Therefore

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the General Manager, Business Systems of Goway Travel

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

We offer tailormade vacations to destinations around the world from North America

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

• Lead the strategy, design and build of a fully accessible (WCAG 2.1 compliant) website to replace the existing www.goway.com

SOLUTION

How did you find Therefore?

• Online Search
• Clutch Site

Why did you select Therefore over others?

• High ratings
• Close to my geographic location
• Pricing fit our budget
• Great culture fit
• Good value for cost
• Company values aligned

How many teammates from Therefore were assigned to this project?

6-10 Employees

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

Design and deliver a delightful and meaningful digital experience for website visitors. Utilizing a modern and scalable web content management solution, we need to connect to customers no matter where they are, through simplified communication operations and a flexible composable digital
ecosystem.

• Support development of B2C/B2B audiences through a multi-channel distribution effort;
• Support a strong consumer brand promise with a major emphasis on customer service
• throughout the Goway travel experience;
• Optimize and drive leads from the website to the call center;
• Increase Goway’s B2C and B2B sales;
• Leverage high past guest satisfaction with product and data-driven offers to increase
• repeat guests;
• Build a foundation upon which Goway can expand product into new markets;
• Utilize demand-based and dynamic pricing enhancements.

Solutions & Service Deliverables

• Front-end Development
• Personalization
• Content Migration
• Search
• Digital Asset Management
• Integration with Salesforce/Salesforce Marketing Cloud
• Integration with Reservations System
• Hosting
• Training
• Project Management

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

KPIs for the success of the project include: 

• Increase in unique visits to the website each month
• Increase in web conversions (visitors to form completions)
• Increase time on site
• Increase organic visitors
• Overall Increase in leads passed to sales

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

Therefore followed a strict project management plan for the duration of the project, delivering all elements on time. 

What was your primary form of communication with Therefore?

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

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

From the outset, what stood out was the team's commitment to not only grasping the technical requirements of the project but also to thoroughly understanding our organization. They seamlessly integrated with our team, almost becoming an extension of our organization. Our project involved significant technical challenges related to our reservations system, and the team went above and beyond to deliver impressive solutions. Their solutions successfully automate our processes and enhance efficiencies on the backend of our site.

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

None. We continue to work with Therefore on site enhancements.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the digital product manager at Longo’s—a grocery retailer.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Therefore?

We engaged Therefore to execute foundational releases for our website and app to support our larger transitional agenda.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Therefore served as key partners, helping us with our web and app development projects for OS. We engaged them at the beginning of the project—from the initial discovery and research phases to design and development phases using an Agile methodology. During the product estimation phase, we completed the initial wireframes. Their team supported a complete re-platforming, leveraging Drupal as one of their core competencies. As foundational releases, their team created products that help with basic account management as well as customer engagement. The digital properties have a core feature set to help us better engagement loyal members. We host also have a cooking school that the platforms promote. Therefore created a full e-commerce experience to enable the discovery and purchase of our cooking classes.

What is the team composition?

Depending on the project’s phase, we had different numbers of teammates. We worked with probably 10 people including a main project manager and a lead developer.

How did you come to work with Therefore?

We found Therefore through a referral. Their team as the right size for us as a mid-sized regional retailer based in Ontario. They were cost-competitive and offered resources to support the entire project lifecycle. Their team was based near us and offered added value services. As we went through the search process, they were the best bet.

How much have you invested with them?

We started the project with a budget of $175, 000 CAD (approximately $130,5000 USD) but that expanded as we increased our scope.

What is the status of this engagement?

The project began in January 2019 and ended in February 2020. One developer from Therefore continues to train our internal team, which enables knowledge transfer.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Therefore was a great partner throughout the project, from discovery to development. For the e-commerce website, we’ve seen an incredible increase in year over year sales against our cooking classes and attendance. As well, it was big to shift customers from in-store registration to online registration. Digital loyalty customer engagement increased. Customers also have a better sense of their reward points and their value. Digital touchpoints provide a much more seamless experience for customers.

