Five Jars

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the VP of digital product and innovation for a large organization in Minnesota. We provide services for youth, community outreach, and family development.

What challenge were you trying to address with Five Jars?

We were trying to rebuild and re-platform a website for our organization, as well as our parent organization. The solution was an open-source website system that any organization under our parent group could use around the world.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We’ve worked with them a few times before, but this is our largest project. To start, we shared the scope of work — the problem we were trying to solve — and then collaboratively came up with a solution. The opensource platform had to deliver enhanced credibility, SEO and e-commerce performance, and a lower cost of ownership.

The project has progressed for nearly four years in an iterative and agile fashion, spidering-off into many sub-projects. For example, when the pandemic hit, Five Jars pivoted into developing a video player that would support both live stream and on-demand content. Once this was finished, we realized we could transform our live content into more on-demand content, but that would require editing and truncating live streams to be consumable pieces for viewers. It would have taken someone 40 hours to do this to 40 hours of video, so Five Jars developed an application that automates the entire process. We click a button, and the software will select the video, edit and truncate it to the appropriate timestamps, and upload the metadata. It’s saved us around $100,000 in resources.

They’re our go-to for bespoke, innovative, from-the-ground-up solutions.

What is the team composition?

We’ve worked with somewhere between 8-12 people depending on the project: a manager, a QA resource, a lead technical architect, and several developers. Alex (CEO) sometimes is involved, and we occasionally have two project managers.

How did you come to work with Five Jars?

Before Five Jars existed, the people who founded it used to work at several other organizations. We met them in those positions and realized they were talented, resourceful, proactive in their communication and capable of problem-solving creatively. When those individuals formed Five Jars, we knew we could come to them for innovative, low-cost, high-quality solutions.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent around $500,000–$1 million with them.

What is the status of this engagement?

We’ve been working with them since March 2018.

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

We measure success with standard project criteria: are we getting things in the scope we expected, at the expected budget, and in the expected timeframe? They exceed expectations in all three categories.  

The next metric is whether we’re seeing better customer experiences, and we’ve observed increases in almost all our primary KPIs: SEO performance, customer satisfaction scores, and e-commerce performance.

They’ve completely improved and overhauled our e-commerce flow, leading to better experiences when people search and find programs and activities relative to them. This translates into purchases.

By all those metrics, it’s been a hugely successful relationship. Nothing has gone wildly budget or been super delayed or significantly reduced in scope because of overestimation. They’ve blown us out of water on everything. If they don’t “wow” us now, we’d be surprised.

How did Five Jars perform from a project management standpoint?

We work with a whole Atlassian suite, as well as Basecamp, email, Slack, Zoom, and Google hangouts.

What did you find most impressive about them?

We’ve been most impressed by their innovation.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, none that come to mind. We’re super happy with them. If someone told me that Five Jars didn’t exist anymore, I would start crying immediately.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

The most helpful thing you can do is have a well-articulated set of goals or a clearly defined problem you’re seeking to solve. Being more clear on needs will set Five Jars up to be as successful as possible.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the senior vice president and chief strategy officer of the YMCA of Greater Brandywine, a midsized YMCA outside of the Philadelphia and Pennsylvania area. We serve about 80,000 members. 

What challenge were you trying to address with Five Jars?

We were looking to improve our digital footprint. We had an archaic registration system, and our website was outdated, difficult to maintain, and provided a terrible user experience. We wanted to enhance our interaction with our members in the digital space and make our website easier to maintain. 

What was the scope of their involvement?

Five Jars built our website from scratch. We’re a part of a consortium of YMCAs that share an open-source website. Five Jars used our old platform as a starting point in terms of model, but they rebuilt everything to meet our CRM and organizational needs using Drupal.

Five Jars partnered with our internal marketing team on some design pieces. The new site has schedules integrated with our CRM, and members can use it to view and register for classes. It also has a search function that drastically improves the ease of buying products on our website.

After the website, Five Jars continued providing additional projects for us, including creating digital products. They’ve built our digital signage and scheduling screens featured as touch screen kiosks in our lobbies. We have a continuous development agreement with them, and they handle bug fixes and day-to-day website changes. 

What is the team composition?

We’ve primarily worked with their co-founder and two project managers. We also work with their developers on an as-needed basis.

How did you come to work with Five Jars?

