UNINCORPORATED

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I am the executive director of an arts and humanities initiative with a state university.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with UNINCORPORATED?

We were originally trying to update our website and make it a little bit cleaner and more mobile-friendly.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Though the original goal was relatively small, when Ian (Founder & CEO, UNINCORPORATED) delivered their proposal, we ended up making the project much more like a full redesign than we had originally anticipated.

They helped develop a new template for our weekly newsletter along with adding features and informational pages to our website to make it a little bit easier to navigate.

What is the team composition?

We worked primarily with Robert (Account Supervisor, UNINCORPORATED) and Rebecca (Art Director, UNINCORPORATED) throughout the project.

How did you come to work with UNINCORPORATED?

We had worked with their team to develop a different website under an arts and action initiative. I wasn’t the main person on that project, but I had become familiar with them, so we reached out when we decided we wanted to do something similar.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent about $12,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

The project ran from around May–September 2019.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We are just in the launching process now, so we don’t have a lot of statistics on the site, but overall it is much easier to use. Feedback from our employees has been positive, and it’s just a much cleaner and more compelling design. On top of that, we have a way to monitor the newsletter, which was something we never had before.

How did UNINCORPORATED perform from a project management standpoint?

We communicated primarily via email and in-person meetings. They were pretty responsive to all of our questions, and while we still haven’t cleared a few things up our overall experience was very good.

What did you find most impressive about them?

UNINCORPORATED is a team of very talented and creative people. They were able to help us figure out not only what our needs are but also how to best implement solutions to those problems on the site in ways that are easy and enjoyable to use. We really enjoyed our experience working with them.

Are there any areas they could improve?

There are some areas where functionality on the site could be better or where we didn’t quite get enough training on how to maintain, but it was clear that they were delivering their best at all times, so it’s not something that I fault them for.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

I would just recommend that you be very clear about your needs and timelines, so they know how to best translate your needs into actual work, and you can hit the ground running as soon as possible.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the director of communications for the USC Thornton School of Music.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with UNINCORPORATED?

UNINCORPORATED has been our partner for many marketing projects over the past eight years.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

UNINCORPORATED does a range of activities for us including graphic design, marketing, and advertising. They produce our event calendar each semester, and a series of ads each fall. For the past 2–3 years, UNINCORPORATED has been our partner for inbound and outbound marketing campaigns. One campaign concerns the launch of new master’s degrees in non-performance fields.

How did you come to work with UNINCORPORATED?

Our work together has grown over the years. What began as a series of design projects has grown to include comprehensive reputation-building marketing campaigns for the school. As part of my duties at USC, I was tasked with launching the USC Glorya Kaufman School of Dance, the first arts school at USC in over 40 years. UNINCORPORATED was involved in the initial branding discussion for the school. Their work was well-received, and when we were considering a partner to launch our professional non-performance degrees, we thought of them. We still put out a bid to multiple marketing companies across the country. Each firm came back with a different solution; UNINCORPORATED’s was an inbound and outbound marketing strategy.

What is the status of this engagement?

Our collaboration is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

One of the advantages of working with UNINCORPORATED is that they provide unparalleled analytics. Most design work—such as our event calendar—is difficult to track in terms of success aside from the positive, anecdotal feedback we have received. However, the campaign to fill our new non-performance degrees had clear metrics: filling those programs with students. 

Another advantage of using inbound marketing was that it is highly responsive to our analytics. Based on the results we saw during the campaign, we made constant changes to improve the performance.

How did UNINCORPORATED perform from a project management standpoint?

They have been exceptional at project management. That’s one of the key benefits of working with them. I have a small office that relies heavily on freelancers and vendors. 

UNINCORPORATED is one of those companies that I know will deliver a project on time while offering creative solutions.

What did you find most impressive about them?

UNINCORPORATED prides themselves on finding creative solutions for their clients’ needs.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I don’t necessarily have any suggestions. This has been a consistent relationship—we’ve grown together as an office and a company. I look forward to what we do next.

Any advice for potential customers?

