Interactive Strategies

BACKGROUND

Please describe your organization.

Destination DC is essentially the tourism bureau for Washington, DC.

What is your position?

I am the Senior Manager of Digital Marketing and Website Operations. My area covers most things digital: website, email, social.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What business challenge were you trying to address with Interactive Strategies?

We needed to build a new microsite for a new product campaign called “DC Cool”.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their involvement in greater detail.

Interactive Strategies had responded to our request for proposal amongst a couple of other agencies. We used them to build a Drupal-based microsite to house DC content that was a little more local-focused, for use in advertising to visitors outside the area. Their scope of service was to design, build, host, and enter content.

How did you come to work with Interactive Strategies?

I had reached out to four or five agencies in the area. I used to work in advertising and knew of some of the smaller companies that could handle a project of this size.

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in financial terms?

Total spend was in the range of $10,000 to $50,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

The project has been completed. It was hugely successful for us and was retired very recently. It was up and running for about three years or so. We are currently working with them on another website project as well.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

The campaign was hugely influential on the redesign of Washington.org, which is our primary website. “DC Cool” was our foray into more modern content marketing, and we ultimately wound up folding that style into the primary site because people liked it so much.

In 2015, the page did just a hair over one million page views and just a hair under 500,000 unique views, so it was a big success. It performed especially well on our social channels as well. It was a small-scale version of what we would ultimately become with the latest version of our website, which just launched about three weeks ago.

How did Interactive Strategies perform from a project management standpoint?

We had a dedicated project manager who was the primary point of contact, which was great. Initially, we met with the president of the company and their larger team of strategists and designers. As we got more into the project, we worked more directly with the project manager. They were succinct in their project management and really filtered out the noise.

What distinguishes Interactive Strategies from other providers?

What I really like about Interactive Strategies is that they are one of the most personable and approachable agencies around. I’ve been doing web work for a long time and am a pretty good judge of what’s being presented to me. It starts with their president, Bruce, and goes down through the entire company. Everyone that I’ve brought in, that has interacted with them, has walked away saying how much they liked them and how friendly they were.

Another area to highlight are their fantastic presentation skills. They’re definitely one of the first agencies that I’ve worked with in this area that uses web-based wireframing tools rather than a deck. They actually pull up a wireframe site, sometimes with its own functionality, which is impressive.

Is there anything Interactive Strategies could have improved or done differently?

I really don't have any improvements for the project we worked on. They executed it in an extremely tight timeframe and on budget, with little hassle.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your organization.

I work at the Smithsonian Science Education Center. We develop science curriculums, video games, and science videos for the K-8 age group.

What is your position?

I am the Curriculum Product Support Specialist.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What business challenge were you trying to address with Interactive Strategies?

Our original website was very disorganized. It was hard for users to find specific topics, search for information, and register for events. The content that we wanted to feature was getting lost in the complexities of the site and we needed a change.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their involvement in greater detail.

We brought in Interactive Strategies with a very tight timeline because we were working on grant funding that needed to be spent by a certain date. They did a fantastic job reorganizing our site in such a short time. They created wireframes for us and redesigned the flow of the site.

In addition to traditional redesign services, Interactive Strategies came to a conference that we were holding at the time, and talked to the users of our site: teachers, administrators, people in the community, etc. Through those conversations they determined what our site was lacking and what information people were looking for. We never would have gotten that information without them. From there, they realized that our site had no clear message and that people didn’t know what to do when they got to our site. All of this information contributed to their successful rebuild of our site.

How did you come to work with Interactive Strategies?

We sent out a bid and were seriously considering at least nine agencies that sent us proposals. Interactive Strategies rose to the top because they addressed problems specific to us. They showed us that they really went through the site by doing mock-ups on our proposal and showing us specifically how they planned on improving those. That really spoke to us and showed us that they were thinking about our message and our audience.

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in financial terms?

We’re in the $50,000 to $200,000 range for everything.

What is the status of this engagement?

The project has been entirely completed, but Interactive Strategies has been extremely helpful for answering any questions. Our contract allotted a couple of months for maintenance work after the project was completed, but we’re off the maintenance now and we still sometimes shoot them a question if we need help.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

I don’t have any hard numbers, but our traffic has gone up and our bounce rates have gone down. People are staying on the page longer because they are able to find what they’re looking for. We also have an email address on the site that people can refer to if they have a question. Before our redesign, we would get one or two emails each month, but now we’re seeing at least a couple each day.

How did Interactive Strategies perform from a project management standpoint?

I mainly worked with two people. Mark Davenport was the person who drove the project at first. He showed us the designs and helped communicate our thoughts to the designer. He seemed to know what we needed even when we didn’t know we needed it.

After the design was somewhat established, we started migrating the information from our old site to the new one. This part of the project was led by Katie Okawa, who was amazing. She was very attentive and responsive to any questions and she helped us with a lot of odds and ends. We definitely felt like the whole team was very organized and professional. It was nice to be able to rely on them for this project and know that they weren’t dropping the ball because everyone in my office had 10,000 other projects going on at the same time.

What distinguishes Interactive Strategies from other providers?

This is the first time we’ve ever done a complete redesign, so this process was new for us. I can’t go on enough about how great Interactive Strategies was to work with, and how easy they made the whole process for us. Since we are a government agency, there can be a lot of red tape and back and forth. Interactive Strategies was able to work with everything we threw at them. It was a huge project and they really delivered. I will definitely hire them again if we ever have a need.

Is there anything Interactive Strategies could have improved or done differently?

I learned more about what we could improve than them. They worked really well with us on the tight deadlines, so no, I don’t have anything.