Acumen is a non-profit that raises charitable donations to invest in companies, leaders, and ideas that are changing the way the world tackles poverty.

Client Testimonial

James Wu, Brand Manager

Our new identity is bold and exciting, but also extremely challenging to work with given its strict 16-degree angles, finicky (yet beautiful!) type, and wide color palette. However, the team at Briteweb is made up of exceptionally talented designers and developers who were more than up for the challenge. They were able to apply the new identity online through our website, mobile site and social media properties in brilliant and unexpected ways, creating a gorgeous, cohesive and thoroughly enjoyable experience across platforms.

But, the real value of working with Briteweb goes beyond their great design and programming chops. They proved to be a major thought-partner to Acumen, helping us craft and produce inspiring videos, guiding us in writing fresh and accessible copy, and in essence, serving as a both a creative and strategic communications shop. Acumen’s work can be difficult to understand and Briteweb was able to help us produce and present our content in a clearer, more comprehensible, and more compelling way than ever before.

This, of course, did not come easy. The team spent months working with us to develop the strategy and vision before going to work. This took real dedication, commitment, listening, and resolve. It took patience. As most of our creative partners can attest, we are not an easy bunch to work with. But, Briteweb was clearly up to the test. They answered our quirks and demands with a balance of generosity and accountability — two values which are core to Acumen’s work — and we could not be more grateful, pleased or indebted.

To top it all off, the team at Briteweb is simply fun. While any project has its highs and lows, it’s the way you come out of those lows which are the true mark of any relationship. Briteweb was always able to keep our team motivated, inspired and laughing along the way — often at ourselves. At the end of the day, you knew they were on your team and had your best interests in mind, feeling a real sense of ownership, shared vision, and common purpose. I could not be more excited about what lies ahead for our budding partnership.

Videos

Concepting, Directing, Producing & Editing by #Briteweb

Our client, Henriquez Partners, approached us about this project. KGMS is a centre of excellence in developmentally informed instruction that empowers children with learning disabilities in a passionate, progressive and inspiring learning environment.

We had a great time working with Head of School, Dr James Christopher, to create a new online presence for this incredible school, including photography, video, content strategy, copywriting and a new mobile-ready WordPress website.

Acumen invests charitable donations in companies, leaders and ideas that are creating longterm solutions to poverty. Since 2001, Acumen has impacted over 100 million lives worldwide.

For this campaign, Briteweb designed and developed a beautiful new responsive website, HD video, communications and outreach strategy including social media, email campaign and partner outreach.

Secret Study is a boutique music agency that connects brands with musicians and artists. They’re a dynamic group of music-lovers with a knack for connecting the arts with business opportunities and wanted to make a splash in their industry.

Briteweb helped find their voice, clarify their value proposition and crystallize their offerings. We then went to work re-imaging their brand and online presence. The results speak for themselves.

This is a custom WordPress website, fully responsive with a custom mobile version all powered from a single CMS, so no duplicated content or pain points with updating content. We could talk about the fancy administrative experience we built for them, but the fun part is the beautiful user experience.

More than just growing artisan quality fruits and vegetables, Sole Food is a remarkable social enterprise that empowers individuals with limited resources. They provide jobs, agricultural training and inclusion in a supportive community of farmers and food lovers. Briteweb completely redefined the Sole Food brand and website, helping the organization craft their story and scale their operation.

Advanture is one of Canada’s top management consulting firms. Briteweb brought their new brand to life with a fully responsive and custom WordPress site.

Tides Canada is the nation’s largest charitable foundation focused on environmental and social justice challenges. Clean Energy Canada is a program of the Tides Canada Energy Initiative. TCEI is working to ensure Canada remains strong and prosperous through the necessary global shift to clean, low-carbon energy.

We helped them develop their language, social media integration strategy and build a clean, responsive WordPress website that works beautifully across browsers, tablets and mobile.

Nicole Bridger is a fashion line for a new generation of women who want to look effortlessly chic while maintaining a commitment to the earth and its people. Nicole Bridger uses the finest ethically-sourced materials and dyes, both from a social and environmental standpoint.

+acumen chapters are deeply committed volunteer-led groups learning and sharing Acumen‘s principles and approach to help create a world beyond poverty – a more inclusive and sustainable future for all.

Henriquez Partners Architects are unique in that they have a strong focus on the social implications of their work. They wanted their website to reflect this, and to bring to life the conversations and issues that surrounded development and urban design.

