Seramount is the result of a consolidation of three businesses: Diversity Best Practices, Culture@Work, and the events and research divisions of Working Mother Media. Since they also focus on research and consulting, they were looking for an improved membership experience with their gated content and membership portal. They also needed an improved search functionality and tagging system as well as improved ways to track site metrics. 

Our Approach

Seramount engaged Last Call Media to deliver a more focused and compelling narrative to tie the products, tools, and services from those three disparate lines of business together into an end-to-end solution for purpose-driven leaders and teams at Fortune 1000 organizations. 

Our work began with an assessment of the three lines of business through interviews with Seramount leadership and employees who support the delivery of Seramount’s products and services. We then completed a series of structured customer interviews to learn more about how Seramount meets the needs of its customers. We then used that data to build a product roadmap to gain alignment on the customer opportunity and product vision with Seramount leadership. 

We approached building the new Seramount iteratively. Once we had a working prototype, we met with customers again to show them work in progress, to test our vision and to refine it based on their feedback. 

Challenges

Some of the challenges addressed involved building an easy-to-use online portal for Seramount customers and employees to access and update gated content only available with a Seramount membership. We solved one of the major customer challenges by eliminating the need to use passwords to access gated content. On the new Seramount, customers enter their work email and if their employer is a customer, they get an email inviting them to login to Seramount. By requiring employees to use their own accounts, Seramount now has additional data to demonstrate the value of their membership to existing customers. 

Leveraging AngularJS, LCM built a seamless custom subscription purchasing workflow app to guide the user through the dynamic purchasing workflow by feeding and pulling data as necessary to and from HubSpot, their marketing automation tool; SalesForce, their CRM; and Zuora, their subscription management service.

The custom subscription calculator in the AngularJS app pulled in data in real time from Zuora, using Zuora’s APIs, so users were presented with the most up-to-date pricing. Once the purchasing workflow was complete, the user’s card was charged and they received an email with their receipt and license key moments later, all without needing to speak to a DeepIS representative.

The twenty-fifth anniversary year is an important one for advancement activities. Alumni have generally attained career and financial stability by this time, and it is an important moment in which to encourage a lifetime habit of giving to Amherst College. Amherst needed an accessible and compelling visual that would explain a complicated funding program. Working within existing guidelines and style templates, we worked with the Annual Fund to build a tri-fold brochure that plainly communicated the benefits and procedures of giving during the five years leading up to and including an alumnus’ twenty-fifth anniversary reunion year.

We already knew that USM.edu was an aging Drupal 6 site that was slow and difficult to update under the hood, but furthermore, site admins had little to no visibility into the performance of the platform, coupled with limited functionality and almost no reporting tools. Beyond Drupal 6 quickly becoming end-of-life from a development standpoint, USM agreed that from the marketing ROI perspective, it was time to move to Drupal 8. 

Due to Last Call Media’s long-standing working relationship with the University of Southern Mississippi, we were able to break ground quickly. The marketing and IT teams on USM and LCM agreed to work iteratively by first focusing efforts on launching a pilot site on Drupal 8 and prioritizing additional departments and colleges after the initial launch. This allowed the LCM team to formulate a focused yet creative digital strategy that would get into the hands of the USM audiences faster and allow for user feedback to inform future, more complex, development and content needs. Additionally, USM was able to communicate directly with the Acquia Certified Drupal 8 developers and architecture consultants at LCM, to provide expertise on best practices and development techniques. This direct line of communication with our certified team gave USM confidence in their ability to develop the new Drupal 8 platform alongside us. Some Acquia technologies we used on USM.edu are Acquia Cloud, Acquia Cloud Shield, Acquia Cloud Edge, Acquia Search, and Acquia Ready. The Acquia platform allowed USM to maintain a homogenous interface to their new Drupal 8 product and the workflow tools have allowed internal and external developers to collaborate in building new features and has made the quality assurance and release process consistent and seamless.

Since the relaunch of USM.edu on Drupal 8, feedback on campus has been overwhelmingly positive. The community was engaged and involved along the way, so it was a huge moment on campus when the site went live. 

There have even been some tangible technical results that the school benefited from almost immediately. One of the key results the site achieved was a sub-second page load for the homepage, despite using a video in the hero region. To accomplish this, we worked with the USM development team to obsessively reduce and minify front end assets, prefer CSS over images for presentational styling, and to lazy-load large assets not required for the initial pageview. Throughout the process, we tested using a front-end performance benchmarking tool (Phantomas) to keep us on track and efficient.
 

We brainstormed several ideas but landed on a theme around cooking and food. This theme is rich with metaphors about working together, each ingredient adding to the final result, and a robust menu of content for attendees. From there we started sketching layouts. It turned out that Lil NERDy looked really cute in a chef’s hat!

We tried to produce images that spoke to the metaphorical meanings of the theme. NERDys sharing food, cooking together, or adding lots of ingredients. We also created some custom images, such as the call for volunteers, and hackathon email images.

 

Remixing an existing character was a challenge, because it had to remain true to the feeling of the mascot, but also be refreshed enough that it was clear 2020 had a unique look and theme. We had to establish rules, such as the eyes always being darker than the body color, to make sure they looked cheerful and lighthearted, and hands and feet being simple shapes.
 

Another element we brought to this theme was patterned backgrounds. We illustrated foods and cooking tools, and added them behind event collateral, to add another dimension to the illustrations when used in emails and on social media. This added depth to the imagery, and consistency to event collateral.

We were able to create a library of Lil NERDys, supplemented by two patterns, that tied into the theme and were informative in the event marketing materials and collateral. NERD Summit had to make a quick pivot due to Covid-19, and was a remote event. We were still able to utilize Lil NERDy across many digital assets and bring some warmth to a then-unfamiliar new event type.