Clearly Innovative

BACKGROUND

Please describe your organization.

I was working for the National Military Family Association, who is a national nonprofit that works to improve the quality of life of military families. 

What is your position?

When we started the project, I was the communications director, and I shifted to mobile initiatives director.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What business challenge were you trying to address with Clearly Innovative?

We were looking to reach a very young audience with a solution in which we could push out information, rather than just continuing to post on our website or social media channels.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their involvement in detail.

It was primarily mobile app development, but it also had a website component, with a very extensive back-end database.

How did you come to work with Clearly Innovative?

We had a relationship with Appcelerator, and Appcelerator recommended Clearly Innovative because they were physically located near where we were. We started our partnership with Clearly Innovative with a short project, which then we continued to expand upon the project.

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

This was a decent size project and cost $200,000-plus.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

I have so many success stories about this app. We had some external folks in the industry evaluate what Clearly Innovative had built, one of the folks commented that we had the "Cadillac of back-end databases," so that was one encouraging piece of news. There were also military spouses who were located in remote areas, and were new to the military family lifestyle, that described the app as a lifesaver. 

What distinguishes Clearly Innovative from other providers?

Clearly Innovative was always accessible. They made accommodations for our business environment, they worked to understand the folks in our company, how we needed to receive information, and the approval steps for the project as a whole. I could pick up the phone anytime and call somebody, and I knew that they were very detail-focused. If there ever was a performance problem, they were on top of it before I or anybody else noticed and were always there to have it resolved.

Is there anything Clearly Innovative could have improved or done differently?

Any issues that we had at the beginning, they have all been addressed, and so I think that goes to their strengths. It was a great partnership. We had a consistent team. Early on, they rotated some members in and out, but then they put in place a dedicated team of programmers to work with us, which was great. I can't really think of any issue that wasn't resolved.