Success is a system — a collection of strategies, tactics, messages, and products that work in harmony to advance your goals. Some of our services are standard on every project (e.g., Discovery or Research), while others are customized to your organization’s needs.
If you have any questions, please send us a message.
Project Management
“Project management is the hub of the wheel — the central point that holds everything together and makes them work harmoniously.”
— Carly Hohl, Executive Vice President of Operations
While you wouldn’t hire us to do only project management, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention it. Project management is what sets us apart from other companies. We have invested — deeply and for a long time — in PMP-certified project managers who know how to juggle the thousand little things that constitute a successful project. We have a large team of project managers who will be your primary contact from beginning to end. They work in teams so there’s always a couple of people who are familiar with the exactitudes of your project. They’re peak communicators, detail-focused superheroes, and as committed to your success as you are.
Discovery, Research & Analytics
Discovery
The first step in any project, Discovery is the knowledge-gathering phase. Your team meets with ours. We ask you a bunch of questions. We participate in exercises and conversations. We follow the heat. And in the end, we deliver a Discovery Brief that details everything we know about your organization — and where it wants to go. The Discovery Brief describes both your current landscape and your aspirations. The goal of Discovery is to figure out which services and deliverables you should implement to be more successful.
“Research kills opinions.”
— Rachel Clemens, Chief Marketing Officer
Stakeholder Interviews
While user surveys provide large-scale data, stakeholder interviews deliver the human insights you can get nowhere else. We’ll sit down, one-on-one, with members of your target audiences to ask the relevant questions. We’ll pursue interesting digressions. We’ll get to the heart of the matter. You’ll receive recordings of the interviews (we usually recommend interviewing at least six people from each target audience), along with our summary report and recommendations.
Focus Groups
Focus groups offer a larger sampling of feedback. Our seasoned mediators will work with you to develop questions and goals for your focus groups. These questions may be focused around the brand, individual needs, or how to better reach your target audience groups. We often conduct 3-4 of these per project.
Audience Surveys
We’ll conduct a large-scale survey of your users to set benchmarks and gain insights. We’ll explore everything from your brand awareness to the messages most relevant to what your users really believe, do, and feel. We’ll ask the right questions in the right way. With your collaboration, we’ll craft the survey, help you promote it, and deliver our expert analysis of the results in the form of detailed recommendations.
Competitor & Peer Audit
Your competition is fierce and growing fiercer. Knowing what your competitors and peers are doing is the basis of an effective, fine-tuned strategy: Learn from their good ideas, improve them, and dump the rest. What are they talking about? Where are they talking about it? How popular are they? Among which audiences? Where are they shortsighted? We’ll do the investigating you don’t have the time or objectivity to do — and we’ll deliver our expert analysis in the form of a clear-eyed, sober Competitor Audit.
Profile Development
Profiles are concrete descriptions of made-up people who represent your target audiences. You might meet “Mike the Marketing Manager” or “Susan the Office Superstar” or other profiles that — when built on sound research and described plainly and in detail — make your marketing, resource allocation, and operational decisions much easier.
“Execution without strategy is like firing without aiming.”
— Nick Weynand, President & CEO
Usability Testing
We’ll conduct sophisticated tests of your website’s usability in order to determine what’s working and what isn’t. Do your users know what your website can do? Or do they perhaps think it can do things it can’t (yet)? Do your menus confuse some people? Why? Is your “Donate” button located where it’ll inspire the most clicks? We’ll answer these (and dozens of other) questions, and deliver our analysis in the form of a Usability Action Plan.
Google Analytics
Analytics are a key part of our initial research into your organization and your current marketplace. Google Analytics will tell you everything that happens online. If you want to improve as an organization, you simply must have these insights. Without a robust and easy-to-use Google Analytics set-up, every move you make online will be left to guesswork and luck.
Instead, we’ll transform Google Analytics into your marketing, development, and executive teams’ best friend: a living, real-time account of how you’re actually performing on the Internet. Our Google-certified Analytics professionals will ensure that Google Analytics answers questions — and inspires you to invent questions you’ve never imagined asking.
After your new website launch, we’ll continue our partnership. You’ll receive custom reports. We’ll set up goal conversion funnels. And we’ll continue to train you and your staff on how to turn Google Analytics into your marketing team’s best friend.
Expert Website Review
Our team will evaluate your website on five metrics:
- Design
- Usability
- Technology
- Content
- Accessibility.
For each metric, we’ll list successes, shortcomings, problems, and opportunities. We’ll assign a number score to each metric. We’ll also compare your website to a competitor’s site. In the end, you’ll leave with a clear, compact assessment of what improvements you should make.