They were recommended by another YMCA that they’ve previously worked with.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent over $500,000–$1 million.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in January 2016, and it’s ongoing.

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

Five Jars has done an excellent job with the site’s design. After launching the site, we’ve seen a 200% increase in e-commerce traffic.

How did Five Jars perform from a project management standpoint?

They’re excellent at project management. We use Slack for on-the-fly communication, and we have regular meetings when we’re working on projects.

We like that we can sync up with them early in the morning when they’re finishing their work. From a timing perspective, it has been great. We can meet in the morning, and the following day the work is ready for us to QA and check. Despite our time zone differences, the process has been seamless. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

Five Jars can easily be our internal employees with how they treat our website and projects. The quality they produce is top-notch; it feels like they’re an extension of our team. That sets them apart as I’ve never experienced that from another vendor. 

If our website has an issue, they place more urgency on fixing the problem than us. They’re on top of everything, and they’ve strengthened our team because we’ve got a good partner to work with. 

We’re initially hesitant to work with them because they’re overseas, and we’ve typically only worked with onshore providers. However, it has been a great experience working with Five Jars. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

They continue to grow their business, but they don’t have a big team to focus on various initiatives. They’re nimble, and they can do whatever we need them to do. However, it sometimes takes time for them to get the right resource allocated and have everything up to speed, especially if it’s a specialized project. They continue to build their talent base and skill set. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Do your due diligence. We love and can’t recommend Five Jars enough, but that doesn’t mean they’re the right vendor for everybody. That said, seriously consider Five Jars. We’ve been very happy with them; they’re one of my best decisions as a chief strategy officer. 

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I work for YMCA of the North, the second largest among the YMCA associations across the US. We provide services around healthy living, fitness, and well-being, as well as summer programs for kids, childcare, camps, and more. Additionally, we do a lot of equity training and programs for organizations.

I lead the strategy and innovation side of the company, which includes managing our digital marketing, tax systems, POS, and CRM. I also help in our strategic planning efforts.

What challenge were you trying to address with Five Jars?

We don’t have onsite developers within our staff; we only have project managers and product managers who plan and create opportunities within our organization. Thus, we rely on partners like Five Jars to execute some of our digital and technological initiatives.

With Five Jars specifically, we wanted to ensure that our programs and services were being presented in a clear and compelling way to our community and make sure that they were accessible through digital tools like websites and apps. Overall, we wanted our audience to interact easily with YMCA, whether they were registering for a program or participating in some of our events.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We’ve been working with Five Jars for almost four years now, and they’ve done such a phenomenal job for us that we’ve brought more opportunities and more work to them. Most of their work has been around digital development and design, so we see them as a strategic partner and an extension of our internal team.

One of the projects that they worked on was when we created a system to make it easier for our customers to buy personal training sessions online and book those sessions. We couldn’t do that in the past, but Five Jars collaborated with our internal teams and integrated multiple systems into our site to make that happen.

As we’re a nonprofit organization, about 20% of our members receive financial assistance for our services, so Five Jars also helped us create an online financial assistance submission system. We created an interface where people could complete a form to request this assistance.

Additionally, they helped us create a video automation tool to leverage our online classes further. We have a wide virtual platform where we stream live classes online for our members. However, if our members missed the live session, they couldn’t watch it anymore. Thus, Five Jars created a system to save the videos, so every class now has its on-demand video on our platform for our members to watch it anytime they like.

Among other projects, they’ve also worked on an online booking tool for our camps and an equity innovation center where we offer digital experiences. They’ve also digitalized various programs and content, and they’ve helped us with a lot of things across the board.

Five Jars’ approach varies depending on the complexity of the project on hand, but it is usually a mix between us providing the requirements and proper research on their end. They normally do more technical research, and we provide them with the business requirements at a high level to make sure that we’re keeping our cost of ownership low while providing a compelling experience at the same time.

What is the team composition?

We work with an ample gamut of team members from Five Jars, from the CEO to developers, project managers, account managers, designers, and testers. I don’t know how many people from their team we’ve worked with, but I’m sure that most of their team members have supported our projects because they’re a small organization.

How did you come to work with Five Jars?

We learned about Five Jars through a collaboration that we were doing with other YMCA associations nationwide. Basically, they had done some work for another YMCA association, and we saw that work.

