Highland

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Director, Member Experience of AAOS

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

A national, professional association for orthopaedic surgeons. 

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Highland to accomplish?

• Teach us about the macro level challenges that all associations are facing today
• Dive deep into macro and micro level issues specifically around early career member engagement and retention.
• Design a bridge experience pilot program for early career surgeons that will increase retention and engagement amongst these members.

SOLUTION

How did you find Highland?

Referral

Why did you select Highland over others?

• High ratings
• Close to my geographic location
• Great culture fit
• Referred to me

How many teammates from Highland were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

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

We worked with Highland in three parts: first, we participated in their cohort with other associations to begin developing our Early Career Strategy. We then hired them post-cohort to assist with additional interview sessions with our Members, and to fine tune our proposal to submit to the Board of Directors for funding to develop an Early Career Pilot. The final stage of work was part of our funding proposal, and included a 12-week sprint with Highland, where we worked to actually co-develop the pilot program to be built. The relationship lasted over the course of a full year. 

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Because of the support and guidance that Highland provided, we were able to develop a robust proposal that included all of the necessary components to get approval for funding - not only did they help us identify the micro story, but also the macro impact that early career members are having on the industry as a whole and how that was financially impacting our company. We were then able to look forward to what would happen if we stayed as we were and did not do anything to address this big drop off point in our membership model. 

The most impactful thing was working with them in the design sprints to actually create the product. The way that they moderated the sessions, brought in cross collaborative teams, and demonstrated real impact and value in such a short amount of time was like nothing we had ever done as a company before. We were able to truly see a product and experience come to life right before our eyes, and get immediate feedback from our members before bringing it to market - this is not a way that we had handled product development in the past, and especially on such a crunched timeline. Everyone that worked on this project walked away with such positive feedback and were so impressed by the value and work that the Highland team brought to the table. 

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

They first provided a scope of work to make it really clear on what we would be doing, when. We then worked together using shared drives and messaging apps to communicate the deliverables, the timeline, and the key players responsibilites for each part of the project. 

In the in person sessions, they made sure to kick off the day with an agenda and clear objectives, and end the day with us knowing exactly what was going to happen the next day, and if their was any "homework" or anything additional that needed to be addressed before we met again. 

Each time we expressed that something was not clear, or we needed guidance, in particular for our team when we moved to virtual check points, they were quickly available and determined to help us iron out the kinks and bring in the people we needed to get back on track. 

Their project management is rock solid, and they really helped guide us every step of the way. 

What was your primary form of communication with Highland?

• In-Person Meeting
• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

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

I think the most impressive thing about the company is the genuine goodness of all of the people that work there. They show up everyday with their A team, no matter who is working on the project. The group of people that I worked with on this project, by the end of our time, feel more like friends than just business partners. They made sure to always listen, and it was clear the whole time that they really valued the teams feedback and contributions. They have this way about always making it seem like no idea is a bad idea, and they make sure that everyone feels like they are contributing and participating. 

I loved the way they brought the team together in person. Again, I have never seen a group come in and facilitate a group of people so efficiently, and understand our very complicated business so quickly. 

I can say without second guessing, that the Highland team was the best group of people I have worked with in the last five years. 

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

Honestly? No. 

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the General Counsel of Gloo, LLC

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Provides infrastructure and technologies to faith and church industries so they can scale their impact

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Highland to accomplish?

• Design Sprint - to rapidly prototype a pastor product for communicating with congregants
• Design Sprint - to develop an AI tool kit for churches

SOLUTION

How did you find Highland?

• Referral
• Other

Why did you select Highland over others?

• High ratings
• Great culture fit
• Good value for cost
• Referred to me
• Company values aligned

How many teammates from Highland were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

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

They facilitated design sprint to rapidly prototype a product for pastors to commmunicate and engage with congregants. We developed three key products in the course of three design sprints in four weeks. We flew.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

The team was motivated, highly organized, fast driving, creative and fun. It was an all-star team with results that moved our organization. 

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

They delivered ahead of time. They committed to two design sprints in four weeks. We ran three. They adjusted to our needs and the observations we were making in market. Adaptability of this sort is critical and very difficult to do. They excelled and over delivered in all aspects. 

What was your primary form of communication with Highland?

• In-Person Meeting
• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

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

Talent, business alignment, mission alignment. They fell in love with our problem and did everything in their power to solve it.