How did Therefore perform from a project management standpoint?

We were able to embed ourselves within their offices but also work remotely when necessary. An Agile development methodology moves quickly, and their team flowed with us. Our internal team shifted during the project. When we needed additional resources, Therefore assigned additional team members to help. We had one project manager, which contributed to the project’s success. He continues to provide support as we transition. It’s great to have him throughout the full course of the project for continuity.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their consultation services were valuable, even from the developers. When we proposed an idea, their team evaluated it and provided recommendations. They noted opportunities to improve our ideas based on the project’s goals. Their team had strong values and provided insights to optimize our development efforts. As we went through a transformation, we didn’t have all of our internal capabilities. Therefore provided valuable extra support. They provided education and training that went above and beyond the statement of work. Their team was dedicated to the overall success and outcome of the project. They focused on delivering a quality product. We had joint accountability to make sure the project was as successful as possible.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Based on our brief, no. In the beginning, they could’ve flexed more into an advisory role on business strategy and goals.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Take the time to have an understanding of your goals, scope, and requirements. We completed a competitive audit with their team. The tighter you can go into a project in terms of overall goals, the smoother the process will be.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the co-founder of Mother Erth, a social enterprise that has two goals: to empower women in rural areas by giving them access to market, and to produce products that enable sustainable consumerism. We turn products from plastic that can’t be recycled into beautiful bags and accessories.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Therefore?

We needed help telling our unique story online, and our existing section was not sufficient.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Initially, we had a couple calls with them discussing our vision for the website. After some back-and-forth, they created beautiful pages by redesigning and overhauling large sections of our e-commerce website using Shopify. They guided us on the content, including text and visuals, that would best capture our story.

We gave them the criteria we wanted for the overall design, and they designed all of our “About Us” pages and chose how to present the information. On a functional level, we desired specific features for our user interface where page navigation blended with the design of our website, but was still simple to use. They helped us achieve these specifications. When our site crashed, they troubleshot with Shopify to solve the problem even though the crash was due to conflicting Shopify applications and didn't concern their own web development.

What is the team dynamic?

We connectedly with their Account manager who managed everything perfectly and efficiently. After a couple calls and emails discussing what we were looking for in this project, we had a call with their Digital Project Manager, who reviewed our needs and they took it from there and worked their magic.

How did you come to work with Therefore?

We shortlisted possible vendors and reached out to them, Therefore was first to respond. After talking with them, looking at their portfolio, and reviewing their Clutch profile, we found them to be the perfect fit.

What is the status of this engagement?

They started work on the site in October 2017, and finished in less than a month. We will definitely be working with them again in the future.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Several influential people have reached out to us expressing a desire to work with us, including one of Canada's top 10 influencers, two photographers listed among Canada’s top 10 fashion photographers, and one of Canon’s top 10 photographers. We were presented with all these opportunities within weeks of our website launch. Our team, and most importantly the public and our community have been 100% pleased with our site.

How did Therefore perform from a project management standpoint?

I was very impressed with their responsiveness and overall communication. Throughout the duration of this project, they would reach out to us first and kept communications going. I never struggled to get in contact with them. We received frequent updates from them, and were able to connect with them via email or phone. Setting up calls was easy and immediate because they had their own software tailored for this.

They were also receptive to feedback and requests. For instance, after their first design came back to us, we wanted some minute changes like moving text placement; they immediately made any requested adjustments and sent us back results that same day.

What did you find most impressive about them?

My experiences working with other organizations on web development and graphic design have usually been tedious. What set Therefore apart is that they delivered a perfect product almost immediately. Besides minor adjustments, we were completely satisfied and impressed with their overall design and outcomes.

