Constructive

I’m an executive at a health services organization.

We wanted to update our website and develop a new logo.

Constructive took over our previous site and redeveloped it with new wireframes, pages, configurations, and pathways using technologies like Envision. In addition to that, they designed our logo based on the requirements we gave them at prior meetings, including color palettes and design concepts.

We worked with 5–6 members of their team, including account managers, web designers, and Matt (CEO).

They were referred to us by someone who knew about their work.

We spent $40,000–$50,000 with them.

We worked together from October 2021–May 2022.

From my experience, I can say that they were responsive and delivered high-level results. Also, people liked the website features and responded well to it.

Project management was great; they met deadlines and stayed within budgets. Regarding tools, we used Google Docs and emails.

Their website design abilities were outstanding.

I don’t think there’s anything they can improve on — I had a great working experience because they were professional throughout the process.

Take your time to go through the research and discovery processes in the project’s early stages.

I’m the editorial director of Child Mind Institute. We’re a nonprofit organization that provides information on children’s mental health, in addition to providing clinical services and research.

We had a website for the organization that has existed for 10 years and after receiving a grant from the Morgan Stanley Foundation, we wanted to make our resources more accessible to underserved and rural communities.

We have a huge library of articles, guides, Q&A, and other kinds of information, so we hired Constructive to organize our resources and figure out ways to make it more accessible to everyone. The process started with discovery, in which they helped us explore how to reach the communities we wanted to target. As development continued, they presented us with great ideas and there was a lot of back-and-forth.

We’ve worked with about 10 people from Constructive, which includes content auditors, designers, and developers.

We engaged with Constructive after interviewing five different firms, and we chose them because they showed the best understanding of what our organization does and needs to do. They previously submitted a proposal for an earlier rebuild of our website, but we had gone with someone else at the time.

We’ve invested around $450,000.

The partnership started in May 2020. We relaunched the site in early September, but we still have ongoing work to clean up a few details.

While it’s too soon to have any measurable data about the success of the site, the feedback has been good and the site does what we wanted it to do very effectively.

I’ve never worked with a firm that’s communicated effectively as Constructive does. They responded to questions in a timely way, they provided solutions to many challenges, they were receptive to our ideas, and they were very flexible.

I was impressed with how they worked really hard in understanding our organization and our audience. Finding information about mental health is not the same as shopping for shoes — it’s very personal and it should be taken seriously. The collaboration resulted in acquiring the best solutions to different problems.

No, I don’t have any suggestions for them. Their discovery process was discrete and we got to the most important part of the project quickly.

I would say take advantage of their flexibility and willingness to have an ongoing dialog. If you have any ideas, don’t hesitate to bring them up, because they’re going to keep coming up with better ideas and build upon yours.

At the time of this project, I was the marketing and communications manager at a community foundation.

It had been at least five years since we updated our website, and in that time, our community — its views, thinking, and way of serving people — had already shifted. We want our website to reflect these changes, become more useful to our constituents, and ultimately show who we were and how people could get in engage with us. That is why we hired Constructive.

Constructive redesigned our website. We worked together to find a new way of organizing the website and its contents. Their team also helped us come up with a newer way to visually communicate who we were to our audience.

We mainly dealt with the project manager, who acted as a liaison between our team and Constructive. He was also in charge of arranging meetings and making sure that everything was running smoothly.

I was interested in looking beyond the local agencies, not out of dissatisfaction but because I just wanted to get a different perspective. A googled for design firms who did nonprofit work and Constructive came up in the results.

We spent around $55,000.

We officially hired them in March 2020 and the project ended in January 2021.

I left soon after the redesign was completed, so I can’t speak of the impact. I was, however, very happy with the quality of the product. Constructive put a lot of care into creating visuals that reflected our organization.

I can't overstate how friendly and professional they were. The team was very organized and time-conscious. I also appreciate their flexibility when it came to organizing meetings; it's not easy to bring lots of different people and points of view together but they were able to figure it out.

Constructive brought a level of sophistication to the project in terms of the design. They were able to unify a diverse community and collection of stories and embody that through our website. We like that we didn't have to teach them how to approach this project; they were already experienced and able to think in the way we wanted them to.

No, I wouldn't change anything about the way they approached the project.

Go into the project as prepared as you possibly can be. Make sure that everyone on your end is signed off in terms of your goals, timelines, and the like. Constructive is very good at managing the project in creating deadlines, so be ready and open to what they propose.

I’m the director of a healthcare think tank.

My group does a vast array of research and analysis, for public policies related to the financial payment and pricing of pharmaceuticals in the US. Basically, our work is complex and rarely amenable to simplified presentation, so we engaged with Constructive to help us build a website. This website would help us translate our fairly nuanced and layered analysis into something that can be easily understood.

They initially spent an enormous amount of time with us to understand what we do, analyze the work we had done, and work with us as they iterate different presentation formats. They frame every iconography whether it hits the right message, content, and tone as communicators.

I work with around six people from their team, and they’re mostly made up of technocrats, logistical coordinators, project coordinators, and some are on the creative design side.

I have a team that vetted half a dozen vendors, who looked at their work, product, timing, and pricing — the vetting process only got to me when they presented Constructive.

We’ve probably spent more than $100,000 USD.

The conversation started in October 2019, and our partnership is still ongoing.

The feedback has been extremely positive. I got a number of inquiries from colleagues who work at other think tanks, policy shops, and academia, asking who our vendor was.

They’re definitely using a project management software to track the progress of the work, but because of the pandemic, we have our regular meetings through Zoom.

We’re impressed by how they’re getting to know us in terms of how we view ourselves, and how effective our messaging should be delivered. The project is an interactive process, in a way that they have to find a way to understand us.

No, because I’m extremely satisfied.

I believe the better you understand what your needs are, the more useful Constructive can be. There’s no limit to their abilities, except our ability to figure out what we want to ask for.

I’m the director of a nonprofit education technology consultancy. We have projects in New York City, Louisiana, and Colorado.

We had an outdated website that needed to be updated. The idea was to ensure that our three campaigns were reflected on our website. We also wanted to give our organization a fresh look and a new logo, and Constructive worked with us on both of these projects.

Constructive created a brand new WordPress website and logo for us. For the logo, they did five iterations. They chose the final design based on the feedback we were giving them from the beginning. We also gave them suggestions for the design, such as its color scheme.

We worked with four people from their team. One of them was our main point of contact, and the rest were developers.

I researched online and read reviews for various agencies. We then spoke to Constructive and developed a relationship with their executive director. From there, we moved forward with the project.

We spent around $70,000.

Our website development project lasted from January–May 2020.

Everyone loved the website, and they were happy about it. There were some hiccups, but Constructive was quick to address them.

Constructive’s project management was excellent. They were attentive and responsive to our concerns. They also had great guiding questions around the materials we should use for content and the assessment of our goals for the website.

Their focus on nonprofit organizations distinguished them from the competition. They worked with service-oriented nonprofits, so their ability to articulate what those organizations did in a visual format was fabulous. The fact that they had a specialty for the nonprofit segment was admirable.

They could have provided us with more guidance around website optimization and backend usage of WordPress.

Have a clearly outlined and articulated vision of the project’s end goal and the organization’s needs. You should also outline the needs of your staff who’ll maintain your website.