Taoti Creative

I’m the interim CEO for Transition Leadership International, LLC. We help nonprofits facing major changes, including turnaround, restructuring, startups, mergers, etc.

I hired Taoti Creative to handle my branding and marketing efforts.

Ultimately, I wanted to improve the effectiveness of my marketing efforts to result in more opportunities and higher conversions.

A mutual connection introduced me to Brent (Founder & CEO, Taoti Creative). It was their clear approach that led me to choose them for the project.

Brent assessed my branding and marketing strategies. I conducted a few interviews with clients and discovered that they had different expectations for my online presence than I’d thought. From there, Taoti Creative helped us build our brand, marketing plan, and overall design based on the research we conducted. For example, now, we emphasize protecting beloved organizations, and it’s apparent within our marketing strategy.

Brent and I worked together directly, and he communicated with the design team.

Since working with Taoti Creative, our conversion rate and sales cycle have been remarkably high. We’ve seen a drastic increase in clients. Years later, I still receive compliments and positive feedback from people about our marketing materials.

The workflow between our teams was seamless.

Their determination to understand our brand before beginning the process was highly valuable to us. We received a great amount of clarity from their team because of the well-structured research efforts.

There was nothing they could have done differently.

I am the marketing and communications manager at the Trust for the National Mall, a nonprofit organization. We manage and maintain the National Mall for the National Park Service.

We engaged Taoti Creative to create marketing collateral for our annual gala benefit, the BALL for THE MALL. Our partnership with a previous vendor fell through, so we needed someone to complete these materials rapidly.

Taoti Creative created our save-the-date cards, invitations, evening program book, and a marketing report for the 2018 BALL for THE MALL. Each piece had its own timeline and multiple rounds of edits. The designs also had to abide by our strict brand guidelines. Their team provided graphic design and marketing expertise in creating this full suite of collateral.

We worked with a team of 5–6 people, including Christine (Project Manager and Producer, Taoti Creative), Callie (Production Designer, Taoti Creative), and Mason (Associate Creative Director, Taoti Creative).

After we cut ties with our previous vendor, a colleague recommended Taoti Creative to us. In our initial conversations, the team came across as experienced and able to deliver within our high-pressure deadlines. We decided to take a chance on them.

We spend about $10,000 per year. Taoti Creative is now a sponsor of our annual gala, so part of the cost is a donation in kind to our organization.

We worked together on last year’s event from February–April 2018. Our partnership, however, is ongoing.

Taoti Creative completed a ten-month project in two months. Their materials received positive feedback from our board and our attendees. The success of our engagement proved to us that higher-quality materials are worth the additional costs.

The team is highly flexible and adaptive to our workflow. We prefer to use timelines for individual pieces rather than the whole project. We also will keep in touch as often as 3–5 times a week at specific points in the project.

They are highly attentive and willing to accept criticism. When one of their designs departs from our strict brand guidelines, Taoti Creative listens to our feedback and incorporates it into a revised version that fits our vision. Now that we’re no longer pressed for time, the team has an excellent understanding of our brand.

No, they’ve done outstanding work so far.

Trust their expertise and give them the freedom to provide you with a few options for a design or product choice. Taoti Creative’s recommendations have inspired us to take new directions with how we communicate with our donor database.

Respondent 1: Our business is Kids Comprehensive Services LLC. The contract that we worked on is Childcare Connection, which is a childcare resource and referral for the District of Columbia.

R1: We needed someone to build our website.

Respondent 2: The goal was for the website to be user-friendly, easy to read, and easy to navigate. It’s a WordPress website. We had some ideas about what we wanted and didn’t want. As part of this process, we did an exercise where we looked at different websites and colors and had to answer questions of what we like, what was strong about the website, and what we didn’t like. That was a part of their information gathering process.

R1: We have around 12 consultants on staff.

R2: I asked a staff member who had experience with building a website. I asked them to look at companies and bring me 3. They all wrote proposals. When we looked at Taoti’s work, we chose them because of the visual graphics of their site. A lot of the other sites had the same functions, but the appeal and visual response wasn’t there.

R2: $50,000.

R2: We started working together in July 2017 until October 2017.

R2: The website is very visually appealing. Everybody that goes on the website is very pleased. It’s easy to navigate, which is one of the main things that was important to me.

R2: We communicated once every two weeks. They’re very responsive. Our requests were met in a timely fashion. They were efficient and got the job done, but were relational too, which is important to me. Common knowledge of childcare and our goals made it a strong team from the beginning to the end of the process. It was almost like they knew exactly what our goals were and understood them. It was a good match.

R2: Their knowledge base was impressive. They had knowledge in content about early childhood, but also on graphics. It was helpful they understood the program people and the backend people.

R2: Absolutely not. They’re on the right path.

R1: Check who has knowledge about your content areas, even though it’s important you have your own experts. That naturally seemed to make the process go smoothly.

We are a water utility company. We have a customer base of over 200,000. Basically, we provide water and wastewater services to these customers. I’m the director of communications.

We had an outdated, clunky, ugly website that was running on a CMS [content management system] that was also pretty archaic. It wasn’t working for us. It wasn’t flexible, and it wasn’t portraying us in the best light for our customers. We knew that we needed a change. Our customer base is pretty tech-savvy in our county, so we wanted to make sure that we redesigned a site that would meet their expectations and promote us, our brand, and our position in the community.