After that, we started assigning them some smaller projects, but we kept assigning them more and more projects over time. Their scope almost doubles year after year due to their work quality, value, and very competitive rates.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent around $400,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in December 2017, and our engagement is ongoing. The projects I’ve mentioned are just some examples, but there are half a dozen other projects that they’re working on for us right now.

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

Since Five Jars created our personal training booking system, we’ve processed over 250,000 personal training orders and 130,000 training bookings. This was a process that we had never done online before. Usually, our front desk person or our customer service center needed to call all those users individually to book the sessions, so we estimate that we’ve saved over 20,000 hours of working time by making this a self-service experience for our clients.

Since having our financial assistance submission system in place, we’ve processed over 7,000 requests, which has allowed us to save over 30,000 hours of manual processing time. In addition to giving our members access to more content, the video automation tool has helped us save around 70 hours per week, which translates into $125,000 on savings per year.

I’ve worked in the digital and marketing spaces for over 20 years, and Five Jars is one of the best digital partners that I’ve ever worked with. They have a great ability to collaborate, communicate, and execute. They’re a very authentic, accountable, and results-oriented team.

The ROI that Five Jars offers is so significant that we keep bringing more work to them. Some of the agencies that we’ve worked with in the past had significantly higher rates, and their quality of work wasn’t nearly as good as Five Jars’.

As we’re constantly building new things, we’re always learning. However, the stability and performance of the systems that they’ve created are amazing, and when we do have issues, their response time is very quick. Additionally, they’re really thoughtful about using tracking tools, so we get notifications and alerts when something changes or needs our attention. Overall, our partnership has been great.

How did Five Jars perform from a project management standpoint?

Five Jars’ project management is great; they’re one of the best project managers we’ve ever worked with. Their communication and documentation are great, and they always come back to us quickly with questions to clarify our objectives or timelines. They’re also very responsive and very good at understanding our work, team, and expectations. I would rate them a perfect score for project management.

We communicate in multiple ways, depending on the project. Sometimes we have daily stand-ups because we do a lot of Agile development. We also communicate through Slack and use Basecamp, Jira, and Confluence to manage the projects.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Five Jars is a small and nimble company, but they’re experts in their space. Whether they provide us with a designer, a tester, a project manager, or a developer, the experience and efficiency that they offer are impressive. They work very quickly and deliver high-quality work, and there hasn’t been a technical challenge that they haven’t been able to solve.

Are there any areas they could improve?

The only thing that Five Jars could improve on is having more resources so that they can handle more projects. We have a lot of work to do, but we don’t have the resources to do it.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

First and foremost, you need to be very clear about your goals and challenges. The better the onboarding process for Five Jars or any other digital agency, the most likely you will succeed.

Additionally, know the type of work they do beforehand. They’re a strategic development partner, and they’re experts in Drupal, so you need to ensure that your needs fit their expertise.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the product lead for a company specializing in building digital platforms and products for nonprofits.

For what projects/services did your company hire Five Jars, and what were your goals?

Our clients were facing serious financial crunches as a result of mandatory facility closures due to COVD-19. They needed a way to reach and engage members at home. We hired Five Jars to help develop a completely new product designed that allowed our clients to manage their own client sign-in process, on-demand and live stream video libraries, and account personalization features for their unique membership bases.

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

We had worked with Five Jars previously on a complex integration project for two software platforms that needed to be linked via Drupal for data management purposes.

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

They developed a Drupal-based content management system that allowed delivery of content only to authenticated users. We had a kickoff meeting with Five Jars and an additional developer agency also contracted for the project. Our MVP integrated with YouTube and Vimeo to allow clients to manage their on-demand and live stream video libraries at an affordable rate. A key refinement led by Five Jars was around account personalization.

An authenticated user had a "favorites" list where they could save their favorite videos, blogs and content categories for faster navigation to relevant content. A more recent feature includes 1on1 video chats that happen entirely within the Drupal-based product, keeping members within the platform's ecosystem vs linking them out to a third party platform.

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

There were 3 people in the core team, a lead dev, an assistant dev and a project manager. Additional resources would consult with the project leads internally if a step in development was particularly complex or required outside opinion.

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

Within the first year of launch, the product increased our existing client base by 150%. We also received countless anecdotes from clients about how the product saved their business by keeping them relevant during an unpredictable year.

