Culture Foundry

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the director of business and marketing at Pride Mountain Vineyards.

What challenge were you trying to address with Culture Foundry?

We hired Culture Foundry to develop our website.

What was the scope of their involvement?

The website acts as a portal to our business for the public. It describes our property, history, each of our wines, and our guest experience. People can also purchase wines. We also offer a lot of wines exclusively to our mailing list. Those members have a special log-in to find these wines that Culture Foundry integrated within the site.

Over the years, they’ve updated our site and integrated it with our POS and CRM systems.

What is the team composition?

I’ve worked with Trevor (Creative Director & Founder), Josh (Designer & Frontend Web Developer), and Colin (Senior Designer & Director). Jory (Director of Accounts) is our main point of contact.

How did you come to work with Culture Foundry?

I’ve worked with Trevor before he founded Culture Foundry. I always thought that he did an outstanding job at delivering our company's vision through a website presentation. It was logical that we would continue on with Culture Foundry.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent $175,000 over the years.  

What is the status of this engagement?

Our ongoing engagement started in January 2010.

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

We’re a small company, so we receive a lot of feedback from our customers and mailing list subscribers. We’ve been told that the site is intuitive, visually-appealing, and easy to use. Users can order our wines online without any issue.

How did Culture Foundry perform from a project management standpoint?

Jory keeps everything organized. She relays everything clearly to the developers while keeping me updated on the timeline and project. If there is a question best answered by a developer, we will have a video call to clear everything up.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Whenever we have an issue, they’re responsive. If something needs to be addressed critically, I can make it known, and they’ll respond quickly.

Are there any areas they could improve?

There’s nothing that I’ve been unhappy with. They really do a great job.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Giving clear direction while being timely in your own communication. It makes the best use of everyone’s time. If something needs to be addressed, I’m always clear about changes, and they’ve been receptive.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the former VP for content programming and media for 24 Hour Fitness and the editor-in-chief for 24 Life magazine.

What challenge were you trying to address with Culture Foundry?

We had many different projects with them, but our core project was the development of the editorial site and lifestyle brand, as well as the digital magazine.

What was the scope of their involvement?

The team participated in a full website launch, including coming up with a content and digital strategy and a direct-to-consumer strategy. They worked on the design, SEO, PPC, and supported us in creating both the WordPress website and the other websites that we built from the ground up. They’d build a digital magazine for us every month, too. 

What is the team composition?

The number of people working on the project flexed over the years, but we had a core team of 4–5 people depending on what we were doing at that point in time. If we needed to launch or build something new, they’d pull in others as needed. 

How did you come to work with Culture Foundry?

I believe we found them through a referral. Their skillset and their work speak for themselves in the marketplace. The team and their ability to adapt our vision and bring solutions to the table made us decide they’d be the best fit. 

What is the status of this engagement?

The project began around December 2014. Though I’m no longer at the company, I believe the project is still ongoing, but maybe not at the same scale since COVID-19 happened. 

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

We launched a site and we wouldn’t have been able to do it without their help. We won a digital magazine award for interactive media, which had an impact. We grew a lifestyle brand from zero and saw at least a 60% increase in traffic for the company, too. 

The cool thing about working with Culture Foundry was that we could bring a vision to the table, come up with ideas, and then they did deep research on best practices and new solutions that took the market to the next level. They then brought that research to take our project to a higher level of execution.

Another amazing aspect of their team is they had designers, not just web developers. They were able to look at the interactive experience for the content and readers, so they know what works, what drives conversions, and what gives the experience we want for our brand, which is especially important now. 

How did Culture Foundry perform from a project management standpoint?

They had direct access to our site and we used a combination of Google and project management tools. Their team was very flexible with what we had. We used a lot of emails and direct communication, including weekly meetings and quarterly in-person meetings for brainstorming. 

We were very much partners, not just a vendor relationship. We had direct access to them. There were some late nights and weekends when we had to get something out the door and they were responsive, which is so incredible in this market. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

The team is full of high-caliber professionals at the top of their game. They are also really good humans, so we knew they were good people to work with — that makes or breaks a work experience. We could have transparent conversations that were both professional and human. 

Their ability to come forward with this level of design execution, and not just a traditional template that’s been used 9,000 times in the marketplace, is impressive. They knew how to bring forward something that was visually appealing, competitive, and distinct. We’ve worked with many other web developers, but none have had the leading edge eye for design like Culture Foundry. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

I can’t think of anything — they were one of my favorite partners to work with. If we needed something changed, they did it for us. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

If you have the luxury to do a launch meeting, do it because that was super valuable for us. It helps establish the relationship right out of the gate. We did work with many teammates and that was really helpful. The weekly meetings are also great.