Briteweb was pleased to provide Check Your Head with a brand re-design in collaboration with David Arias, including new colors, brand and logo marks, and a branding guide.

We then went to work on a strategy to guide their new WordPress website design and development. We had four core objectives: 1) Provide visitors with a fun and informative way to browse and register for workshops, 2) empower youth to take action in their community and to participate in the ideation of new actions that could be taken, 3) create tools to allow for multiple content authors and crowd-sourced content, 4) clearly illustrate Check Your Head’s value, significance and partners to potential funders.

For Teachers, we created a beautiful interface to browse and book workshops. Visitors can browse all the workshops from one page, see associated Actions and fill out a clear and concise booking form with all the necessary details.

For youth, we created the Actions and Resources sections. Youth can browse actions and get inspiration and instruction on how to become real change-makers in their community. If they’ve completed an action, they can also submit an Action Report to tell others about their work, as well as submit photos and video. We also thought it would be empowering to allow youth to submit action ideas that, once approved, would be listed on the website alongside the existing actions. We built forms that collect the Action Reports and Ideas, and turn them into draft content posts, which Admin can review and publish with a few quick clicks.  The Resources section is completely revamped and reorganized as well, making it easy to find links to cool books, magazines, films and music.

The site has dozens of other cool features as well, but we’ll stop talking about it. If you’d like to learn more, give us a call!

In January 2012 the sustainability community will come together to create an ‘ECO’ domain extension, offering a new option to choose a domain name that ends with .ECO instead of .COM. Our job was to market the initiative to major NGOs and Green Biz Associations with the intent of earning endorsements to strengthen the Dot Eco bid.

Briteweb provided a full service communication and web development strategy. Once we refined and packaged Dot Eco’s communication message, we produced a series of 18 videos featuring interviews in 5 continents, as well as a WordPress website platform to deliver the Dot Eco message. By stripping away the unnecessary technical jargon and honing in on core values, we were able to capture a story that has helped win endorsements from Dot Eco’s top wish-list NGO’s and organizations.

The Cheaper Show is an annual grassroots event organized by local artists featuring 200 international artists showing 400 pieces of art, all priced at $200. This year’s show featured artists from 17 countries, which were drawn from 1500 international submissions in 45 countries.

Briteweb was responsible for designing and developing the show’s WordPress website, in addition to implementing and managing the show’s communication strategy with a specific focus on content development, community engagement, PR and social media.

The Cheaper Show’s website showcases the artists and event information and is also a year-round blog that highlights artists and community art events in a highly curated listing.

Thanks to an extremely effective 2 year online engage strategy and incredible press coverage, the site received 2.8 million hits in June this year, peaking at 185,000 per day the week of the event.

Services

• web strategy
• website design and development
• social media plan
• manage intake and curation process of over 1000 submissions via website admin (custom developed)
• live event IT logistics: multiple video projections, sales systems, team communications

Our long-time client, Balanced WorkLife needed a tool that offered sales professionals the ability to profile a potential sales contact personality and communication style, harnessing the power of DISC assessments. We developed a mobile web app, compatible with all Apple, Android & web ready rich-mobile devices, along with a basic web version.

The People Profiler is a highly-reduced version of the DISC Behavioral Assessment, which typically takes 20-30 minutes to complete. Briteweb worked with the coaches at Balanced WorkLife on the algorithm that would pack this 30 minute assessment into 8 simple questions that takes the user 2 minutes. Our automated test scripts ran hundreds of thousands of assessments to perfect the methodology and guarantee accuracy.

In addition to our work with The Cheaper Show’s online strategy and wordpress website, #BW spent 2010/11 developing a business and organizational strategy, and handling event direction and production for the last two years.

Behind the scenes, as Executive Director, Steve Rio developed a comprehensive show operations plan and budget, built the Show’s sponsorship deck, procured all key sponsorship relationships, founded a federal non-profit foundation and built relationships with local and provincial government offices.

On the frontlines, #BW managed show production, logistics, overseeing the 100+ strong crew of staff and volunteers, merchandise, marketing and overseeing all operations and IT for the 2010 and 2011 events.

Samantha Langdorf played a critical role in the 2011 event, acting as project manager, accountant, communications coordinator and assisting both Graeme Berglund (Creative Director) Steve Rio in his executive duties. Samantha was also in charge of content and social media coordination for the 2011 show.