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

The project management was great. Five Jars had a unique ability to remain flexible and still hit key deadlines despite sudden changes in requirements. We used Slack, Jira, and 2x weekly team calls to stay connected and keep sprints progressing.

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

Five Jars has a unique ability to take a complex problem and architect very creative solutions that are budget-friendly as well as easy for non-technical stakeholders to understand and engage with.

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

Our only issue was an occasional lack of developer hours available to us for the project, due to other projects Five Jars was currently managing. But I know resourcing is something the company is continuing to invest in as they grow in popularity and demand.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the creative director of the YMCA of Greater Cleveland.

What challenge were you trying to address with Five Jars?

We had a pretty awful website and its basic usability was just enabling us to see schedules. Our old site was never meant to host the type of web page we needed. In fact, only a few people would see something helpful on our website. Since our platform didn’t fulfill its purpose, we hired Five Jars to build our site that could best express who we were.

What was the scope of their involvement?

The team built the site in Drupal. Five Jars created features such as automatic scheduling and class finder. Users would also be able to click through the membership prices by branch before delving into a lot of our processes.  We also used their suggestions in designing our site. We’re now working on other features that we’re hoping to get up and running soon. We’ve finished phase one, and we’re now on phase two, but we launched the site in July.

What is the team composition?

We’re working with Alex (CEO), Dmitry (COO & Technology Strategist), and two other people.

How did you come to work with Five Jars?

We were looking through a lot of our Open Y resources because we wanted to procure a site. It was just a matter of money and timing because of the virus. Since we were in a group of YMCAs that had already hired service providers to complete their site,  we were able to get their recommendations. Five Jars and a few other companies were recommended. In the end, we chose Five Jars because they understood that we were a nonprofit, so they offered cost-effective services.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent over $50,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in March 2021, and we continue to collaborate.

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

One of the success metrics has been our site’s decreasing bounce rate. To be specific, we’ve experienced a drop of 10–15% when it comes to our site's bounce rate. Thanks to them, we now have a user-friendly platform. Our site visits have also increased by 10%, and that has been a big thing because we want people to stay longer on our site.

How did Five Jars perform from a project management standpoint?

They have a good project management workflow, and they use Basecamp as their primary tool. On top of that, they like to move things along, and we appreciate that because we wear a lot of hats internally. We can rely on them to help us keep track of where we are on our project and what we need to focus on. They also help us understand the deficiencies in our project such as if we’re having trouble with keeping on time or if we’re not producing materials fast enough. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

I’m impressed with the digital signage we can use on our site because it adds a unique look to our platform.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, there’s not a lot of things they can improve. The only difficulty in our project is their early business hours. As a result, they aren’t really available in the afternoon since they’re based in Ukraine and Russia. However, it’s not a big issue for us.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Have a site plan that will ensure your project’s success. While they’re implementing your plans, make sure there is no delay on your part.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the executive director of the Council for Exceptional Children, a nonprofit association with 21,000 members who support students with disabilities.

For what projects/services did your company hire Five Jars, and what were your goals?

For this particularly project, we needed to integrate our CRM into our Drupal Website, as well as into a few peripheral systems so that our members had a seamless SSO with a clean User Experience.

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

We had worked with FiveJars on previous Web development and building a new website. They managed that project ahead of schedule and under budget. In addition, a member of our staff had worked with Five Jars at a previous organization and came with great reviews of the work.

We still did a full RFP process and Five Jars was the best because of their wide scope of knowledge (from creative to the finite details of servers).

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

We provided a project plan to integrate a new CRM into our Drupal website, as well as to tie that CRM into peripheral software using our web SSO. This required vast knowledge of the Drupal, Oauth, and API's. It also required the Five Jars team to work with our CRM developer, who later said to us "they were the easiest developers we have ever worked with."

This project would have normally taken up to 8 weeks to develop. However, because of a delay with the CRM, when we finally were able to get started with Five Jars, we had less than two weeks to pull it together. I can tell by the time of days that we were getting updates from them, they literally worked around the clock for us because at that point, we were in an emergency state of need.

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

We worked with a Project Manager Michael), the Technology Strategist (Dmitri), the Software Developer (Andrew), and because this was a rush job, the CEO joined our initial launch call to assess our timeline and how he could rearrange their own internal resources to support us in this urgent project.

