Solid Digital, LLC

How did you select this vendor?

Starting with our steering committee, we circulated an RFP and asked for recommendations of local vendors. After discussing a few vendors, we began the process with Solid Digital.

One of our key committee members and staff were involved in moving the decision forward, and the budget and scope was brought to the committee before the project moved forward.

It was important that we were working with someone who could complete the project under the timeline, and that would be available to support the product during the event.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

Using an existing bidding database, they developed a new bidding display, created a brand new mobile bidding experience giving guests the option to bid from their phone and receive text message notifications, and created a bidder registration process. They needed to take into consideration the many ways bidder information enters the system and created solutions based on the nuances.

What was the team composition?

We worked with a central project manager throughout. We began with design and transitioned to back-end, function design. We worked with about five central people over the course of the project.

What was the scope of their involvement?

They provided a full range of services, beginning with strategy and ending with continued support. They had a good feel for what we wanted. We had maybe two follow-up, in-person meetings where we got into the nitty-gritty of what we wanted. From there, the project really took off.

Because web design and the associated technology fell squarely within Solid's expertise, we let them take the lead. Of course, we felt more than comfortable requesting changes throughout the process. However, our strategy sessions were exceptionally productive, allowing designers and programmers to get a true feel for NJASAP's vision and run with it.

They completed an SSO with vBulletin as a component. The underlying CMS written in JS was developed by Solid and functioned like an API and database. We appreciated that they’d written this forward-facing technology in a language known to most developers.

What is the team dynamic?

Numerous people were involved, and they brought in whoever’s competency matched the project need at that time. I assume they engaged every person on their team at some point. They handled a lot of that internally, which I appreciate because our project was so massive. We were bringing together three completely unique web properties and asking them to communicate with each other seamlessly. Now, it works like a charm.

Jesse [CEO & Partner, Solid Digital], our technical lead, enthusiastically communicated a vision for the project, and his quiet confidence made me believe that he and his team could deliver what we needed.

How did you come to work with Solid Digital?

I found them online. We met with Naveed [CRO & Partner, Solid Digital] and Jesse in February 2015 in Dallas for a session of planning. I don’t think that our organization really knew what we needed at the time. That planning session gave us enough information to develop the RFP. Once we had the RFP in place, we talked to four different groups, including Solid. In 72 hours, we went to Portland, Chicago, and New York. We ultimately selected Solid because they seemed aware of our technical and creative requirements.

What is the status of this engagement?

We began the selection process in February 2015 and officially entered into an agreement with Solid in May 2016.