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

No, wouldn't change a thing. We will be back again and again.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m a VP at the American Geophysical Union. We work with earth and space scientists and have 60,000 members who work on research and solutions around the earth’s biggest challenges. Our work includes a variety of scientific specialties; we serve their needs to help move science forward. 

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Highland?

We hired them for market research, business consulting, and product development and design services.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We’ve gone through several phases of work with Highland. Initially, we provided Highland with membership surveys we had done a couple of years ago and several other reports that included information about the state of our organization. The team spent some time familiarizing themselves with our current state and the problem we were trying to solve. 

The first two phases were research; in phase one, Highland outreached to our membership base to better understand how they perceive the value they receive from our organization. The goal was to find where members were receiving value and the gaps we could potentially fill. Highland’s task was to uncover the information needed to create our membership value proposition for the future. They identified three key insights.

During the first phase, Highland also made some journey mapping for us to understand our core customers, who are primarily earth and space scientists working for academic institutions. From there, Highland’s team helped us create a path forward and strategize our next steps, who we needed to inform, and who needed to be at our meetings. They presented their findings at our board of directors meeting and strategized with us from A to Z. 

In phase two, we went outside of our core audience and had Highland outreach to potential audiences to understand their needs and whether our organization could also serve them in our current or future state. Currently, we’re in phase three: the innovation stage. Highland is working with us to create solutions based on our learnings from phases one and two. Highland is designing and testing pilots and prototypes. 

Additionally, Highland has led several workshops throughout the process spanning all our departments. For example, we recently held a two-day design sprint workshop with our staff. 

What is the team composition?

David (Principal, Design Research & Strategy) is our primary contact. In the first phase, we worked with David, Justin (Lead Design Researcher & Strategist), Abril (UX designer), and one other teammate. During the second phase, we also worked with four team members, with one switch-out from the first phase. Currently, we work with two teammates from Highland. 

Are there any employees from the service provider's team that you would like to give a shout-out to in this review?

David really partners with us to help us achieve our goals in the most authentic way possible — he doesn’t blow in and out of the project. Moreover, he avoids politics and speaks to the facts the research tells him instead of the answer anyone wants. As a result, our relationship with Highland is a partnership. 

How did you come to work with Highland?

Jon (President) reached out to me through LinkedIn because Highland was creating a cohort with associations to understand the challenges they face. Jon inquired if we would be interested in participating in that cohort. 

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent almost $500,000. 

What is the status of this engagement?

Our partnership started in December 2022, and the engagement is ongoing. Highland is on retainer with us until at least September 2023. 

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

This project started off as research to help us define the membership value proposition for the future, but it’s become much more than that. Our work with Highland is helping drive organization strategy versus just the membership component. Highland has uncovered really important insights that have helped our board fine-tune our strategy. Their findings have changed how we think about our work and what should and shouldn’t be done. 

Highland has uncovered clear key insights that we hadn’t discovered with past research. The team has also done a great job ensuring our members are included in the workshops. Our organization’s process is deep and complex, so it’ll likely take us several years to see the results of their strategies or measure the impact on our membership. Although we’re not at a point where we’ve launched a prototype, Highland’s work has been invaluable to our organization. 

How did Highland perform from a project management standpoint?

Their project management is great; we’ve had zero issues. Highland has always stayed on budget and on time and sometimes even ahead of schedule. We meet with them weekly, sometimes multiple times a week, and use Zoom, phone calls, and emails to communicate. Additionally, we use Miro to collaborate. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

I had never worked with a provider as good as Highland. They have a level of authenticity that many consultancy groups lack. Highland really cares about the work, the people they work with, and their clients being successful. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

Nothing they need to improve comes to mind. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

I recommend you stay open-minded to Highland’s suggestions. Sometimes when clients call a consultant, they’ve already worked out in their heads what they think needs to be done. 

One of Highland’s strengths is coming to the table with recommendations that could get you what you want and more. Therefore, be open to what they might bring you, even if it’s not your original plan. 

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

Respondent 1: I’m a senior manager of a healthcare society. 

Respondent 2: I’m the IT director for the same company. 

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Highland?

R1: Our website hadn’t been updated in more than five years, and we wanted a fresher look. We also hoped to make the site less cluttered and easier to navigate for our members; we hired Highland to redesign and develop our website.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

R1: We started with a research phase where Highland did quantitative and qualitative analysis with our members and research into our metrics and site analytics. After that, they started a design and development phase. 