They reiterated several times to us that they believe in forming partnerships. They don’t finish a job and walk away from it, and I appreciated them going above and beyond their own obligations. I am not easily impressed, but Therefore highly impressed me. Their responsiveness, consistent communication, and level of involvement and dedication were excellent.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Continue getting their name out as I hadn’t heard of them until someone presented them to me as an option. Other than that, I don’t think they could have done anything better than they did. They are a fantastic company to work with.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Have a clear vision in mind for what you want, and present it to them. They have an amazing way of capturing that vision and producing a final product that you’ll certainly be pleased with.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I am the director of demand generation for a software company. We develop and sell environmental health, safety, and quality management software.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Therefore?

Our website is built on Drupal, and we needed to update the wireframes and functionality of our website.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We wanted to update the wireframes to improve the user experience and better inform our users about our company. Our goal is to convert visitors into leads, so we can sell them our software.

We had about 6 pages that we wanted to rework. Most of the pages required a complete overhaul. Many pages had dynamic content coming from our content library. We also worked with their design team to come up with a concept for graphics.

It was a great experience to sit with them and talk about the whole project at the beginning at a high-level, and then work with their design team in the first phase to land on what our design requirements are and what we were looking for. They came up with the mock-up, and we worked changes through the mock-up. Once we were happy with that, it was handed over to their development team. They started building that, and we had daily morning Scrums where we would work through the stage we were at during each phase of the project and pivot on the little challenges or feedback we had, or the functionality we were looking for and approached it in that way. Once we were at the end and everything was done, we did some QA and turned it onto our production site.

What is the team dynamic?

It was a full-service team of 6–8 people working on this project. It was nice to work with the same 6 people on this project as they got to know this project and brand really well, and they got to know us and how we work. We spoke with Bobby, who was the overall account rep, and Giancarlo [Senior project manager, Therefore], who was our main point of contact. Giancarlo was good about being accessible to us; he had a daily cadence of making sure we knew where we were with the project at all times.

How did you come to work with Therefore?

Another division of our department worked with them on another web property that we have.

How much have you invested in them?

From my department, we have spent over $50,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We began working together in May of this year, and the work is ongoing. The initial project is complete, and we have signed a retainer for a monthly number of hours for ongoing optimization cadence.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

The user experience is much better. The messaging regarding what our company does is much clearer on the site. It is clear what our product offering is, as well as how you can buy it. It is now much more flexible to be able to adjust the site, add content, change the look and feel, and move things around. Overall, the site has been refreshed and is more modern looking than it was before. Our visitors are spending more time on our pages, and we are seeing an increase in our conversion rate. We are seeing a positive increase in our leads flow. We are able to funnel leads into our demand generation funnel now, because the website is a better user experience than it was before.

How did Therefore perform from a project management standpoint?

They had about 3 months worth of work divided into sprints of 2-weeks or more. We had a daily morning Scrum, where we would talk with Giancarlo and the rest of the team to check in on progress and discuss the plans for the day. Bobby was available to me when I had questions. We dealt with the team every day. After the morning Scrum, there were days we would be in contact all day while working through a particular issue. There were a couple of challenges along the way, but overall, we accomplished what we wanted to within the allotted timeframe. Giancarlo is a great project manager. He is very detailed and accessible, and he made the project go smoothly. We were always up to date on what was going on with the project.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They have a very well rounded team and can provide a broad range of services. They have the capacity and a variety of components in their team to help us with design to development, covering a wide range. They were able to help us with our whole project, which was great.

Are there any areas they could improve?

We were slightly over on the timeline because we had a complicated set of requirements. They did a great job in dealing with it, but there were times we needed to get things under control from a time management standpoint. We worked through it, and ultimately, they delivered what we were looking for.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Make sure to have those initial meetings so they have time to understand your company and get to know your goals. Make sure to use that as the guiding light through the project. Hopefully, you can get there on the path of least resistance working with them, as they have a broad range of capabilities on their team to help address most issues that would come up.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.
I’m the web and digital media manager for an art gallery.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Therefore Interactive?
We engaged them [Therefore Interactive] to do a redevelopment of our existing website. Our site hadn’t been updated for 5 years, and we had a number of challenges we needed to address, including refreshing the design, improving our information architecture, and introducing a different content management platform that would help us do our work better. We are a national art gallery, and we felt our site didn’t really reflect an institution that’s focused on collecting, presenting, and interpreting some of the best art in Canada and from around the world. We felt that the website had lost some of its focus over time and had become difficult for users to navigate. We needed to update it according to current trends and best practices in online media. We wanted a more flexible platform that would allow us to present content and other strong assets like our collection more effectively. We were also interested in going with an open source content management system that would give us the flexibility to grow and update the website in the future.

