Case Study: Connect Cascadia

Challenges

The Cascadia Innovation Corridor connects the peoples of British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon in a spirit of common endeavor. Like the other 40 mega-regions in the world, Cascadia is first and foremost an economic engine for regional prosperity today and tomorrow. Unique to our mega-region, it is striving to become the world’s first sustainable mega-region —  planning for responsible growth by addressing the challenges that come with an increasing population, such as prohibitive housing costs and congestion, while seizing the opportunity to manifest a brighter, healthier, affordable, and connected future for our community. Through the Cascadia Innovation Corridor, they work toward these goals through their experts on our subcommittees who engage in cross-border partnerships.

Our challenge was to resuscitate an outdated, neglected, dysfunctional website — ConnectCascadia.com — and re-organize it to display the tremendous work the initiative had accomplished over the past several years, as well as more clearly highlight its mission and direction going forward.

Solutions and Outcomes

We followed a similar approach to that we recommend for the Biller Family Foundation site: redesign the site to put the organization’s impact front and center — from reports to initiatives to areas of focus. We used our ‘discovery’ process to hone in on the initiatives’s core messages and how to best frame them online. We also incorporated new content — reports, official statements, memoranda of understanding, video conferences — and presented it in a more accessible manner. In short, we took a website that was ignored and not serving the initiative’s mission and re-made it into the initiative’s central source of content, information, and action.

Services

• Design, art direct, copywrite, develop, launch, maintain, and host websites; infographic design
• Reorganize video and written content for optimal presentation.
• Hardened website security
• Custom photo-illustration and graphic design
• Ongoing website maintenance and monitoring
• Essential WordPress training
• SEO and Google Analytics
• Brand guidelines