It wasn’t part of the scope of the project, but there was an integration point with another company so that customers can go online, view their balances, and pay their bills. We do have a significant number of web forms where customers can ask questions, report problems, and start service and stop service. Taoti Creative helped us create those web forms. We used Drupal for project management.

As a public agency, we have to go through a formal procurement process. We issued the RFP [request for proposals] in February of 2015. We wanted to stay local, so we researched some companies in our area and sent proposals to those companies. Aside from their great interviewing skills, patience, and ability answer all of our sometimes-annoying questions, Taoti Creative knows how to build a website from the start. By that I mean they were going to dedicate a significant amount of time to audience development, which is a huge priority for us, just to learn about some of our stakeholders and their needs. Their team, both technical and non-technical, had a great understanding of Drupal. They really took their time to learn about our company and what we wanted, and I think they gave us all the information that we asked for. They were very committed to the whole interview process. There was not a question that we asked that they couldn’t provide an answer to or even some support or guidance.

Unfortunately, I can’t share any of that information. What I can say is that they exceeded our budget expectation.

We issued the RFP in February of 2015 and did the actual selection in June of 2015. The procurement process took about five months because we had a pretty significant response and had to go through two interview processes with some of the companies. We chose Taoti Creative in May, kicked off in June of 2015, and launched in February of 2016.

Our bounce rate went down significantly after the launch. I think our bounce rate from our old site was about 75%; it was ridiculous. The bounce rate went down right at the start. We had customers calling just to say the site looks so much better and is much more user-friendly. We have emails from the Contact Us forms on the website from customers who just really appreciated the new site design.

Taoti Creative has a very good project management philosophy in place. Teamwork was the tool that they used. We had a dedicated project manager, Lisa Collins, who was the coordinator for the whole project. She worked with the developers. I don’t know exactly how many developers there were, but there was a significant amount of development that went into the project. I would say there were no fewer than four developers working on it at any given time. Taoti handled everything. They matched their best developers with our needs, and Lisa coordinated the workflow for them through Teamwork. It was a very transparent process. Through Teamwork, we were able to see the tasks that she assigned, deadlines, milestones, and conversations between the developers and Lisa. This helped us make sure that we all had the same set of goals and were all looking at the same sheet of music for the whole project.

Company-wide, there’s nobody at Taoti Creative that I don’t feel comfortable calling, from the CEO to the project managers. They’re all really responsive and very helpful. They all have the success of our site at heart. I just think they are very good about responding. If anything happens with the site, they have an urgent email that they respond to within minutes.

We had such a positive experience with them. There’s really nothing I could point out for improvement.

I’m the chief marketing officer of the Society for Science & the Public, a nonprofit with several different functions.

We have a website for each function, but none clearly conveyed the overall picture of what the Society does—our brand and our impact. We worked with Taoti to create a central society site that did that.

Taoti first performed key stakeholder interviews internally. They worked with a content strategist that we already had on board who had done some user research. We did card sorting and some other site organization exercises together. They came up with a really good design and wireframe, then used a product called Envision to show us wireframes and mockups. The entire site was built on Drupal. We didn’t have any custom functionalities on the site. We worked with them to ensure we had the correct coding and the ability to do analytics to be able to track various elements of what we were doing. We create our own content.

We did a request for proposal and looked at the 10 organizations who responded. We had face-to-face or phone interviews with six of them. Taoti sat down with us and walked us through several projects they had done. They had done a wide range of projects, and some of them resonated with what we were doing. Also, I like to work with people who are local so I can sit down with them. People who were remote were going to add another hurdle to the project, so the fact that they were local was really important to me. They had a great vibe and we liked them. We’re a Drupal organization, and they had deep experience in Drupal. They connected well with our developers and acted as an extension of our own team. The project was a joint effort.

We started working with them in September of 2016. They did a site audit, and we spec’d out the specific website they built for us. The site was launched in February of 2017. Right now, our relationship with them is working well.

We have seen more traffic to the joint page, which is the key page we want people to go to when they consider our organization. More importantly, the traffic that we’re driving to the Society’s home page is now pushing significantly more traffic through to the transactions pages. It’s a straightforward Drupal site, and we’re all used to working with it. The difference is night and day in terms of the way it feels to people experiencing the website.

They delivered everything on time and within budget. A project like this always has moments of frustration, and when we had those moments, they were responsive. She was friendly and willing to work with us to get things where we wanted them to be. I communicated with them through Google Docs and phone calls. The rest of the team used Teamwork and Slack.

They were creative and really cared about our project. We didn’t feel like we did with other vendors, where they did the work and moved on. They continue to stay emotionally and intellectually engaged in it as we continue to make changes.

We had a great meeting after the site launched to discuss what worked and what didn’t. The key learning was to never make assumptions about our budget and timeline or that you know which way we’d go on a particular decision.

It’s kind of a mixed blessing for an organization like Taoti to work with an organization like ours, which has a lot of in-house talent. There are more resources to deploy to get a project done, but at the same time, there are more points of view. I would say that they would work really well for an organization that needs soup to nuts, but they’ve also been adept at working with us when it was more of a collaborative effort.