SOLUTION

 What was the scope of their involvement?
We had a couple of discovery sessions with Therefore Interactive to start the project. We were able to give them some background research and preliminary work that we had done to identify some of the issues or problems we wanted to address with the new website. They had a number of technical and discovery sessions with us where they probed some of our own assumptions in greater detail to get a better sense of our current landscape and infrastructure for supporting the website.

The next phase was a design and strategy phase. Then we looked at development and launch. We spent a lot of time doing other things like a content audit. At the time they took over the project, we had 6,000 pages on our site, and a lot of it was out of date and redundant. They worked with us to provide clear, objective criteria to be able to assess our content and help us understand what we should keep, update, archive, or delete.

Were there specific features you wanted redesigned?
They helped us develop a simplified information architecture to understand what we knew based on research and what the core audience was looking for. They also introduced different ways of presenting our content through a more simplified navigation. As an art gallery, one of the main things people are trying to find online easily are things like hours of operation, admission, and parking. We looked at our home page to ensure all that information was in one central location. Therefore Interactive introduced a small drop down for some of that core information.

They introduced a prominent listing of current exhibitions as well as upcoming events and more prominent, visual call-to-action content. They helped us develop our calendar of events with a more effective taxonomy for how we present things, including a lot of filtering we hadn’t had before. People could then filter and plan a visit by choosing a time frame or type of event they’re looking for.

They also really improved our collections database. We have about 65,000 pieces in our art collection, and we didn’t have a specific search of the collection before. They introduced a collection search that allows users to do much more effective filtering. You can now look at art by artist, by medium, by category, or by time. We also have the ability for us to do more specific views so that you can show work that is currently on view in the gallery, art that is on tour or on loan, or show results of the collection database with images.

Therefore Interactive was very conscious of how people visiting our website would be able to search the collection. There’s a wide range of users, and we needed to accommodate that. A tourist wanting to visit the gallery or an international researcher from another institution might go to the site for specific information. The search filters and functionality they introduced enabled us to meet the needs of a lot of different users.

How many resources were assigned to your project?
We had a primary lead who was the digital strategist at Therefore. I know there were often 2 other people who worked on the project regularly including a project assistant and a Drupal developer. I believe Therefore had the ability to provide all the services we were looking for.

How did you come to work with Therefore Interactive?
Because we’re a publicly funded government agency, when it comes time to do a project of this scope, it goes to tender. We selected Therefore Interactive based on that competitive process.

What is the status of this engagement?
We started working with them in September 2016, and the website launched in May 2017. I don’t know how those timeframes compare with other projects but I think Therefore is very efficient, and they were able to accomodate some delays on our part.  

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?
They were outstanding in their project management, timeline management, and development of a number of effective tools to help us deal with complex amounts of information. That enabled us to facilitate decision-making and keep things moving forward. They kept us on time and were excellent with communication and in dealing with stakeholders. We had weekly scheduled meetings, and towards the end of the project we spoke daily through phone, Trello, Google Drive, or email. They are very responsive. When we were dealing with the database integration, they put their staff on call on the weekends in case we needed them. They worked whenever we needed to make sure things got done on time in a high-quality manner. There were definitely some crunch times towards the end, but they went above and beyond what we expected and were 100% dedicated to the project from start to finish.

I find when you’re on the client side, you want to feel like you’re the only client. Therefore had lots of projects going, but we were a key focus for them, and we continue to be so. Their warranty program continues to provide post-launch support in the transition. They’re very committed, and they never disappeared.

