initial phase. We work with partner organizations that are supporting our initiative, and we do a lot of outreach to promote the website. So far, we’ve had very positive responses regarding the structure and design of the site. On the whole site, we only have three images, which is very unusual but goes back to making it user-friendly for our target audience. At the same time, I think it’s a very nice design. No one ever even seems to notice that it’s a website really built for a low bandwidth audience.

How did Taoti Creative perform from a project management standpoint?

We were on an extremely tight, three-month timeline. They really over-delivered on that compressed timeline. We had weekly check-in calls to follow up on the timeline and technical requirements. They introduced us to the Teamwork platform, which was really easy. We were able to communicate as easily as email, but also upload documents and files. They involved everyone on the team who needed to receive certain information or documents. For the post-launch process, we were able to submit tickets through Teamwork for anything we wanted to be changed. We’re still using it for all the communication with Taoti that’s not over the phone. 

What did you find most impressive about Taoti Creative?

It was my first time working with website developers. I think Taoti was very helpful in walking us through the whole process from A–Z. They really tried to ensure that we understood every single step along the way. I feel they delivered on the design and development part, and they really understood our goals. Along the way, they made sure we were always included. We’ve been extremely pleased with Taoti’s work.

Are there any areas Taoti Creative could improve?

I can’t think of anything. We’ve had an extremely positive experience with everyone at Taoti. A lot of the people on our side didn’t know much about website development, and they were available whenever we wanted to talk, either via phone or online. They made sure to explain their work to us.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your organization.

We are a national, membership-based, nonprofit advocacy, research, and program initiative organization representing 3,069 counties. We're located in Washington, D.C.

What is your role at the company?

I am the social media manager.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What business challenge were you trying to address with Taoti Creative?

Our website did not adequately address the needs of our audiences and staff from a design, functionality, and maintenance standpoint. A complete restructuring of informational hierarchy was necessary after several years of patchwork backend maintenance with no defined management structure.

We were looking for streamline content creation, publishing, and curation. We wanted to enhance website functionality across all devices and minimize staff time in site management and administration. Our organization also wanted to provide a more dynamic, engaging experience for users.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their involvement in detail.

They were tasked with designing a website with a completely new navigational, tagging hierarchy to facilitate ease of access to resources and promote further engagement with site content. The design needs to reflect the latest trends in web design and provide a more robust site architecture to facilitate back-end maintenance and content publishing. We needed to maximize site performance across all devices, operating systems, and browsers.

How did you come to work with Taoti Creative?

We did some internal research and comparison and got the recommendation from a friend.

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in financial terms?

That is confidential.

When was the project completed?

July 2015 was the website launch.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

The feedback was overwhelmingly positive from all stakeholders and audiences. We are achieving a new level of relevance in DC.  Taoti Creative delivered an on-time project within the scope of the budget and executed well.

How did Taoti Creative perform from a project management standpoint?

More than other companies, they were able to "get in our heads" and provide the best solutions.

In hindsight, are there areas in which they could improve, or things you might do differently?

Not from their side of things.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your organization.

We are a trade association. We represent our members before Congress, the regulatory arena and the public.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What business challenge were you trying to address with Taoti Creative?

Our organization has grown in complexity and sophistication, and it is still growing. We needed an external facing platform for our members, for content aggregation and for burnishing our brand. We needed to live up to our promise of developing something better than our existing platform. The old site was really a bulletin board, nothing more—lots of scrolling, no prioritization. There was no way to tell the user what was important. Everything was important because everything was there without any sense of order or value. That’s why we talked to Taoti Creative.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their involvement in some detail.

Our portfolio was pretty limited at the time, so we initially kept a very tight focus on the new website. We have lately been working with them through a maintenance agreement to help us make sense of some things that we want to be able to do on our own, but no one here knows Drupal, so there’s been a bit of a learning curve internally. However, we’re slowly becoming better and more proficient.

One of the things that we always wanted was to create a site that we could grow into quickly and then outgrow. That was one of the strategic decisions that Taoti clearly understood. We don’t want to rebuild the site in six months. We just want to add custom features over time.

How did you come to work with Taoti Creative?

Although we had issued a Request for Proposal [RFP], we found them by word of mouth through a colleague here on the team. They applied the same day the RFP was due, which was a testament to their sophistication and subject matter expertise. We admired what they had done for other clients in ways we thought could really tell our story. We’re such a small part of the Washington scene, and such a small part of a very large super-structure called the financial services industry, that we wanted to put some narrative around our part in that larger picture.