The more specific you can get with your vision and feedback, the better they’ll adapt and learn what you’re trying to build. Then you’ll have a co-creation of a language that helps you with your site. 

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I work for Ballet Austin, and I oversee sales and marketing. We are a nonprofit performing arts organization, primarily a ballet company.

As a nonprofit, we can raise funds and work with donors, which has become incredibly important with what is going on right now, but 75% of our business and our business revenues do come through more traditional forms of earned revenue. We sell tickets to performances. We also run a student academy for individuals as young as 18 months and as old as 18 years interested in studying dance in a more structured curriculum style.

We also have an adult dance and fitness program using the same studio space after hours to go back and teach ballet and contemporary, tap dance, modern, hip hop, every possible kind of dance style, and some types of fitness classes. We also operate a Pilates center as part of that business unit.

What challenge were you trying to address with Culture Foundry?

All of the different business centers, certainly the ones that do earn revenue, are very dependent on a website. We have a website that predates my time with the organization, but I believe that we are now into our third content management system based on the history that I know. With each of those switches come slight differences in how our website is styled.

I sell tickets to shows and oversee the marketing for those sales, and I also provide marketing support to these business units. We are very heavily dependent on that website to function as a retail site, not just to get the word out about our brand, but we also do a lot of business through the website. We sell classes and tickets through it.

We needed a new CMS to build the website on.

We were in a situation where we had done a major web redesign project that we had completed in 2015. We had actually ended the relationship we had with the organization that helped us with that. They were doing the creative design for us, which was a lot of advertising support, and they had also helped us with the last time that we updated the website.

They had moved us onto ExpressionEngine, and we had not kept current with software updates, which were not automated necessarily through that software.

We had gotten to the point where we were professionally at the end of our relationship with the last web development firm. We were getting close to the end of life with the ExpressionEngine software that our website was built on. 

What was the scope of their involvement?

In terms of design, we didn’t want to change our website. We liked the way it looked, as it had been refreshed five years ago. It was CMS migration. We asked them to take what the website looked like and slap it on something that we could regularly update the software on.

Since we’re a nonprofit, and this isn’t our primary focus, we also needed this to be automated.

We needed someone who could help us get onto a new CMS that would be more stable and ultimately easier for my team to use because we do most of our work in the system. We also needed someone to monitor the site and help with other areas that the other agency had done.

We started the relationship with them by them coming in and taking over monitoring duties if there were any issues. Within a couple of months, we scoped out the project to take our existing site off ExpressionEngine. They recommended WordPress, and they basically rebuilt our site onto that platform.

WordPress allows us to do so much more in the backend that doesn’t require a developer. If we wanted to do a major restyling of a page, we could put our own plugins in. We have so much that we can do as amateurs in terms of website design in WordPress instead of ExpressionEngine, which was very templated, and we were very locked into certain design choices.

When it came down to it, we had intended to do the content migration on our own, and we were launching this migration project in October, which for us is Nutcracker season, and a year ago, that was a different thing. My focus is so heavily on marketing and sales of that show, and we ended up separately engaging with them to move all of the content over. The web developer basically rebuilt the site on the new platform, and then in November and December, he grabbed all of that material to transition it over to the new CMS, allowing us to go back and basically clean things up and add some additional pages, as well as work on redirects or things like that which might cause problems when we made the switch from one to the other.

 Now we can do anything we want. Our limitation is how much we can figure out on our own.

What is the team composition?

The original conversation started with Trevor (Creative Director & Founder), one of their principals. Our primary contact has been Jory (Director of Accounts). She is our go-to person daily. We have worked with a web developer on basically the entire migration schedule.

How did you come to work with Culture Foundry?

I reached out to Culture Foundry. Before coming to Texas and doing this, I used to work at Churchill Downs, the home of the Kentucky Derby, and I was involved with marketing, communications for that company and through that business and event, I got to know Trevor and his team because that is one of their major clients.

When I moved to Austin, Trevor has a location here, and it was easy for me to reach out to someone that I knew of and had great experiences with them in the past. We were in a situation where we were about to do an RFP. We are a little ballet company, so I didn’t know if there would be a lot of folks nipping at my door and asked if they would be interested in working on this project and working with us.

How much have you invested with them?