What did you find most impressive about Therefore Interactive?
Their commitment to the project was impressive. They cared as much about our goals and the end result as we did. That translated into things like dependability, a willingness to accommodate unforeseen delays from our end, and a commitment to provide a highly skilled team for the project. They had consistent resources, and we knew we had the same developer working on things behind the scenes. It felt like a shared commitment.

Are there any areas Therefore Interactive could improve?
If you’re looking to get into a subcontracting relationship, you need to make sure it’s seamless so you feel like you’re working with 1 company.

What tips or recommendations could you share that might increase the likelihood of success with Therefore Interactive?
I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend them for any project. They’re very professional, efficient, and dedicated. They definitely know their stuff.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We are an entrepreneurial organization that builds the next generation of digital products for early stage start-ups and large enterprises. I am the vice president of products for the company.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Therefore Interactive?

We are also a design and development technology company, mostly focusing on development. A client came to us with a Drupal project, for which we didn't have the specific skill sets required.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Therefore Interactive was brought in to provide help with our endeavor. For the most part, Therefore Interactive has handled the majority of the Drupal work. A portion of the project deals with AngularJS, which is closer to our skillsets. We've also worked with Therefore Interactive's technology architects to design the solution. 

How did you come to work with Therefore Interactive?

I'd known Therefore Interactive's principal for 5 or 6 years, but we'd never worked together in a professional capacity. I chose Therefore Interactive because I knew that they were one of the best shops in Toronto for Drupal work.

How much have you invested with Therefore Interactive?

The cost of Therefore Interactive's services has been around $50,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with Therefore Interactive at the beginning of August 2016. We're within the last couple of days for our current project.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

I never had any concerns about the quality of the deliverables. The initial work and planning were also fantastic on Therefore Interactive's side, with well-done documentation answering the clients' questions precisely.

How did Therefore Interactive perform from a project management standpoint?

Therefore Interactive has been good in this regard as well. We keep synchronous and asynchronous communication; we've worked with Therefore Interactive's project management constantly. They're always available for keeping things on track, but they're also not afraid to mention when something is out-of-scope. 

What did you find most impressive about Therefore Interactive?

I appreciate the fact that, even though Therefore Interactive is not a huge company, they're a high-quality one. The work is excellent, but their team is also personable. I've never had the feeling of sending requests into a black hole, and not knowing when they would come out.

Are there any areas Therefore Interactive could improve?

I can't think of anything significant. Therefore Interactive has run a typical, well-planned project.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We are a public-sector union with a large membership. My role is in communication, with a focus on web work, but also layout, design, project management, research and analysis, and a number of other files.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Therefore Interactive?

We first wanted a campaign-based website for advocacy work. However, it became clear that we needed a more robust engagement management system. We wanted people to be able to use the system to send electronic letters to elected representatives in Canada. As we were researching the initial project, our requirements were expanded to include the redevelopment of our main web site. Our challenge was that whatever was built had to be forward compatible with our main website that was thousands of pages deep.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We ended up using Drupal for the projects. Our engagement management system build was done over a period of six weeks. It was a rapid, agile format that allowed us to do a lot in a short amount of time.
 
Therefore Interactive created a framework allowing us to deploy campaign web sites as fast as we could get copy written and translated. It also included a CRM component and an advocacy platform all built into Drupal. The system shared a single content engine and database, as opposed to the multi-site component of Drupal, allowing us to repurpose content across multiple sites, with a different look-and-feel for each one.
 
This work served as the foundation on which we built the main site, which was a much larger undertaking. Therefore Interactive was responsible for the development, but they also worked on migrating content from our old site, which took a considerably large amount of time given the complexity of the move – more than either side had anticipated. In the end, because of our existing working relationship, we ended up with a much more accurate migration and also a separate Drupal-based content migration system. It allowed us to curate content and schedule it for import to the main site. The migration system serves as a bridge for people wanting to access important archival content.