With Taoti we created a clickable map, and with another third party vendor we populated the map, which helps us tell the press, the Hill and the public the impact of our members in states around the country. We help our members help their consumers. So helping to bring all of that to life has just been incredibly impactful for us.

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in financial terms?

We’ve spent between $100,000 and $125,000 working with Taoti for development and launch. We had to pull back on some things to keep within our budget, which is a reflection of our internal budget cycle.

What is the status of this engagement?

We launched three weeks after our annual meeting. The same people that were involved in producing the annual meeting were involved in producing the website. So at one point Taoti was actually ahead of us in development. They thoughtfully worked with us to create the space we needed to do our work so we could have a beautiful launch after coming off this huge annual meeting.

We began working with Taoti in the spring and finished everything in about six months. In the beginning we wanted to launch the new website at our annual meeting, but, when we saw that that was not going to be possible, we just slowed everything down. What further complicated the process internally was that our internal project officer who was running this for us got a great new job and left us. He was really the brains behind a lot of this work and deserves the lion’s share of the credit. But when he left in February, he handed it off to me and we finally launched by May.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any statistics, metrics or other feedback from your work with Taoti?

We are very proud of the responsive design component of the new website. We are a trade association and we represent our members in many different ways and they look to us for insight and analysis. They’re busy people trying to help consumers with their financial needs, while we’re up here taking a careful look at how all of these rules, regulations and laws impact their ability to do that. We’ve been able to tell the story of how our private student loans are performing, how responsibly consumers are meeting their obligations and how our banks are working with them to help them do that.

The bottom line is that it’s just a great site. It is leagues away from our old, perfectly serviceable site but one that had no energy, no passion, and no narrative. Taoti Creative gave all that to us, and we were able to leverage that, use it and we’re going to continue to use it.

We’re working with them now to redesign our weekly newsletter so that it is smarter and more responsive to the end user and takes people back to the website for a deeper look. It has energized everyone here. My colleagues here are thinking differently. They’re thinking web first now and trying to apply things on the site. Although we’re small, we have people who are content owners who need to publish certain pieces on the website. Our Public Relations [PR] shop is prolific. We have a point person whose job is to publish our letters to the Hill and publish our comment letters to the regulatory bodies. After we figure out the new newsletter, I want to continue to integrate all these elements into the website.

What distinguishes Taoti Creative from other providers?

Taoti Creative are natural storytellers. They’re very good at helping us frame a narrative and think through the story line. That’s really what our website has enabled us to do—to become better storytellers.

Is there anything Taoti Creative could have improved or done differently?

One thing that I give them a great deal of credit for is that they have really big brains and really big hearts. But sometimes their Drupal brains go faster than us who don’t speak Drupal. We sometimes have to slow them down, but they’re great about that. The one thing they need to remember is that although they love their customers and think they’re really great people, their customers don’t speak Drupal as fluently as they do—I hope that feedback is well received.

BACKGROUND

Could you briefly describe your company?

Credit Builders Alliance is a national nonprofit that has almost 400 members across the United States. It’s a nonprofit that supports other nonprofits with back office services that help build credit for vulnerable and low-income communities across the United States. CBA has a unique relationship with the credit bureaus, and they actually report the data of those nonprofit lenders to the credit bureaus.

What is your position?

I left the company at the end of December, so I’m not with them anymore, but when I was there, I was director of operations.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

Could you describe the business challenges you were attempting to address when you initiated the relationship with Taoti Creative?

We had a website that had been developed when the organization started that was very simple, clunky, and difficult to use, and we needed to overhaul it. We wanted a more dynamic and interactive forward facing presence. We had a couple of false starts with Web designers before we distributed our RFP [request for proposal] to potential vendors. 

SOLUTION

Could you describe the scope of this project?

It was a total overhaul. A complete redesign from beginning to end, so we had to go through the process of completely redoing our information architecture, all the content pretty much had to be redone. We began with requirements gathering and project scoping. Once we'd devised a deployment strategy, they began to create custom designs for us. Then came the actual implementation, which involved significant backend development, data preparation and migration, systems integration, UI/UX [user interface/user experience] testing, performance and scalability testing, training, and support.

On what platform did they construct your new website?

It's a Drupal-based site. 

What content management system powered your previous website?

Joomla.

Could you describe the rationale behind transitioning from Joomla to Drupal?

We were having a lot of difficulty making changes to our website and updating things, or putting in images without the formatting going completely haywire, so the old website was just not user friendly, and didn’t give us the control and customization options we wanted. It also wouldn't interface properly with our Salesforce solution. 

How did you select Taoti Creative as your solution partner?