Branding & Strategy
“A good brand is like a good friend: reliable, interesting, honest.”
— Rachel Clemens, Chief Marketing Officer
Branding
Your brand is everything — everything — your audiences think of you. Every interaction, every message, every single thing you put into the world shapes your brand. We’re brand experts. We will help your organization rediscover its authentic identity. To do this, we’ll conduct research, meetings, and exercises — what we call the Brand Workshop — that uncovers the most powerful way to position yourself in the world. Then we’ll put it into concrete words and images you can actually use.
Brand Workshop
For organizations that want to refine or reinvent their brand, this is one of the first steps. The brand workshop will last approximately 3-4 hours and involves stakeholders responsible for the major decisions at your organization.
The group is moderated through a range of topics from a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats), to a peer review, to a visual exercise. This will give us a defined and agreed upon place from which to develop a Creative Brief that will inform how we prioritize targets, position the brand, and develop messaging and communication tactics.
Messaging Platform
Here at Mighty Citizen, we’re big believers in simplicity. Which means we also recognize how complex being simple can be. We’ll take everything we’ve done up until now with your organization — discovery, research, testing, and deep thought — and turn it into a Messaging Platform.
Designed to guide your organization’s public-facing identity, the Messaging Platform is a collection of your most compelling messages, organized and carefully worded in a number of ways. You’ll get your positioning statement, value proposition, proof points, audiences, elevator speech, and more. Your new Messaging Platform is just that: a safe ground from which to launch everything you do in the future.
Tagline
There are plenty of reasons to want a great tagline: your organization is new or unknown, the public is confused by your name or brand, you’ve shifted your services or products, etc. Like logos, great taglines say everything about you — and they do so elegantly, with a touch of delight and playfulness sprinkled in. We’ll present you with a series of tagline concepts, and will work with you to select and refine the one that can proudly stand as your public motto.
Logo Design
A new or reimagined logo — done thoughtfully and conceptually — can inject your organization with a new sense of delight and purpose. We’ve designed countless logos for organizations of every type. We believe that a great logo will:
- Tell your story in a second
- Stick in the viewer’s mind
- Offer a few different interpretations
After Discovery, we’ll deliver a number of unique logo concepts. You’ll tell us which you like — and why — and we’ll revise them to your specifications. In the end, we’ll present you with your new logo in every conceivable form, ensuring that you can deploy it across your organization right away.
Brand Guidelines
If your brand is going to maximize its impact in the world, it has to be consistently deployed. Wherever people encounter your brand—whether online or off—it should feel familiar, reliable, and trustworthy.
To make protecting and promoting your brand easy, we’ll craft your Brand Guidelines—a report that explains in plain language how your brand should (and shouldn’t) appear to the public. Logos, taglines, colors, image treatments, key copy—the major elements of your brand will be accounted for. Whether via advertising, website, printed materials, apparel, signage, fleet graphics, wayfinding, etc., your staff will be able to quickly understand how to promote and protect your organization’s identity.
Design & User Experience
User Experience (UX)
Your users are the Alpha and Omega. It is their needs, concerns, challenges, and desires that drive every decision we make at Mighty Citizen. Whether we’re building a fundraising campaign, designing a new website, or crafting campaigns that bring new people to your doorstep, we’re contemplating: What will work for your target users? That’s why we’ve invested heavily in seasoned, experienced, battle-tested UX designers who can bring sophisticated insights that will give you an edge.
“Structure creates understanding.”
— Mike Steckel, Vice President of UX & Research
Information Architecture
Information architecture is how the content on your website, emails, and print materials is structured and displayed. Because it doesn’t matter how compelling your content is: If your users can’t make sense of it, they’ll leave in a flash. Our seasoned Information Architects will strike that delicate balance between boosting your online goals and serving your users’ needs. The Information Architecture phase delivers a series of wireframes — i.e., blueprints for your website — that makes the connections between you and your users in the most effective way possible.
“Content is the only reason anyone visits your website.”
— Andrew Buck, Associate Creative Director
Content Strategy
Content is everything. It’s the reason the Internet exists. It’s the reason anyone visits your website. That’s the good news. The bad news? The Internet is clogged with content. Your competition is fierce. Luckily, most of the Internet is lifeless and irrelevant — which means you can stand out if you deliver great content.
We begin many projects by conducting a comprehensive Content Inventory & Audit. This document lists every type of content — web page, module, social media platform, etc. — that you publish and measures it against your goals and organizational structure. You’ll receive a Content Style Guide that defines how you should write about yourself to maintain a consistent brand and message.