Rather than doing a retainer with them, we have three different financial relationships with them. We either work with them on a project basis like the CMS migration project, which was over $20,000.

Monthly, we pay them to host our site. If we run into a situation that we don’t know how to fix, they will go in and fix things.

Based on an annual basis, I would say that we’re likely spending close to $10,000 a year.

What is the status of this engagement?

The team came in and replaced our previous developer in June 2019. We started the CMS migration in October 2019, and with delays due to the pandemic, we finished that May. We have an ongoing relationship with them.

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

The functionality and reliability of the site are good. Year over year or vendor over vendor, comparison based on revenues because of the times that we are in, we are just not selling like we had been a year ago at this time.

The website, the way it is laid out, is very similar to what it was when it comes to user experience, which was intentional. We weren’t looking to do a complete redesign, although we may do that at some point. I don’t know that the website would be performing any better because of their involvement. Still, having said that, the people who maintain the website are performing 150% better than we were because, in the past, we only had a handful of individuals in the organization who either had the time or the capacity to work within the old CMS. It was just more complicated.

The chances of going in there and making a mistake that would compromise the way the site functioned or just really messing things up were greater. One of the things we had done since migration is making sure there are two to three people in every department with a section of the website they are responsible for and trained in WordPress to build their own pages and build their own updates. In a way, it has eliminated the need to have that one person who is a dedicated webmaster who would take care of everything.

It has brought a lot of democracy to how we conduct our business online because it has put straightforward tools into hands that are more trained and confident now to quickly react to changes in our business, which has been really important.

Case in point, when all of us started to have to shut down in March, those of us who are content creators, whether we are teaching or performing in a live environment, had to figure out how to get into video pretty quickly. We had a good head start there because we have an internal video team. Anyone who had a cellphone who could create content created content that we turned into a brand-new version of a web channel. We were trying to help people stay physically active. We were trying to help people stay mentally calm and well. We tried to find all kinds of ways to go back to the main mission that we usually do with people face to face in very high touch environments and recreate that experience as best we could virtually.

I had an entire team that goes in and builds the delivery vehicle for that content, which would not have been the case if we had been in this other relationship. We would have had to have gone through the vendor and spent an awful lot of money for the same kind of results. That is much a function of WordPress and their recommendations that we went on that CMS instead, giving us the tools that we needed with a system that was easier and more flexible for us to use so that we could pivot and pivot again, and keep finding ways to house all of our content online and then use email, social media and other ways to get people back to that website to consume it.

Working with them has been great because they have allowed us to take back a lot of responsibility for maintaining that site. They had no problem with it because they are very concerned about the best solution and an affordable solution. If that is us doing most of the work, they are fine with that.

They have always presented me with what is going to be the best solution that is most cost-effective, and I really like that about them. For a nonprofit arts organization, at any time, that is important. Still, right now, when the pandemic has very compromised a good chunk of our business, and we can’t even perform part of our business right now because of it, that means a lot. It tells me they are with us for the long haul, and they care about us as a business and as people, and they care about the people that we serve.

They know how important it is to keep that website up and running because right now, like for many, it is the only way we can engage with them. The tough thing and the nice thing about what the entire world is going through right now is that it has really forced a shift in the direction of technology for many ways we interact, transact, and consume.  I am glad we were able to make the switch at the time that we did.

How did Culture Foundry perform from a project management standpoint?

If there were any delays, they were the result of us needing to change something or a global pandemic shutting everything down and taking our eyes off of that ball for a little bit.

They are very responsive and very communicative. We even got into some situations as we were getting ready to make the switch over where there was another vendor involved, and there was some back and forth about who should be responsible for what going forward with regards to our DNS.

It wasn’t the most pleasant conversation. Vendors have different turf they try to protect, and I think what I like about Culture Foundry is that they are very emotionally intelligent people. They quickly sensed some internal politics were going on, and they weren’t interested in owning anything; they were interested in the best solution for our organization and how to get there. It was just a very nice, diplomatic, and mature approach to resolving small problems as we were making this transition.

Jory’s customer service is great. When we need to seek them out for help on the website, we can talk about the cost agreement with them as well. We opted not to go with a retainer. We opted to go on a time and materials basis with them.

I think they are human beings first and very empathetic. I have always found that the way they communicate with us to be very understanding and very supportive, which is what you need. If I am calling, it is probably because I am stuck, and it might be really important. They have been responsive, and they have done a really nice job of helping us with the transition and then being there for us when we need them.