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

When we launched our new CRM, we had several pieces of technology that needed to be connected to it. Our website, because of the work of Five Jars, was the only piece that launched on time without problems! They managed to move an 8-week project to a 2-week project without dilemma. We could not be more pleased.

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

Five Jars uses all the necessary project management tools to keep us updated, including tools to track costs and performance. They are very communicative--both the good and the bad. They also left enough time in the project to allow us the wiggle room at the end that we needed to repoint servers and do Q/A work.

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

This is a simple thing, but it means the world to me. We agreed to a price to pay for the project, and when it was finished, Five Jars came back to us and reported that they had been able to cut costs and in the end, did not charge us as much as we had agreed. That is unheard of. They proved their worth as a PARTNER, not jut a vendor. And the quality of work was top notch.

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

Nothing comes to mind--they are an interesting group of folks to work with who have such a varied skillset that they have learned to capitalize and distribute the work appropriately. Everything was seamless working with them!

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm the Director of Digital Marketing & Platforms at the YMCA of the North, one of the largest YMCAs in the world.

For what projects/services did your company hire Five Jars, and what were your goals?

We had a serious problem taking our Virtual Live Stream workouts and then exporting them & publishing them out to an On-Demand experience quickly and without a lot of time, effort, and resources put into it. It took roughly 40 hours a week to do this manually, and we didn't have the manpower to do this on our own.

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

We've worked with Five Jars in the past and they have a proven track record of success on projects that are complicated and nuanced.

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

Create a video automation tool that will pull the live streams from Vimeo.com on the YMCA of the North Vimeo account, automatically cut off the beginning and ending rough points, insert a logo stinger and end slate on each respective side, reupload to Vimeo, and import into the YMCA of the North's Open Y site with all of the necessary metadata (including Instructor Name, Class Title, Class Time and Date, Equipment needed, Duration of class, etc.)

Autogenerate a thumbnail as well for Time, Date, and Title of Class. -Product must be distributed on the Open Y Backlog -Product must be automated from start to finish -Website admin should have options for automated thumbnail generation or manual upload -Website admin's only job is to tell the automation tool the start and stop time of the video. (Edit Points)

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

2 Vendors. Andrey Maximov and Michael Ivashchenko. Andrey worked in development on this project and Michale was our project manager. It appears that Andrew Berezovsky might have been involved as well as Team Lead. Alex Schedrov decided whether our project was even doable.

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

Thanks to this tool, we are now able to save over 40 hours of work a week! We will only save even more time as we scale our Virtual Y offerings. When we expand to two studios, this will save us around 70-75 hours a week. At our current rate for a Virtual Admin in our studio, that will be about $125k saved every year once we open up our second studio.

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

We had a biweekly meeting with our Project Manager and our Developer. Very clear and simple communication. If they needed something, they would tell us. If we wanted a feature to be more stable, they would correct it. I was very impressed with how easy this team made it for us.

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

This product was key in pushing Virtual Y further and keeping our Virtual Y members satisfied. The time it took to do the "old method" was unsustainable. Thanks to Five Jars, we have something that is stable, efficient, and high quality. I cannot believe how easy it was to work with this team.

When you work with a team that literally develops a product that eliminates an entire role on your team, you can't help but be blown away. I'm impressed with Michael and Andrey who were fantastic at meeting our needs and also providing clear and direct feedback.

Easily the most brilliant devs I have ever worked with. They never seemed afraid of a task thrown at them. I've seen this in the past with other devs, and it was impressive to see them work through problem-solving.

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

Not in the slightest.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We’re a health and fitness nonprofit organization that serves Santa Barbara and Ventura counties. We have a membership model, and we offer child care, aquatics, and a lot more programs designed to help support our communities. I’m the IT director of the association, so I oversee our seven branches.

What challenge were you trying to address with Five Jars?

We needed to upgrade our website. Our old website was built on WordPress, and it was really cumbersome for our marketing department to update and make use of it. We wanted to do a lot of things with our online presence, but we couldn’t do them with our former site.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Five Jars helped us migrate our website into Open Y, a platform built in Drupal. January is really important for health and fitness organizations, so we engaged with them in October 2018 hoping to get our website up and running by January 2019. However, we delayed the launch a couple of weeks, but it was on our end because we kept adding content and making fixes.

We also were trying a new scheduling software for our classes, so Five Jars helped us integrate it into our site, and they tied it into our membership software program by the time we went live.