R2: The website was built using Drupal. 

R1: We also used Miro for the design process. We had an old website, but this new site was built from scratch. One of the biggest changes that Highland implemented was creating content tags that allow our users to search by topic or tags, which is cleaner and more organized. We also have forms that users can fill out, and from an editor's standpoint, we can separate our different content types. 

The new site has videos, blogs, and multiple other features to share content with our members in various formats. 

R2: We also have a single sign-on system via SAML that connects to our CRM so our members don’t have to log in multiple times and can still access specific content tailored to their preferences. 

What is the team composition?

R1: On the design side, we worked with two senior project directors, a lead UX designer, a project manager, and two research analysts. On the development side, we worked with a lead and secondary developer. 

How did you come to work with Highland?

R1: We either found them through a referral or a Google search. 

How much have you invested with them?

R1: We spent around $360,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

R1: We worked together between November 2022–May 2023. 

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

R1: We don’t have any hard metrics, but we can discuss the quality. Highland's design and research skills were fantastic; research was clearly one of their strong suits and made them unique as a service provider. 

How did Highland perform from a project management standpoint?

R1: Design is highly subjective, so it took a few tries to get to a place where we were all happy with the design, but they were open to feedback and responsive. They also consistently had benchmarks where they would bring in different stakeholders from our company. They did a great job demonstrating our progress to team members who weren’t involved with the project daily. 

Our project manager was diligent about keeping deadlines on track and reminding us about them, which we appreciated. One issue we ran into in terms of project management was when we started the project, we were very busy on our end and couldn’t check in regularly. When we returned to work with Highland, we found that they had moved ahead with development and had spent almost the entire budget even though we had eight weeks left.

This surprised us because no one had updated us on how much of the budget was spent. If given the opportunity, we might have reprioritized a few things instead of just moving ahead. Our leadership team met with Highland, and they were open to our critical feedback. We still went over budget, but they gave us a reasonable solution which we appreciated.

Overall, some large misses in communication shocked us, but we solved them in the end because Highland was open to having conversations. We used Slack and monday.com for communication. 

Are there any employees from the service provider's team that you would like to give a shout-out to in this review?

R1: We’d like to shout out Eli (Senior Product Designer). We worked with him daily for months, and he was diligent and attentive. He was focused on design principles but was also flexible and had an excellent vision for what our site design was supposed to be.

What did you find most impressive about them?

R1: The Highland team was highly intelligent, especially surrounding the research and design phase. They had a thoughtful approach and took the time to learn about our target audience and what we needed. They were a wonderful organization that cared deeply about providing high-quality work. Highland was invested in the project, which is hard to find in a vendor. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

R2: From our perspective on the technical side, we had a few struggles during the transition to launch the website. This came down to a few nuances in how we wanted to go live, particularly with the web forms and trying to transition that information over. 

Additionally, we had an issue with the SSL certificate because it wasn’t set up properly before or after the launch. It became clear that Highland didn’t have expertise in that particular field, so we’d suggest they get a little more expertise in technical maintenance. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

R1: Be open and thoughtful about your goals and lean into the research because it can improve the experience. You should also be clear about your expertise because you need to figure out who drives the project. If you want Highland to take over the project or you want to work as partners, communicate that. Be clear about your experience level and who leads the project because that will make a big difference. 

R2: Make sure you’re highly committed to the project and ready to apply the right resources because you can’t just put in half the effort. Ensure the project is a top priority for your company because it will require your attention. 

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the Head of Product and Services at Genioo. We’re a professional services company that supports companies from the Fortune 500 list with their strategy realization.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Highland?

We were looking for a partner to help us define the strategy and to design a blueprint for our own Project Mgmt Software. This was particularly critical as we are not a Software company and were looking for a trusted partner to guide us on that journey.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Highland designed and developed a custom software solution for us. We had a series of design workshops where we mapped our customer journey. After this, Highland went one step deeper and organized design sprints to achieve a specific phase of that journey. Highland also designed other materials for us, including templates to help us facilitate our conversations with clients. After finishing each design, they ran a couple of test iterations of the design with potential users. 

Highland then developed the software’s MVP and helped us define our user personas with a lot of input from our CEO, who had a clear vision of what we wanted to accomplish with the design. We asked for a simple interface, and Highland identified the right theme for our design. 