We haven’t used any project management software or anything like that. Our approach to getting it done was very basic. We put together outlines and timelines and all of that using Word documents and whatnot.

Daily, email is usually the way. If it’s really urgent, I might text Jory, or I might pick up the phone. We are both in different time zones. The only thing that might hinder communication might be that I am trying to get in touch with somebody before they are on the clock, but those are easily managed obstacles if you even want to call them. For the most part, it has been the occasional Zoom conference, but email is usually how we get things done.

What did you find most impressive about them?

I have always liked them because they keep the focus on what is the story that needs to be told, and that is something that I think is really important for brands, regardless of what you are selling.

Their team is great at helping their customers design their web solutions around their stories. I don’t have a lot of experience with different firms because I worked with them and then worked with one other and back with them or another iteration of Trevor’s team. Web development is their full-time focus, which is just unique to our situation. The other agency that we worked with was great in the space, but it was one of many things that they did, and I just felt as though when I am talking to Culture Foundry, they are 100% all-in focused on web solutions. It’s not just part of larger creative services offering.

Are there any areas they could improve?

For the project that we tasked them with, it would be unfair for me to say there was anything there that could be improved upon. We were looking for a quick solution and a very cost-effective solution.

It was a time-consuming project in terms of having 100 pages in the CMS, and they had to be moved over to another CMS. It probably wasn’t the most fun thing they have ever been tasked with doing. I am sure they would love, when things normalize, to go back and remake a website with us one day because I am sure they have a million ideas about how they could make ours better. I think they were exactly what we needed at the time we needed them, and I hope at some point, we can do something a little more ambitious with them.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

I think just being honest and forthright. I am a very direct person, and I don’t like playing games.

I appreciate it if we can just cut to the chase and get there first. I like that about them. I think their approach and solutions are very scalable. Looking at me compared to some of these other kinds of big entertainment organizations they work with, it would have been very easy for them to say they wouldn’t make enough money on us, so they don’t need to bother us. I had an existing relationship that at least got Trevor to return my phone call, but I like the fact that it still matters. There is a lot of loyalty there and a lot of care.

They benefit when their clients benefit. For example, we are doing a version of the Nutcracker this year, just not in the theater. It is virtual, and we are producing a movie. My team is building hours and hours of featurette content to go with it. All of this will be delivered through the website at some point. We are busy doing our marketing and stuff, and I am on email all day long. I see this newsletter from Culture Foundry, and I thought it was just like a client newsletter, and it is some sort of shopping guide. I decided to read through it really quickly and came to find that they had put together a shopping guide, knowing everyone is doing their shopping online and showcasing client’s offerings around the holidays.

It was basically like a Cyber Monday gift-giving guide and how people should go out and sample our customer’s goods, and of course, they had taken the time to include the Nutcracker and what we were doing. They grabbed the artwork, and they didn’t even bother me about telling them about it so they could promote it. They just took the initiative, and they did it. I don’t know how many email boxes that lands in, but the fact that they went to the trouble to do that without even being asked, I think, is great. I was really impressed and touched by that.

I would highly recommend them, and I would say that my advice would be to go in and be honest with what you need. If it’s not a good fit, I think they will tell you. I would be hard-pressed to believe that they wouldn’t find a way to work with anyone who came at them.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the founder of a tech community. We put on monthly events, job fairs, and bring the community together.

What challenge were you trying to address with Culture Foundry?

We needed help creating a website. We started as multiple Meetup groups. As we grew frequently, we needed a better presence.

What was the scope of their involvement?

They created a WordPress site for us that would be able to help us long term. They also do SEO

What is the team composition?

We worked with 4–5 people from their team.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent $25,000–$50,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in October 2013, and our work is ongoing.

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

Our monthly visitors have gone up month over month. It’s helped us get thousands of attendees at events and hundreds of sponsors and presenters. It gave us a brand image and a place for people to see who we are to attract the people we need to grow the business.

How did Culture Foundry perform from a project management standpoint?

We used some phone calls, emails, and Google Docs for project managementent. It’s been a 5-star experience.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They have a very relationship-oriented long view of how they do their business. They’re not looking to get money in the door, get a project, and move on; they show deep interest in our mission, our needs, and how they can help. The team was very interactive from day one onwards in partnering on how the website can be a tool to grow your business.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, anytime issues came up, they were immediately responded to.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

My advice is to be really clear on what their business needs are, and what a digital presence can do for them. Share your pain points so Culture Foundry can create a good solution.