A Long-Term Partnership with Aesop
The Challenge
Frontline Placement Technologies is the leading producer of substitute and temporary worker placement software (Aesop) for the education, event management, library, and health care markets. Imprecise web content and time-consuming changes were hindering Frontline’s progress. Dyke Habegger, Frontline’s graphic designer and YCP liaison explains, “Before YCP was involved, what we had was a website where if you looked really hard, you could figure out what was going on with our company.” Frontline was using a popular open source content management system, provided by their former web site developer, which was limiting what they could do with their web site and causing them to spend hours making simple changes.
The Solution
In January of 2007, Your Creative People was called up to Philadelphia to meet with Frontline’s CEO Michael Blackstone and their marketing team to discuss how to clearly target each of their web sites. Shortly after, Frontline engaged YCP to help rebrand their company in all of their online initiatives. Dyke recounts: “We gave [YCP] a few little projects at the beginning to see if it [was] worth the long-distance relationship between Philadelphia and Greenville; and they proved above and beyond measure that they were be able to do it.” This was the start of a highly successful rebranding partnership that garnered significant numbers of leads and successfully grew revenue for their software service. In an e-mail referring YCP to one of his associates, Blackstone said, “I came out of an advertising background and when it comes to creative, I am very picky. We waded through a number of creative teams before we met these guys. I would highly recommend them. ...extremely organized, great communicator[s] and they ‘get it’.”
YCP began by redesigning the corporate site then moved on to creating targeted sites for each vertical market. While working closely with Frontline’s marketing team, YCP partnered with Frontline on 11 different web sites, including one for the launch of a brand new product called “Jobulator.” Dyke recounts, “Now, we actually have something that tells the story of what our products are, what they do, what the benefits are, and [sends] a clear call to action to our prospects. It’s remarkable what YCP was able to do with our web presence that we were never able to do before.” YCP also partnered with Frontline to provide print and logo design work as well as creating and managing their e-mail marketing campaigns, which went out regularly to over 12,000 contacts. Instead of having to go with several different developers for web design, web programming, video, flash, and a separate company to provide the content management system, they found all of that in one company: Your Creative People.
The YCP strategy is to partner with clients by focusing on developing a long-term relationship where solid understanding of the client and a spirit of genuine partnership exists.
“YCP does what we haven’t seen from other firms, which is an attention to details and an attention to our needs as a client on a daily basis. What differentiates YCP from so many other agencies is the personal time and attention they have put into every project that we do. That’s been very impressive.”
- Dyke Habegger More Testimonials
Content Management
For over two years, Frontline has taken full advantage of YCP’s Backstage content management software to update all of their web sites and delegate content editing to others in their organization. With Backstage, they spend minutes, not hours, making simple changes to their web sites. YCP has worked closely with Frontline to tailor Backstage to the specific needs that have arisen, including coding custom functionality, which helps streamline several internal processes resulting in internal savings of time and money. Backstage has put content editing in the hands of Frontline’s non-IT people and allowed them to manage Flash, video, and other highly interactive features not normally found in a content management system. YCP also built and branded a new educator’s social networking site for Frontline that runs on the Backstage platform. Jonathan Pavoni, of the Frontline marketing team states, “I don’t need a degree [in] web site design and HTML to manage my web site anymore. Backstage has made it very easy for me to edit pictures, links, text and flash without contacting a webmaster. With user friendly design, Backstage has created a way for anyone to manage their entire web site.” Frontline has clearly seen the organizational benefits of using Backstage as their content management system. In their words, “We love Backstage.”