We continue to work with them, but we don’t have a service agreement. For example, there are updates and other work for which we contract them on a project basis.

What is the team composition?

Alex (CEO) is our main point of contact. Michael (Project Manager) and Dmitry (COO & Technology Strategist) were the main people involved in our launch.

How did you come to work with Five Jars?

We went through a process to select a vendor that had experience with Open Y. Even though Open Y is a big organization, there weren’t many vendors that had experience with that platform.

This platform had a community, and they kept a list with all of the vendors that had experience with it. Five Jars was one of them, and they had already worked with that platform to develop a website. We interviewed them and checked on the past work that they had done to see if their clients were happy with their experience and get a feel of what the price would be.

Five Jars clearly excelled in that process, and part of it was due to the cost, but we also had interviews with them and really liked their company and their staff. We felt that they would be a good partner for us.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent around $100,000. They’ve been really flexible and done a lot of free work for us for the site as well.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with them in October 2018, and our engagement is ongoing.

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

We’re extremely happy and pleased with the amount of work that Five Jars has done for us. They were able to get our website to be live in a couple of months, and now, we’ve seen an increase in our website traffic and our online registrations.

How did Five Jars perform from a project management standpoint?

Five Jars is very amenable, and they work around our schedule. One of the head guys at our marketing department and I were building the website and the content at the time, so we had pretty particular requirements and always requested changes. However, this was an amazing project because Five Jars’ team was very flexible during that process.

Our only concern about working with them was that the time difference between us would create issues around our communication and a language barrier. However, everything has worked out really well. We work on the project during the day and request changes, and they work on those changes during our nighttime.

They set up a Basecamp account for us, so we’ve continued to post tasks through there. When there are issues or bugs in the website, we put them there, and they’re really quick to respond and fix them.

Five Jars’ team has also given us a lot of suggestions on content and design, which have helped us be successful on this project. They always deliver on time, and they’re very affordable — we’re really happy working with them.

What did you find most impressive about them?

It’s really easy to work with them. They’re really proactive in reaching out and figuring out how they can best provide service and support us.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Although the time difference between us worked really well during the development process, when we found a bug after launch, we had to wait until the next day for it to be fixed. That was a slight inconvenience for us, especially when we first launched, where there were critical errors.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Have a clear focus on what your goals are, but also be open to taking their feedback. They have experience building these websites — they’re the experts. Several times during development, they told us their suggestions, and it was up to us to be open about receiving them.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I work for George Washington’s Mt. Vernon, a historic site in northern Virginia just outside of Washington, DC. I’m the VP of media and communications, and I oversee our marketing, advertising, and social media presence.

What challenge were you trying to address with Five Jars?

Our website hosts over 8 million visitors per year. Through it, users can learn about visitation to Mt. Vernon and gain educational opportunities about George Washington. We need Five Jars to help us with difficult technological challenges. They also serve as our coding partner when we want to add new features to the website at an affordable price for our nonprofit budget.

What was the scope of their involvement?

At the start of the project, Five Jars worked on our ticketing platform since we wanted to make online tickets available via the website. After that, we’ve extended our relationship, and they now provide online support for our various needs. They’ve worked on our site’s mobile optimization, capabilities, and features. Soon, we’ll launch a new membership center and a video portal. Overall, they help us constantly innovate what we do online. 

For specific features, Five Jars has brought a new custom interface for our online ticketing and purchasing system. Through it, people can choose items that they want to see while visiting Mt. Vernon. We’re also working through a membership center, which allows guests to easily check out orders if they’re a returning member. We’re a donor-supported organization, so guests can also see their giving histories. They can also reprint tickets or see exclusive content available only to members of Mt. Vernon.

Moreover, we’re currently adding a new video portal to the website. We launch around 130 new videos per year, and plenty of them are live stream events. We want to put them in one place so end users can easily find them. The Five Jars team is helping us develop that, and we look forward to launching it in July 2021.

For all of these projects, everything is planned out. Typically, we start the year by figuring out what we want to do with Five Jars. Then, we turn our ideas into scopes of work, which they help refine and divide into individual sprints. From there, we lay out a timeline of what we’ll do based on our goals and budget for the year. 

What is the team composition?

We work most frequently with a lead developer and a project manager, which haven’t changed throughout our entire relationship. They also have a whole suite of teammates that work on our projects and do additional tasks, such as QA testing and other development-related work. 

