Process

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Process

Your alumni love the new website, your viewbooks are the hottest thing at the college fair, and your Twitter feeds are hopping 24/7. That’s great—almost as good as the growth in applications, donations, and general goodwill these successes are meant to inspire. But what makes these successes possible—and what you’ll most remember—is the process that got you here.

Depending on the project, that process will involve between six and 18 months with mStoner. We know from experience that this time will be most productive and trouble-free when you have a clear sense of who is responsible for doing what and when. No matter how much our clients like what we do, they trust us more when they know what’s going on. Trust makes the work better.

Though our process adapts according to the project, we usually follow these steps:

  • Pre-Engagement. With you, we establish a scope of work, put project teams in place, and build preliminary schedules.
  • Intake. We review background materials and visit campus for in-depth meetings with students, faculty, and project stakeholders.
  • Strategy. We share what we learned during intake and our plan for achieving the project goals.
  • Creative Development. We create and test verbal and visual concepts for your website, viewbook, mobile site, ad campaign, or other project.
  • Technical Implementation. Time to roll up our sleeves and actually make the, um, donuts.
  • Launch. Your website goes live, your viewbooks get mailed, your billboards get hung, and your president bursts into your office crying with what we hope is joy.

Using variations on this process, we can maximize the time spent exploring your needs, targeting a solution, and achieving the results you want. We’ve found that this framework allows us the flexibility to meet the needs of many different clients, with many different objectives.

Different for Your Benefit

We get to know our clients like no other company does.

We work exclusively in education, and we’ve also worked for a variety of different administrative units at institutions—from fundraising to HR.  We dedicate intake time for each project to get a sense of how each client is special and different.

We make creative work that inspires and succeeds.

We always provide effective solutions, and we certainly have our share of success stories. But beyond success, we push our clients to approach creative work in a way that truly inspires audiences.

Strategy informs everything we do and everything we make.

We're known as the strategic company in higher education for a reason. We start with institutional goals and help clients translate objectives into work that supports who they are—and who they want to be.

We focus on outcomes: recruitment, retention, engagement, and fundraising.

Underlying institutional strategy are financial realities of admissions, yield, alumni relationships, and fundraising. Our work supports and contributes to the efforts closest to return on investment.