Overview of Executive & Production Services

• organizational infrastructure development and implementation
• budget creation & management
• incorporation of a federal non-profit organization (Emerging Arts Foundation – Steve Rio, Founding Member)
• achieve agency partnership with registered charity
• marketing strategy & materials
• sponsorship procurement, relations
• all aspects of show production and planning
• team leadership of 13 employees and 100+ volunteers
• media & marketing production

The Briteweb team had an incredible time helping the show develop, and was honoured to work with such a talented and dedicated crew of individuals, including Graeme Berglund (Founder, Creative Director), Tim Furness (2011 Event Producer), Zoe Peled (Associate Producer, Volunteer Coordinator), Adam Fryatt (Environment Designer), Danny Vermette (Logistics/Construction) and Jessica Delorme (Curator).

#BW also had the pleasure of working with the incredible design crew @ CLOU, and the lovely ladies @ Heth PR.

Saje Natural Wellness sells 100% All Natural body & lifestyle products based on aromatherapy and natural medicine principles. They asked us to help them re-imagine their online presence and rebuild their online store.

We started with a deep analysis of their current website, online presence and then built a comprehensive set of benchmarks. Our goal was to foster a community around the blog and their social media assets so when the new website launched, their audience would be ready to activate immediately.

The website we developed is a highly integrated hybrid of CS-Cart (popular shopping cart platform) and WordPress. The integration from a visitor’s perspective is seamless. The configuration allows Saje to harness all of the SEO goodness and easy content management of WordPress combined with a robust e-commerce platform.

During development, we fostered their online community, starting their Twitter and Facebook engagement, and cultivated a blog featuring 10 authors in a variety of complimentary fields. This ensured that the day we launched the new e-com website, there was a fresh community ready to engage.

#BW provided a simple WordPress website design and development project to showcase Transmission Site’s office and production spaces. We employed modern ajax and javascript techniques to create a single-page slider that loads each sequential page as the visitor browses.

Recently we’ve assisted them as they entered the Somed space, training and assisting Transmission’s all-star social-media maven, @AZAR1A, with blogging, Twitter, Facebook and SEO best practices.

#BW spent the fall/winter of ’09 working with an amazing organization leading up to and in Copenhagen for the UNF Climate Change Conference. We were working with TckTckTck, a coalition of over 250 NGOs, youth groups, and others including WWF, Greenpeace, Oxfam, 1SKY, 350, and a host of other huge organizations. It was an amazing 3 months, working crazy hours, and traveling to New York, Barcelona, and two trips to Copenhagen.

Steve Rio acted as project manager, IT strategy manager, and lead the logistics team creating and operating the Fresh Air Center in Copenhagen, during the Conference. Steve Rio was hired by and had the pleasure of working with Jason Mogus, lead Strategist at Communicopia.

We came onboard in the early stages, and helped shape the vision along with Jason Mogus and Beka Economopoulos from Fission Strategy. We came up with the Fresh Air name and brand as well as helped shape key language used for internal capacity building as well as public outreach.

When I think of what it means to be a new media journalist today, I think about the Fresh Air Center. What was most amazing was not just the fantastic journalists and activists I met, but the spirit of cooperation and camaraderie fostered in this environment. Unequivocally, it’s the backbone to where new media is going.

— Huffington Post green editor Katherine Goldstein

Once the vision was in place, our first goal was to engage the major partners of TckTckTck: Greenpeace, 350.org, Oxfam, Avaaz, and many others. To achieve this, Steve set off for the COP15 intercessional in Barcelona, where he spent 10 days in meetings with literally hundreds of individuals and organizations, laying the groundwork and building relationships that would be crucial for success.

Steve then spent 7 days in Copenhagen scouting and procuring our venues, local personnel and logistic needs.

In preparation for, and during the operation of the live Fresh Air Center, Steve was responsible for a wide range of activities including partner engagement and activation, all logistic requirements including accomodations, venues, furnishings, audio/visuals, and human resources in Copenhagen and Vancouver.

#BW provided all IT strategy and implementation with the help of a hired technical implementation expert, Norbert Payne,  in Copenhagen. The IT build included phone lines, satellite internet run from ceiling to basement of the 4 story building, multiple wireless networks, video editing suites with hyper-speed connections, stage and AV equipment for live talks and all security measures.

The project took place across Vancouver, New York, Barcelona and Copenhagen.