We distributed an RFP to several potential vendors with prior Drupal experience. Taoti Creative responded with the most compelling offer. We then invited them to demonstrate their relevant capabilities and, after being successfully vetted, we decided to bring them on. 

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in monetary terms?

It was between $50,000 and $100,000.

When was the new site launched?

We launched it December 31 of last year [2013].

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

In terms of results, could you share any statistics, metrics, or user feedback that would demonstrate the effectiveness of the work Taoti Creative has delivered?

The big thing is that they understood our business. Sometimes, we have a technical line of work, and it’s a very specialized area that nobody else does. The thing that I liked the most about them is that they understood what our business line was, and they were able to stay in sync with that. We didn’t have to keep explaining to them how our business works. That was a crucial factor. But, the other thing is that they understood that it’s an organic, evolutionary process. Especially when you’re a startup, and you’re constantly redefining your business parameters as you’re going along. They were very patient and very helpful throughout that process. They helped keep us to try not to do too much, but to lay a foundation where the website could evolve and grow if the organization evolved and grew. Those were the two big things that we wanted out of it, and they very much delivered that.

In retrospect, are there areas that you think they could improve upon, or are there things you'd do differently as the client before approaching this type of project?

No. When you utilize small firms you have to remember that they have limited resources. It's a real constraint that needs to be managed with keen awareness. Taoti Creative made themselves extremely available to us and they were always responsive to our requests and inquiries. I admire that level of consistency from vendors, especially in the software development space. 

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

Can you give an overview of the work Taoti did for you?

We have a custom develop application. It’s not one of your standard, off-the-shelf Drupal or WordPress apps. It’s custom code, it’s written in PHP, and it runs on top of on MySQL database. It’s a very standard but everything that we have our custom layouts. All the work that goes on behind the scenes, the Intranet portion of it versus the public website, it’s all custom built. It runs from standard technical specs that we designed with their assistance. They pretty much program what we want and, if they think that we’re not making the best decision, or they think they have a better way of doing something, they talk to us about it first so that we’re not wasting development hours.

What was your main goal going into creating this application?

Just to get a website originally. Five years ago when we started, the National Kidney Registry didn’t even exist. The concept didn’t even exist. We wanted to be one of the first people out there with the idea and, once it was out there, then from there we just wanted to grow. Our business model kept changing, and they were able to adapt with us. 

SOLUTION

What scope of the project was Taoti involved in?

They helped with the design, and they helped with the development. The only thing that they essentially didn’t do is create the business model.

What would you say was a general cost range for their project? 

The initial development was definitely less than $10,000, but we spent about that and maybe a little bit more per month now on maintenance. Like I said, we’re in constant revision. We outsource the Taoti along with internal staff as well. There’s me and then there’s another developer that works with me. We use our knowledge to enhance what Taoti provides as well, so we all work in collaboration otherwise, we’re probably spending $20,000 to $25,000 a month.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

How satisfied are you with the finished product that they developed?

The finished product was on four or five years ago. We constantly do revisions. We have a monthly budget for maintenance. It’s a significantly sized budget. We basically keep one of their programmers almost full-time employed for the entire month.

When working with Taoti, is there anything that stands out as being unique or special compared to other developers you’ve worked with?

They’re experts in everything. There’s not a thing we can’t bring up to them that they don’t bring somebody to the table and say yes, we can do this, and show us what they can do.

Do you think there’s anything they could improve or do a bit better?

No. The only problem I’ve ever had is on occasion something takes an extra day or two to get done, compared to what it was scheduled. But, I’d prefer to have it done right and done within budget than done on time anyway. If I have to suffer by waiting a day or so once every three or six months then, believe me, if that’s the biggest complaint I have, then I’m very blessed.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Director of Government

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Marketing

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Taoti Creative to accomplish?

• Experiential Marketing
• Generate awareness

SOLUTION

How did you find Taoti Creative?

Online Search

Why did you select Taoti Creative over others?

• Great culture fit
• Company values aligned

How many teammates from Taoti Creative were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

They created a floating experiential marketing product for us and executed seamlessly. 

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

I had a wonderful experience with Taoti, from start to finish with an experiential marketing project. When they didn't know if they could do what I need, they didn't just say "sorry, no". I got a call from the owner and even thought what I asked about wasn't exactly doable for them - we talked through what I was aiming to achieve and he came up with great ideas and then executed them. We generated awareness at the levels we didn't even expect.

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

They did deliver everything on time with highest quality.

What was your primary form of communication with Taoti Creative?

Virtual Meeting

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

Thank you so much for your talent, ideas, and hard work, which made our project a success!

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

No