Our Process
Let’s discover the details together
We work with dedicated, smart people around the world in the fields of applied research, education and social good. Like our clients, we believe the world can – and should – be a better place, and our digital solutions and communications strategy help them achieve their goals.
Unlike most agencies, we don’t ingest a brief and spit out a fully formed project plan. Why? It feels arrogant and frankly, stupid, to make all of your big decisions when you know the least about a project. Through in-depth consultations, we allow the project to take shape around a kernel of truth. Maybe it’s a problem that needs solving or a vision of how the client might achieve their goals.
Seed
Starting from a simple brief, develop an initial concept.
Discovery
Explore the details of the project in a collaborative way.
Develop
Build an application to answer an audience’s specific needs.
Launch
Deploy, collect feedback and analytics, and iterate on the initial development.
Maintain
Provide ongoing support, fix bugs and monitor app performance and security.
Discovery
Audience
Who is this for? What motivates them, brings them down, occupies their time? We start with the audience in mind, and keep them in our sights throughout the process. We might build something we love, but if they don’t use it, it won’t get far.
Problems to Solve
Identify the problems we need to solve for our audience and break them down into smaller problems that we can tie to specific functionality or communication needs.
Project Goals
Narrowing down on the problems to solve, what are the specific goals we set for this project?
User Journeys
What are the paths we believe people will take to solve their problem, using our solution? People think differently, and they come to your website or business from different angles. With this as a baseline, we build out different ways for people to achieve the same end result. Aspects such as the visual hierarchy of content on a page may guide a certain subset of people, but others prefer to browse back and forth before choosing their next step.
Function & Design
What should we build, and what should it look like? For our web development and software projects, we create a site map to describe all of the pages and content we require, and how they all fit together. From there we go to design, where we build a fully functioning prototype of the application. At this stage, it is important to imagine how the organisation might grow or change in the next 5 years, and ensure the design can accommodate that to an extent.
Channels
On projects where we develop digital strategy, we explore which channels will reach – and resonate with – our audience.
Tech Considerations
What are the technologies and tools we will use to build it? We usually make a bet on the tech stack we think will work best for the project, even though there may still be some unanswered questions.
Project Planning
How will we work together? What are the project parameters, such as scope and timeline?
Let's Build
Once we get to the point of developing a website or application, we build in flexibility to allow for more details to emerge along the way, and to provide us with a more robust set of tools once we launch.
Bringing the combined vision of clients, technical experts and designers to life is super exciting. If you’ve ever built something with Lego, you have a sense of what we do every day. And to continue the Lego example, we build from a recipe – the design prototype – and we build from our own intuitive understanding of how the building blocks can we used for something new.
This second way of building is often overlooked, even frowned upon in our industry, as it requires developers to think beyond the strict project scope. These principles guide us:
- Build with the future in mind. For example, the design prototype might call far 3 projects listed on the home page, but what if there are 5 or 6 projects a couple of years later?
- Creativity requires constraint. Many websites are built these days using page builders, which gives content creators an insane amount of freedom to build websites exactly as they’d like. While there is definitely a place for them, it’s often not a good fit if you want to follow strict design principles and create a consistent style.
- Question previous decisions if new information requires it. This so often happens. We choose a certain approach to do animated graphs on a website, only to realise that the content we are working with needs a different approach.
Your Digital Impact
Digital strategy follows a similar path. We start by describing audiences, problems to solve, goals, and user journeys. We work on the assumption that your organisation clearly understands the offering or product, and its positioning and/or price in the market. You already have a good product/market fit; if you don’t, come to us when you do.
From there we tackle creative assets such as ad creatives, videos, long-form content and more. We also determine the ideal channels you should be engaging in, and provide a detailed content schedule. We may work in partnership with an in-house creative team, or rely on our trusted external partners to deliver high-quality work. Either way, we remain answerable to the strategy we develop with you.