Highland used Figma for design and developed an MVP that features a setup wizard and a drag-and-drop timelines for project planning. The timeline has different zoom levels and allows users to highlight specific milestones from the project. There’s also a standard document attachment functionality and a meeting template that automatically pulls milestones from the timeline and allows users to add comments or notes.

What is the team composition?

We worked with Highland’s project manager, three developers, UI/UX designer, and a researcher. Some of Highland’s leadership team oversaw the project too, including the development director, the head of design, and the head of research. 

How did you come to work with Highland?

We found Highland on Clutch. This was our first development project, and Highland seemed like the right fit. We chose them because they offer disciplines we didn’t have in-house, including research expertise, aside from design and development. 

Additionally, Highland’s leadership team was able to engage in a meaningful and strategic conversation about our product’s objective and value. We noticed this since their business proposal. 

How much have you invested with them?

We invested a little over a $1 million.

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked with Highland from June 2021–October 2022. The design phase started in June 2021, and the development phase began in June 2022 and concluded in October 2022. Highland continues to offer us maintenance and hosting services.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Highland created a six-month road map and stuck to it. They delivered all the features they planned in advance and worked slightly below budget, which is usual in software development. All features went into user test and got refined.

Overall, Highland realized an outstanding job. They executed our guidance really well and took our brief further to come up with a great design concept. The design Highland created fits our company’s vision. 

How did Highland perform from a project management standpoint?

Highland met deadlines and used Jira and Confluence for project management. They also used another tool for feedback. We used Slack for daily communication and had weekly meetings with the project manager, as well as monthly meetings with Highland’s leadership team. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

I was most impressed with Highland’s commitment — they care about our success as much as we do. They didn’t only do what we asked them, but they went above and beyond to ensure we were satisfied with the project — we felt we were being taken care of.

On top of that, Highland’s team was extremely creative, constantly engaged with us, and open to feedback.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Despite it being a messy/creative process, setting big milestones to align the client team would be helpful. 

They also could help educate clients on how agile methods work if they aren’t accustomed to that.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Be clear with Highland about what you want and don’t want. Don’t be afraid to ask questions because they’re always open to dialogue. 

Also, be sure you agree with the objectives of the research efforts too.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the VP, Learning Experience Design of an educational technology company.

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

We are an Educational Technology company who creates curriculum materials for K–12 students and support materials for teachers.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Highland to accomplish?

• Synthesize research highlights to formulate Next Gen Teacher Experience ideation
• Create wireframes aligned with research for Next Gen Teacher Experience in existing platform
• Research with users and iterate designs based on feedback

SOLUTION

How did you find Highland?

• Referral
• Other

Why did you select Highland over others?

• Great culture fit
• Company values aligned

What was the size of Highland’s team?

2-5 Employees

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

The Highland team will provide the following services:

• Partner closely with the UX team, in-house research team and Desklight to glean insights from research
• Use HCD methods to determine gaps and next steps
• Provide low- to medium-fidelity screens and prototypes of hypothesized features as needed to test for teacher desirability & usefulness.
• Plan, lead, analyze & synthesize prototype testing sessions with teachers

Highland will map teacher UX and co-create feature designs with our UX & other Suppliers. Highland will work alongside the our UX, Research, Developer and Supplier teams as needed, attend creative sessions, domain meetings, and demos/reviews to ensure the team work & deliverable are aligned.

Each week will start with a meeting to set up the work cadence for the week and end with sharing deliverables. Both meetings should include the Product Owner and representatives from the internal UX team as well as Highland. The end of the week meeting may include additional stakeholders as needed. In order to meet this timeline, we will need to recruit users to test with. Highland will support scheduling and other logistical efforts.

The following criteria must be met to achieve a successful project:

• Adhere to a mutually agreed-upon plan for communicating and escalating issues.
• Provide efficient project management and oversight of the project

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

• Wireframes delivered
• Research completed
• Revisions delivered

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

Yes, timely delivery and clear communication if anything was lagging or at risk.

What was your primary form of communication with Highland?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

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

The value of Highland to my team is their deep knowledge of productization and web development that guides their innovative approach. It is critical for UX deliverables to be aligned with what's possible from a web dev and data flow perspective, and Highland is always steps ahead of us in considering those applications of ideation and decision-making.

