Skills Overview
Three Reasons You Should Let Us Be Your Guide
We speak nonprofit.
We work only with nonprofit organizations, so we know your greatest assets as well as your pain points. We know yow to get you noticed and attract supporters to your cause.We dream in pixels.
With over 150 years of combined experience, our team loves to create, design, brand, code, and solve problems. We eat, sleep and breathe this stuff. And we love it.We know you are unique.
While we are masters of industry standards and best practices, we take a fresh approach to each project, creating custom, goal-driven, audience-focused solutions for all of our clients.Downloads
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Download these documents to learn more about what we do for our clients.
- Marketing
- Client Stories
Our Services
We do a lot. Download these resources to learn more.
Interactive Design
Wordpress
Who We Are
Branding & Identity
Analysis & Action
The Proof is in the Projects
We don’t just make you look cool. We get results too.
Client Story: Ronald McDonald House Philadelphia
Client Story: Museum of Glass
Client Story: Kents Hill School
Client Story: Easter Seals DuPont & Fox Valley Region
Client Story: Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund
Client Story: Bill of Rights
Client Story: A Safe Haven
Client Story: Alpha Kappa Psi
Core Competencies
Let us Guide You
A Nonprofit Focus to Strategic Design
We’re a full-service design agency born out of a desire to help nonprofits achieve their mission through creative design. We are experts in branding, strategy, print design, visual design, website development, analytics and digital analysis. And we work exclusively with nonprofits.
Strategy and Planning
Rolling out a new design can rejuvenate your brand, energize supporters and boost staff morale. Often it's tempting to set an aggressive launch timeline in an effort to refocus your time back to day-to-day tasks (which, at a nonprofit, are undeniably important). But, before you should jump into a branding project or a new website design, it’s absolutely imperative to lay the groundwork.
Basing design on a solid strategy will make your project more relevant, engaging and overall more effective in achieving your organization’s goals. The key elements of a successful nonprofit strategy include: defining your goals, identifying and understanding your audience and drawing out a plan for success.Let us be your guide.
At Guide Creative, we pride ourselves in developing strategies that tie back to your nonprofit’s goals, benchmarking, setting measurement strategies, laying out clear plans, training your team and helping you get started. Together, we'll explore your organization's creative history, where things stand in the current landscape and how your plan should be laid out to accomplish your organization’s unique strategic goals. We believe if you're spending time and effort on design services, it only makes sense to understand what success means to your nonprofit and set out on your journey into the unknown with a trusty roadmap.Our strategic services include:
- Audience Analysis
- Competitive Research
- Marketing Plan Development
- Website Audit
- Persona Development
- Content Strategy
- Benchmarking
- Information Architecture
Branding and Identity
Sure, a brand includes a logo, business cards, and stationary... But a brand is not just visual design; it’s the emotional and psychological relationship supporters have with your organization. Creating the brand of a nonprofit is unique in that most constituents already feel an emotional tie to your mission but defining clear brand dimensions, key messages, and desired actions of supporters requires extensive research and expert guidance.
Let us guide you
Guide Creative’s branding specialists will dig to the core of your organization’s identity through in-depth interviews and discussions with key personnel and supporters and through extensive research and analysis. It’s imperative to define and refine your brand, live it, and communicate it across all channels to build trust with your supporters and ensure your voice is heard. A solid brand strategy and design will allow you to show the world who you are, who you serve and what you’re all about. Our branding and identity specialists have devoted their careers to developing brands based on in-depth discovery sessions regarding your successes, challenges, mission and goals.Our packaged services include:
- Market & competitive research
- Visioning workshops
- Brand architecture & positioning
- Culture workshops
- Brand testing & strategy
- Logo design
- Brand manuals
- Print & digital material design
- Brand training
Add-on services include:
- Naming
- Marketing collateral design
- Custom print design
- Favicon creation
- Social media design
- Outdoor signage
- Brand training
- Trademarking
- Brand success tracking
- Agency of record
Visual Design
With a bevy of things to see in this wide, wide world, you have a finite window to captivate your audience with engaging visuals, compelling imagery and a clear path to what they're looking for. A powerful visual design is the one chance your organization has at a first impression. Together, we'll hit 'em with our best shot.