Treat UNINCORPORATED like a partner. Part of the enjoyment of working with them has been the sense of collaboration. They’re very flexible and easy to work with.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We’re a school of public policy within a university and we have several degree programs for undergraduates and graduates. I’ve had two different titles during the time I’ve worked with UNINCORPORATED—director of online learning and director of digital learning and innovation. 

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with UNINCORPORATED?

I worked with them on the marketing of two different programs. 

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

UNINCORPORATED assisted with our marketing efforts but their services also included web design and development. We use HubSpot as a marketing platform, and they’re familiar with it. They created landing pages, forms, and email campaigns for us, and tackled content development for blog posts and videos. We shot a bunch of videos internally, but they strategized and turned it into relevant content for our marketing campaigns. They also provided some strategic direction for our social media campaigns. 

What is the team composition?

Ian (Founder & CEO, UNINCORPORATED) worked closely with us. Their marketing manager handled a lot of the operations and managed the project tasks. We also worked with an account supervisor, who helped more on the backend with our account. Those were the three main people we collaborated with, but I know there were others on their team handling a lot of the writing and graphic design. 

How did you come to work with UNINCORPORATED?

UNINCORPORATED worked with a number of different departments at our university prior to me signing on with them, including our school of music. My counterpart there turned me to them. Ian has a rich background and had worked at our organization prior to going out on his own and founding UNINCORPORATED. It was useful that he had some cultural contextual knowledge of our university.  

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked with UNINCORPORATED between January 2017–July 2019. 

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We didn’t necessarily have set goals when we got started, other than increasing our enrollments. We did have a lot of analytics all the way down the marketing funnel and we met many of those goals. The ones we didn’t meet were because of internal issues on our end, which UNINCORPORATED had no control over. That being said, on the top-of-the-funnel things, they did an excellent job.

We have analytics and have been able to demonstrate that the SEO of a program we were marketing ended up surpassing the SEO of our existing school website, which was well-established. We had a six-month window before our organic content picked up and it surpassed what we’d been doing internally. That was definitely a notable KPI. 

UNINCORPORATED also did a great job of really helping those of us as well as the directors of the programs we worked with to gain a much better understanding of what’s required in terms of strategy. Some of our senior leadership—by virtue of getting reports created in hand with UNINCORPORATED—have a much better understanding of what it means to advertise in today’s digital landscape.

How did UNINCORPORATED perform from a project management standpoint?

After our meetings were over, I was in awe of their capacity to organize so many different things and people at once. They really brought order to what otherwise would’ve been chaos through the skillset they brought to the table.

We all used Slack, Google Drive, Google Docs, and Asana, though we also used email occasionally. We met weekly on an hourlong videoconference, which was always highly productive. Overall, UNINCORPORATED communicated very well. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

We greatly appreciated their project management and talent with digital and inbound content-based marketing. They had a solid handle on HubSpot, which is a pretty robust platform, and were great at writing content. I think they subcontracted some of that work, but every piece of content that was written really came out strong. UNINCORPORATED didn’t have expertise in our field, so I worked with them on healthcare policy and administration for a bit. They certainly figured it out and did an excellent job producing written content about it.

Additionally, UNINCORPORATED has a good understanding of large organizations and their dynamics, such as in our case. They have great graphic and web designers, too. We produced most of the video content in-house, but they provided great insight into where we needed to shorten or expand things, and we did reviews together. They brought really good suggestions to the table, both in terms of how a viewer would see it as well as the strategy for SEO and generating leads. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

There were a few mistakes that were made, but anybody could’ve made them. UNINCORPORATED’s team needed a bit of onboarding in terms of culture. Our area is very different from corporate structures, and they had more expertise in working with private enterprises. We’re a private nonprofit university and power structures are very different. UNINCORPORATED wasn’t getting why things were happening correctly at a high level at times. There were some cultural things they needed help with, but that would be true for anyone coming in without experience in higher education.

Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?

It’s important to use communication platforms. UNINCORPORATED was pretty unconvinced in this sense, but once we decided on what platforms and communication channels we were going to use, it worked out great.

They bring a fresh vibe to the table, which I appreciated quite a bit. Some of our senior leadership is unfamiliar with things that are common knowledge to the younger demographic about technology. My advice would be to embrace the millennial approach and mindset, which might not be as evident to an older generation.