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

The value Highland brings is in their ideation. One thing that could have gone better is the alignment of their UX ideas to our Design System; that said, it didn't hinder us greatly and their ability to work outside our system got the right ideas in the users hands more quickly. It did cause us to do some additional work to get their prototypes to align ahead of our dev planning, but totally worth the extra work!

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m an executive at a healthcare insurance company.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenges were you trying to address with Highland?

We wanted to understand how to improve our customer experience by covering our areas of opportunity to enhance our service and delight our health insurance members.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Highland was responsible for doing market and member experience research. They started by recruiting and interviewing our stakeholders, upper management associates, and members to understand the current customer journey of our services and get a perspective on the problems within it. This was an extensive process with hour-long interviews to capture the motivations to be healthy and their needs and frustrations from a health insurance company.

Next, they did a second research track where they came up with high-level concepts of what we could do to reimagine our member experience. After that, they created a mock-up based on their ideas and got feedback from our members to see what would resonate with them.

In the last step of the engagement, they mapped out all of the results for us to see what the future journey would look like and gave us seven different stages to apply this, with examples of how it should look.

What was the team composition? 

We worked with around five members of their team, including Jon (President), Amrita (Director, Design Research & Strategist), an illustrator, and three designers working behind the scenes doing research, synthesis, and their weekly update presentations.

How did you come to work with Highland?

One of our former VPs had experience working with Highland, so she referred them to us.

How much have you invested with them?

We spent around $600,000 with them.

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked together from January–May 2022.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Overall, we were very happy with Highland’s work. We could take their research to create a blueprint for how we want to build our new member experience and go much deeper into the areas they suggested we prioritize. This was a successful partnership for us because we got a vision and a place to start to reach our main goal.

How did Highland perform from a project management standpoint?

Project management was solid in terms of meeting deadlines and staying on budget. Additionally, they were receptive to feedback and communicated promptly; we used email, Slack, and weekly meetings to review their research progress.

What did you find most impressive about them?

I want to highlight Highland’s research method, which was extremely comprehensive; the way they took notes on every topic and sorted them was easy to understand and useful for us.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Highland’s team didn’t tell us initially where to start and what to prioritize regarding the data they took from their research. Nonetheless, we pushed them on this, and they changed their approach.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Use them for service design because that’s what they do best. If you need a new experience for your members, they’re the right team to go with because they can map out everything about your untried processes.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I belong to an organization called ISACA. We’re a nonprofit that helps IT professionals get training in enterprise abilities to assess their overall capabilities.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Highland?

We hired them to do user-centered research and market analysis to help us create a new digital product offering that would help enterprises assess their cybersecurity skills and capabilities.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We’ve gone through three phases with Highland over the last year. The first phase was the discovery phase; we interviewed 36 individuals, including executives, managers, and people implementing their cybersecurity protocol. During that first phase, we did the interviews and some basic prototypes to understand the problems in the industry.

In the second phase, we used those insights to do prototyping and testing with an additional 30 people to do the initial mockups in product design, which was UX work. We took the core product design into an MVP structure that outlined the product design, user journey, and data strategy in the third phase. Then, Highland helped us implement everything and start building the product.

Additionally, Highland did a business and market analysis stream. Since their specialty is UX discovery research, they had a third-party partner to help with the market-sizing business model approach to implementing a product-led growth business model. They’ve mostly used Figma to do the UX prototype, and we use tons of collaboration tools to help with collaboration during COVID-19. 

Now, we’re about to go into product development. We still have another phase under our proposal, and we’re asking them to consider doing a low code platform.

What is the team composition?

Throughout the phases, we’ve had an account manager, a research director, a project manager, product designers, UX people, and a business lead partner.

How did you come to work with Highland?

I asked my network for multiple companies in the Midwest, and their name popped up through some friends. Then, we went through a traditional interview process.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent under $1 million.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in January 2021, and the engagement is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Since we were heavily focused on the discovery, our success was outlining clear artifacts at each phase of what type of information and finished assets we would get. Also, the number of interviews, market analysis, and go-to-market strategy were part of it instead of the volume or velocity of work.

How did Highland perform from a project management standpoint?

They’ve met almost all the timelines and stayed on budget consistently through all three phases. Even in our third phase, they ensured we achieved everything and didn’t ask for additional funding when they extended the timeline.