How did you come to work with Five Jars?

We knew one of their founders through another project, and he did plenty of work to help us out during our previous engagement. When he went on his own and formed his own company, we transitioned to him. He built a great team by recruiting great talent to work for him. As a result, we decided to carry on with our relationship.

How much have you invested with them?

We invest around $70,000 a year for their retainer work. We’ve also done one-off projects beyond that. 

What is the status of this engagement?

We started the partnership in January 2019, and we have a regular retainer contract with them. 

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

For success metrics, our website views have increased, and we’ve gained 2 million more followers because of that. Our online revenue has also grown. On top of that, we now have a better revenue tracking ability in terms of advertising, emails, and other marketing channels. The percentage of people that purchase tickets online has also jumped from around 15% to 45%–50%. 

How did Five Jars perform from a project management standpoint?

Five Jars does a fantastic job in developing their scopes of work while ensuring that we use our funds efficiently. They always search for ways to make deployments easier and less cost-prohibitive. 

For communication, we receive biweekly updates from them and use Basecamp to track tasks, which they do in sprints. Sometimes, they do demos of the completed work. We use Slack channels to address more urgent concerns. Apart from that, Five Jars’ founder and I have monthly meetings to ensure that we’re getting the required deliverables. Through this meeting, they can also anticipate our needs as an organization.

Overall, Five Jars has a hands-on approach in terms of how they help us. Whenever we have any urgent need, we feel that they’re a true partner to us. Furthermore, they set priorities correctly. They not only ensure that we receive urgent deliverables; they also ensure that we accomplish our bigger projects. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

They have the ability to bring in different experts and scale up well based on our changing needs. Sometimes, we have a big project that requires more than one developer, and they can scale up the team for that. 

Moreover, they’re highly cognizant of our budget, which is a great concern in the nonprofit sector. We don’t always have a tremendous amount of funds to work with, so they develop smart ways to build cutting-edge solutions while not breaking the bank. They provide the right talent at a fee that’s affordable for a nonprofit organization like us.

Are there any areas they could improve?

An ongoing challenge for them is making sure that they can retain talent and continuing to diversify their capabilities. We’ve been growing with them, and they’re on the right track when it comes to growth. They might have had a limited set of team members and capabilities in the early days, but they’ve been making hires that have a diverse set of skills. That has helped them achieve more and grow as an organization, so they must continue doing it. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

If you only like to work with US-based organizations or agencies, I highly recommend Five Jars as an alternative to that. They have the ability to scale, cover work in different time zones, and provide services at more affordable rates. They also have a diverse workforce working around the globe. Overall, you’ll always feel that they’re taking care of you. 

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the chief advancement officer at the YMCA of Greater Omaha, which has about 10 branches expanding into 12 across the Omaha area. We offer youth sports, active older adult programs, swimming, community outreach, and much more.

What challenge were you trying to address with Five Jars?

We have about 65,000 members and 25,000 children who play sports, and our e-commerce on our website was not very strong. We received a lot of complaints about membership renewal and difficulties in registering for games. We needed someone to help us improve our site’s UI/UX.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Five Jars conducted improvements on our website’s UI/UX, layout, and navigation. They allowed us to choose the design and style we liked, and they personalized it for our organization. They also helped us with SEO, Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance, and everything else related to the website. 

The site is now up and running, but Five Jars is providing continued support. We are keeping them on a retainer to troubleshoot and solve any issues that we may encounter post-launch. 

What is the team composition?

We communicated and coordinated with three people, but there are more working behind the scenes. 

How did you come to work with Five Jars?

Our parent organization had a resource for developer partners that we can use and vet. I placed an RFP, and Five Jars came back with the strongest proposal. 

How much have you invested with them?

We have spent probably $50,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working in March 2020, and it’s ongoing.

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

Our operation has been affected by the restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, as we bounce back, with the help of the website we’re now surpassing our 2019 business levels. Additionally, we’re receiving accolades and notes of thanks from appreciative parents and members. 

How did Five Jars perform from a project management standpoint?

They are excellent at project management. We normally communicate through Zoom virtual meetings, but we also have some phone calls and use Basecamp. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

Five Jars provides excellent customer service and attention to detail. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

I am just happy working with them. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

I would definitely consider working with them because they’re a strong team, and I would have them provide not just one-off projects but continuing support as well.