Let us guide you
Guide Creative understands the elements of a strong visual design. From rich photography and the importance of eye contact to visual representation of your mission, we will ensure your design is built in adherence to your brand guidelines and with the goal of helping your organization fulfill its very important mission. Guide Creative: making the world a better place, one design at a time.Visual Design Services Include:
- Website design
- Print design
- Marketing and collateral design
- Email design
- Mission visual storytelling
- Five-second testing
- Photography
- Video
- Animation
- Infographics
- Visual hierarchy and wireframes
- Content layout and design
- Color theory
Website Development
Your website is a tool used to engage, interact with and mobilize your audience, ultimately inspiring action.
Let us guide you
Guide Creative’s extensive research and work with nonprofits in creating strategic, impactful designs has helped us uncover nonprofit best practices for interactive design. We incorporate these best practices into each and every design we create, while focusing on the individual needs of your organization. We keep up on the latest technology, social media trends and methods of engaging supporters so that our designs are indestructible in an ever-changing world. Our tireless commitment to "knowing wassup" is a labor of love and because of it, we continue to be the most relied-upon resource for nonprofit website development.Our development services include:
- CMS recommendations and build: WordPress, NetCommunity, Blackbaud Sphere, Expression Engine, and more
- Multimedia
- Javascript
- Virtual maps and tours
- Video
- Photo slideshows
- Interactive visual elements
- Forms
- Online fundraising
Mobile and Social
As a nonprofit, you want to be where your supporters are – on the go, on social media, in multimedia, all over the web, really. We understand that in this day and age, you've got to reach out to your supporters on their terms and not expect them to come to you.
Let us guide you
It's impossible not to have noticed the insertion of smartphones and tablets into our everyday lives. And naturally, we get it - we're tech junkies ourselves. So we understand how important it is to maintain the consistency of your brand and message across all platforms. The key is to provide your audience with relevant content, news and information where it's easiest for them to act: right in the palm of their hands.Social and Mobile Serivices Include:
- Social strategy
- Social fundraising
- Facebook and Twitter page design
- Blog design and best practices
- Mobile websites
- Task-based mobile pages
- Mobile fundraising design
- QR code strategy and mobile layouts
- Responsive design
Analysis and Action
We lean on the belief that a good strategy means you’re never finished measuring, analyzing and planning.
Let us guide you
At Guide Creative, “analysis and action” means revisiting your benchmarks and defining measurement plans that track specific metrics for your organization’s unique goals. Understanding successes, challenges, trends and opportunities for improvement allows your nonprofit to see the big picture. Developing an ongoing action plan and approach allows for a design that ultimately helps further your mission. There are many different tools used to analyze progress. We'll create a custom approach tailored to your organization’s particular needs, combining the right balance of quantitative and qualitative measurements. By guiding you through a plan for continual data tracking and analysis, we will not only set you up for immediate results, but refine your organization’s strategy for long-term success. Our full-time design and web strategy analysts specialize in helping nonprofits create and realize strategic goals through design. We'll help you define what worked, what didn’t and what you should do next.Our Analysis and Action Services
- Search Engine Optimization
- SEO copywriting
- Copy/content editing
- Website analytics tracking
- Website analytics reporting
- Website analytics tool recommendation and training
- Surveys
- Polls
- Usability testing
- Email testing
- User experience testing
Communications Coordinator & Summer Program Director, The Roeper School
"We appreciate all of the work you did to get our site up and running. Yesterday’s switch couldn’t have gone any better. Working with you has been a pleasure."Our Process
A tried & true method
Guide Creative's audience-focused approach to design combines unparalleled nonprofit design expertise, powerful, flexible technology and a collaborative process to help you portray the best possible face of your organization that supports your strategic goals and overall mission.
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Define & Plan
Define the problem & determine goals.
Art and technology watch is part of our daily life, we follow the very latest and upcoming trends. We carry out benchmarking for each customized approach. Together, we analyze your target to define your objectives.
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Research & Strategy
Take a detailed look at your audience & your needs
Our team puts the user experience at the heart of the design by providing a unique structure, and a clear and intuitive way to organize your content that will resonate with your constituents.
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Design
Create the fresh new look that will make an impact
Our designers visually shape your creative identity, bringing your content and brand to life through design.
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Build & Test
Construct the solution, create interactivity and test it like crazy!
We rely on the current and emerging web development technologies that will drive your application now and for years to come. This approach allows us to create effective sites, capable of handling heavy traffic loads without compromising availability.
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Manage & Analyze
Review what’s working and how we can make it better
To get the most from strategic design, we propose regular checkins on its evolution. We work together on improvements that will enhance the user experience.