Content Governance
For especially large organizations, we’ll also help you craft a Content Governance Plan that ensures you’re managing your content efficiently. This plan identifies who writes what content, where it’s deployed, who reviews it, and the proper process for publishing a consistent and compelling message.
Copywriting
The difference between good writing and great writing is the difference between a 20% open rate on your emails and a 35% open rate, or the difference between 10,000 website visits per month and 25,000. Words matter. So let our experienced, collaborative copywriters take the load off your team. We’ll deliver concise, compelling, and thoughtful copy that speaks to who you are. We’ll help you define your voice — and then write as many pages of copy as your brand needs.
“Great design is the complex pursuit of simplicity.”
— Polly Thurston, Creative Director
Visual Design
Colors. Photography. Illustration. Animation. All of these contribute to how people feel about your organization. At its best, visual design works in harmony with your content to create an unmistakable, unforgettable experience for your users. It’s not about picking pretty colors; it’s about injecting your design with thoughtful concepts.
And because we want to empower you with a visual identity that is flexible and scalable, we often deliver our online visual recommendations as (what we call) an Element Collage. The Element Collage approach means you see both the pieces that’ll make up your new visual identity and how they can be assembled, online or off.
Mobile-Responsive Design
If you don’t have a mobile-responsive website, stop what you’re doing and contact us immediately. These days, not offering your users a thoughtful experience on mobile devices (like tablets and smartphones) is a surefire way to lose opportunities. (And Google will punish you for it, too!) Here at Mighty Citizen, we start our design process from the mobile point-of-view. This mobile-first approach means your mobile users have an equally rewarding experience as your desktop users, while also forcing us to think critically about how to communicate your organization’s purpose as effectively and efficiently as possible.
Print Design & Collateral Material
We’ve designed countless print materials — e.g., brochures, fundraising campaign mailers, annual reports, research studies, higher-ed viewbooks, etc. As with our digital work, we aim always to infuse our print designs with compelling concepts and best-in-class aesthetics. Every piece of print collateral has a purpose; and we’ll ensure that our designs directly serve that purpose.
Marketing & SEO
Marketing Strategy
Strategy is a collection of tactics aimed at a specific, measurable goal. In this sense, crafting a marketing strategy is like balancing marbles on a plate: even the slightest movement can send everything off kilter. This is our approach to promoting your organization: balance, focus, nonstop attention, skill.
Specifically, our strategists will deliver your organization a plan. Whether for a discrete campaign — like a fundraising or enrollment push — or something yearlong and organization-wide, we’ll detail the following:
- What you should say
- To whom you should say it
- How often you should say it
- And where it should be said
Armed with the insights uncovered during your Discovery phase, we’ll identify the channels, messages, and schedule you need to produce measurable results. (That word — ”measurable” — is kind of our motto around here.)
Boost awareness. Attract new members. Increase donations. Improve enrollment. Deliver more services. Strengthen your position.
And do it all with collaboration, delight, and sophistication.
“SEO is like a mystery novel, the more keywords you use, the more visibility you gain, but beware of keyword stuffing, it’s the equivalent of a plot twist nobody wants.”
— A Mighty Citizen
Search Engine Optimization
Nearly 1 million Google searches happen every minute. That’s 60 million searches per hour, and nearly 1.5 billion per day. But how many of those searches lead people to your digital doorstep? Without a keen eye toward optimizing your website to please the big search engines (Google and Bing), you’re surely missing out on countless visitors — people who are looking for what you do, but who never know you exist because you’re buried in the 3rd page of search results.
Let us change your position in search results. Let us apply our custom SEO expertise to every scrap of content on your website — infusing it with a strategy that will (a) improve your ranking and (b) get you found.
Search Advertising
The top results on Google are advertisements. They’re paid for. But it’s not enough simply to throw money at advertising. Instead, we’ll work closely with you to develop a targeted, comprehensive plan to deliver visitors at the lowest investment possible. The name of the game is “ROI” and our skilled advertising experts will constantly curate your search advertising strategy — ensuring that it’s delivering the results you deserve. (For nonprofit organizations, we’ll show you how to get and get the most out of free advertising from the Google Ad Grants program.)
“Data becomes information. Information becomes insight. Insight becomes a to-do list.”
— Joi Bass, Director of Marketing
Social Media Advertising
If you want to be seen on most social media platforms, you have to pay for it. That’s the unfortunate truth of online marketing these days. But the options are endless. Deciphering each social media platform’s unique advertising capabilities — and crafting ads that work — is a nonstop job. Turn it over to us, and simply await the oncoming engagement. We’ll craft a strategy that aligns directly with your goals. (And if you don’t know your goals yet, we’ll help you figure those out too!) Our advertising approach is all about ROI — i.e., making sure we’re supporting your goals at the lowest possible investment.