How did you come to work with Therefore Interactive?

Therefore was brought to our attention initially by word of mouth as they had developed another union’s web site. We put out a request for proposal to a number of organizations, and ended up using Therefore Interactive for the first build. When it came to building our main website, we contacted approximately ten companies, and Therefore Interactive won again.

How much have you invested with Therefore Interactive?

Approximately $300,000 when including our SLA hours.

What is the status of this engagement?

We have a monthly maintenance package with Therefore Interactive for our site, and we use a number of hours for fixes and further improvements.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

We developed a good working relationship with Therefore Interactive during the initial build within a matter of days. They shared their knowledge through strong project management and we shared our expertise as well. For our main web redevelopment, this paid off immeasurably as we already had a good working relationship with the initial development group from Therefore Interactive who participated in our campaign site build.
 
We worked directly with the developers on numerous aspects of the build to achieve things more quickly and would frequently reach out to one another with questions and ideas. Whether it came down to details, quality assurance, usability acceptance testing, detailed feedback from Therefore Interactive's side on how things could work, or trying to explain the organizational requirements in a way that could be translated into technical pieces, we had a level of comfort and mutual respect with Therefore Interactive that led to a very good outcome. We accomplished a lot more during our allocated time than we would have if we didn't have this kind of relationship.

How did Therefore Interactive perform from a project management standpoint?

The project manager certainly kept the project on track and allowed us to participate in their morning stand up meetings on a daily basis. Generally, when working with a project manager or client service specialist, all the interaction is done through that person. However, we had a level of comfort that allowed us to work directly with the developers as well – which really helped. We used a number of online tools to show examples of how things worked, talked in detail, and worked with them though the usability and quality assurance process. Having that level of comfort led us to have a deeper, more interactive feedback and development loop.

What did you find most impressive about Therefore Interactive?

Therefore Interactive was quick to ramp up our projects, they worked with us closely and now continue the kind of support that we had during the project build.

Are there any areas Therefore Interactive could improve?

No.

What tips or recommendations could you share that might increase the likelihood of success with Therefore Interactive?

For us, the agile build format worked well as it proved to be a great way to get a lot done in a short amount of time. It was vital for us to dedicate time and people to this process.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

The Royal Conservatory of Music is a music education organization in Toronto, Canada. I am the IT director of the company. I foresee all the IT operations.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Therefore Interactive?

We've approached Therefore Interactive in different capacities over time. Most recently, we needed to develop an API which would interact with an iOS app that we're working on.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We were initially using the Loopback.io API hosted on Amazon Web Services. Therefore Interactive created an API which sits between our iOS app and the main database. The API was developed and customized internally, on Therefore Interactive's systems. It's hosted on an Ubuntu 16 machine.

We've changed our ticketing system recently, adopting one which uses iframe within our web pages. Therefore Interactive has helped us with that project as well.

How did you come to work with Therefore Interactive?

We have worked with Therefore Interactive in different capacities. I don't know how the collaboration first started.

How much have you invested with Therefore Interactive?

The total cost of our project with Therefore Interactive was between $10,000 and $50,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We have been working with Therefore Interactive on the current project for at least a year and a half, and also have a maintenance contract with them.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

We haven't yet released the system. Therefore Interactive delivered exactly what was asked, and they've been great in answering our questions and resolving problems.

The API which we were developing was supposed to connect directly to our database. Because we were hosting it on an Acquia managed server, we didn't have direct access to the database. Therefore Interactive had to change the programming, connecting to an intermediary server first, and issuing an indirect connection from there. The work was done without extra cost, and Therefore Interactive has been courteous in helping us.

How did Therefore Interactive perform from a project management standpoint?

We had a very strict deadline for the project, and Therefore Interactive delivered ahead of time.

What did you find most impressive about Therefore Interactive?

We've worked with many different vendors, and communication can be an issue. This wasn't a problem with Therefore Interactive; they were prompt and answered any questions we had right away.