We have in-person collaboration and use email, Slack, and Zoom meetings to communicate.

What did you find most impressive about them?

One of their strengths is their partnership with the other company and their product discovery and design approach. Many UX design shops will just make something beautiful and miss the beat of the market analysis, so that approach is critical to us.

Also, they have an open, collaborative style. They include people who usually wouldn’t be part of the day-to-day process, but they provide weekly updates to ensure they also get updates, which is valuable. In general, they bring eight players to every event or meeting.

Are there any areas they could improve?

They lost one of their project managers, so the project manager came in late to the third phase. Since the role is critical, there was some miscommunication. It was definitely a struggle in the first few weeks of the last phase, but we ironed it out.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

We had too many people from our side in the process. I’d advise other people to have a focused team they can trust to work and commit time to the collaboration.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am a program manager at a Jewish domestic abuse agency based in Chicago.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Highland?

I am launching a new program called Seven Circles for young Jewish couples in our community to learn about how to have a long-term healthy relationship. To differentiate from the direct abuse services our organization offers, we wanted to build a new marketing website for this program.

SOLUTION

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

Someone recommended Highland to us and we spoke to them along with a number of other potential web developers. Highland stood out for a few reasons. First, they were most reasonably priced and flexible with us, since we are a nonprofit with limited budget. Also, my strength is definitely not in technology and it was important that I felt comfortable with the web developers, and I felt like they could communicate to me in a way that I could understand and learn.

Highland made me feel that way immediately. One thing Highland did that helped me make my final decision to hire them, was create a very detailed and easy to understand deck to outline our project. They clearly did their research on who we are as an organization and integrated it into the deck.

Describe the project in detail and walk through the stages of the project.

I met with Highland many months before we were ready to begin development of this new website. We put the actual website building on hold and Highland first helped me narrow down an LMS to use for my program curriculum. They worked diligently on this short-term project and helped me understand what to look for and how to prioritize my needs within each LMS.

In the lead-up to the building of the actual site, my main POC made sure I had all my questions answered along the way and we checked in regularly, which was a very helpful experience. We then started the building of the site and it took way less time than I expected. The team morning check-ins every day over Zoom that I attended, and we communicated throughout the day over Slack. The site was built within 3 weeks.

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

In total, we worked with 3 team members at Highland. We had a team lead, a designer, and a developer.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

While we just launched but so far, our program donor, our board, our staff, and our target couples are very pleased with the site.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

It was so easy to communicate. They had check-in calls over Zoom every morning that I attended and we communicated throughout the day over Slack. Whenever I had a question, they answered immediately and with patience as I was learning so much along the way.

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

I really appreciated the customer service. I felt like they cared about our organization and what we do. They also cared about me, personally, and how I could learn along the way. I know and trust that they will be there for us over time.

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

I did share numerous emails with language, ideas, and edits and there were just a few instances where I had to go back and make sure they were all integrated. That said, they got almost everything I shared (and I shared a lot!).

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm a Director in Marketing Communications at a niche, national liberal arts college.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Highland?

We were looking to understand the experiences, thoughts, feelings, needs, and circumstances of the college's prospective students and their parents during the college search and selection process.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

We found four companies that offered the service we need, and we scored the companies based on their skill, experience, culture, character, personality, and price. We sought out the firm that best:

• demonstrated successful experience with similar projects that had positive results;
• proved the ability to execute similar projects in a higher education environment;
• showed an understanding of the nuances of our college's culture
• expressed trustworthiness, transparency, communicativeness, and intelligence;
• convinced us that we would enjoy working with them; and
• worked with our budget to provide what we need.

Describe the scope of their work in detail.

After a series of discovery conversations, we collaborated to develop a plan to acquire a proper research sample, conduct qualitative research in the form of interviews, synthesize that research, and then conduct a quantitative survey. Highland also synthesized and generated actionable recommendations based on the research findings.

What was the team composition?

I worked closely with the project principal throughout the process. The team also included several UX researchers and designers.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

The research findings are being used to change marketing, communications, and recruitment strategies and tactics to improve the experience of our prospective students and their parents.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

The workflows were very effective. We communicated daily via Slack and regularly via virtual meetings.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

The Highland people with whom we worked were extremely honest, deeply curious, and thorough. They cared about the project like it was their own.

Is there any area for improvement or anything that could have been done differently?

No.