Email Marketing & Marketing Automation Platforms
Email is the most effective online marketing tactic at your disposal. Done right, a robust email marketing plan can produce instant revenue and engagement. But as with everything online, the options and customizations are endless. We’ll help you evaluate your email lists, segmentation, and goals.
Then we’ll develop a strategy, and execute the strategy — going as far as to write your emails, personalize them, A/B split test them, deliver them, and analyze the results in an actionable way.
Or you can go a step further and deploy a marketing automation platform (MAP). These savvy, remarkable software solutions can make email marketing more personalized, targeted, and effective. But setting them up can be a challenge full of irrelevant features and potential pitfalls. Having deployed MAPs for other organizations, we know precisely what needs to be done — both on your MAP and within your organization — to make automated email a cornerstone of your digital marketing strategy.
Fundraising Strategy & Implementation
Great fundraising campaigns all have one thing in common: They tell a great story in a great way. With our extensive experience in nonprofit fundraising, we bring a keen understanding of how to balance strategy and execution. We’ll work closely with your team to develop a tactical plan that targets the right audiences, then implement it using our design, technology, and digital marketing expertise. You’ll raise more money from more people—it’s really that simple.
Media Planning
In the data-first world of media, planning and audience identification are some of your first steps to aligning your media plan with your overall creative and marketing strategy. By relying on our rich, battle-tested experience and our acute interest in emerging technologies, we help our clients meet their most pressing mandate: to do more with less, do it faster, and prove that it worked.
Media Buying
Gone are the days of “set it and forget it”. We plan nimbly, buy programmatically, and optimize constantly. Regardless of the medium (online, mobile, print, TV, radio, etc.), there are three core media buying tactics that our media buying team focuses on: Direct Media Buying, Programmatic Media Buying, and Paid Search Advertising. Our hands-on team ensures that your media are bought efficiently, with transparency, and are in sync with your overall brand strategy. Our industry veterans will make sure you achieve targeted results. Just as importantly, we’ll help you to understand what this new world of programmatic media buying means to you and your brand (yes – you can even buy traditional media programmatically now!).
Web Development
Web development is the coding of your website. It’s how we turn designs into real, working, powerful homes on the Internet. But that doesn’t mean it should be a mystery. In fact, we build websites on a number of user-friendly content management systems (see below). And on the back-end, we craft code that meets the latest and greatest standards, both in accessibility and best practices. Our code is clean, scannable, flexible, and portable. The bottom line is: If it can be done online, we can build it.
“Development is where the rubber meets the road. We turn ideas into reality.”
— Stephen Tidmore, Executive Vice President of Technology
Content Management System (CMS)
Your content management system (CMS) is the tool you’ll use to manage your website. It’s where you’ll add and edit content and control your users’ interactions. At Mighty Citizen, we specialize in several CMS platforms that we consider the best in their class. These CMSs include:
- Craft
- Drupal
- WordPress
- ExpressionEngine
- Kentico
- Sitecore
- Umbraco
Each of these offers unique features. So after Discovery, we’ll recommend the CMS platform that makes the most sense for your organization. Whichever CMS we select, our goal is always to turn managing your website from a chore into a delight.
Application Development
If it’s digital, we do it. That includes the design and development of applications — both mobile apps and web apps. Our skilled developers will transform your idea into a fully interactive, easy-to-manage application that directly supports your goals. We’ll deploy the same tried-and-true tactics we use to create award-winning websites — including our proven project management process, integration of third-party systems and APIs, and complete quality assurance (QA) and usability testing.
Accessibility
Accessibility refers to building a website that is usable by any person, regardless of their disability. At Mighty Citizen, we believe strongly in designing accessible websites and experiences. We adhere to the most current principles for technology design such Section 508, WCAG, and TAC 206 standards.
Third-Party Software Integrations
Your website is the hub of your digital identity, but it’s not the only software your organization uses. There are CRMs, email marketing tools, databases, member management systems, and more. Some of the common integrations we create include:
- CRMs like Salesforce, Zoho, etc.
- Email marketing platforms like MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, Constant Contact, etc.
- Marketing automation platforms like HubSpot, Eloqua, Pardot, etc.
- Donor databases like Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge, Donor Perfect, etc.
- Membership management systems (MMS) like iMis, YourMembership, MemberClicks, etc.
- Student information systems like Banner, Oracle, Unit4, etc.
But really, we integrate them all — and we build them according to your particular needs. By developing technically sound integrations between your website and your third-party software, we’re able to deliver a more efficient, easy, value-added experience to your users.