Are there any areas Therefore Interactive could improve?

I haven't seen the formal documentation for the work done, but I'm sure that Therefore Interactive will provide it. We've seen the finished product and have had our questions answered in bits and pieces, but I would like to have a formal document for future reference.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

Our organization is an employees' union. I am the supervisor of the information technology unit.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Therefore Interactive?

We are working on the second phase of redesigning our website. A year before starting our work with Therefore Interactive, we employed another company for consulting and designing the changes, moving our site from an old front-page, static HTML, humongous collection of content, to a Drupal 7-based dynamic website with the ability to have control over content submissions and editing. The first phase didn't work well, and we didn't have time to finish what we wanted to have done.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Therefore Interactive built our website based on the first Drupal version which we created. They changed things gradually, in the end making a full redesign. Therefore Interactive worked mostly from the information architecture side, rather than the graphical representation one.

Therefore Interactive assigned one designer, a project manager, and a database administrator to our project.

How did you come to work with Therefore Interactive?

We worked remotely with our previous company, having phone meetings in which we discussed designs, which didn't work very well. We were looking for a local company that we could meet and with which we could discuss last-minute changes and challenges. Therefore Interactive has always been flexible around our needs and with the general challenge of running a Drupal site.

We went through a formal request for proposal, and found Therefore Interactive through their previous work online. We agreed on what we needed to fix and improve, and our experience with them has been positive.

How much have you invested with Therefore Interactive?

The cost of the project phase was greater than 150,000 CAD.

What is the status of this engagement?

Our first redesign process started in 2013. We switched to Therefore Interactive at the beginning of 2015. We have a contract for maintenance and support, as well as a few ongoing design hours, which we've prepaid and utilized.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

I find Therefore Interactive's work to be cleaner and more organized than what we first created, which helped with overall efficiency.

The biggest recognition for us was the award that we received from the Canadian Association of Labour Media. It was the first time that our organization was recognized by them. We received praise for the architecture of the site. It was logical for union members to navigate it and find what they need.

We have various groups of members who are divided into sections, which makes searches difficult. We addressed this by allowing users to enter information which they already knew, in order to receive the information that made searching possible. This was the biggest challenge in the first phase, which led to tons of complaints. It virtually disappeared once we switched over to the site built by Therefore Interactive. Users can also find information by simply looking around, which was also something that didn't work before, as our information wasn't structured for that purpose. The user interface isn't the greatest part of our design, but it does work.

Therefore Interactive designed a tool which allowed our in-house web designers to have the flexibility to create more content without taking a Drupal boot-camp. There were many overall bugs and some unfinished work in the previous stage, which was cleaned up and improved by the people from Therefore Interactive.

Therefore Interactive did a great job in saving our server a few months ago, after a DOS attack. It's a hosted server and it's supposed to provide the full Drupal stack, but our hosting provider wasn't as good as Therefore Interactive. They didn't have the proper tools, despite the discussions we initially had. Some of the network people from Therefore Interactive were able to pinpoint the attack and rescue the server. They treated our contract as a full set of services, not limited to design, but also from an administration standpoint, which has been useful. Our previous consultants charged us for every minute spent talking, which didn't help us identify our needs.

How did Therefore Interactive perform from a project management standpoint?

We had to extend some deadlines, but still managed to respect our ultimate schedule. This was also a function of our internal availability for tests and feedback. Therefore Interactive's responsiveness and communication style are excellent. They're very approachable and I was always able to contact them when I needed to.

What did you find most impressive about Therefore Interactive?

Even though approachability may not be unique to Therefore Interactive, I really liked this about them. I can talk to their team, and whenever we have a problem, I know that Therefore Interactive will jump in to solve it. We do have a running agreement with them, but Therefore Interactive has taken it a step further.

Are there any areas Therefore Interactive could improve?

Therefore Interactive did admit that graphic design is not their strongest point, but still they could employ someone for more creative graphical user interface designs.