Our relationship with ChanceLight has had many incarnations.
In 2013, D’nelle was working as project manager for Kenneth White and Beth Downey at Kenneth’s web dev agency, sprclldr. At the time, ChanceLight was partnering with sprclldr for new website builds and site redesigns. The first website D’nelle worked on was a redesign of the Autism Services division, and the relationships she made during that project led to a long and happy relationship.
Currently, Berry Interesting provides comprehensive web property consultation and strategy services to the ChanceLight marketing department, including site maintenance for their suite of 12 WordPress sites, knowledge-base development and management, organizational leadership for the web ops team, and guidance with vetting and hiring other strategic partners.
WordPress Support and updates at enterprise scale
ChanceLight’s family of brands boasts a sprawling web presence across three divisions, eight distinct brands, and sixteen sites (including one multisite). Keeping these sites running smoothly, with up-to-date and licensed software, properly functioning connections to their CRM, and ongoing content updates is no small feat!
Berry Interesting uses iThemes Sync to manage and keep detailed records of software updates and site uptimes to handle the basics of site care and troubleshooting. We conduct weekly “property walks” to check for visible errors, perform bi-weekly and emergency software updates, and lead monthly team meetings to ensure the highest level of WordPress care.
Project management for a small internal team and several strategic partners
ChanceLight has cultivated long-term relationships with several external vendors to support their small-but-mighty in-house marketing department. Berry Interesting orchestrates team priorities and schedules to ensure that the right specialist is wrangling the right task, as well as maintains and curates historical institutional knowledge on both ongoing maintenance work and new site builds.
Beginning in 2020, we spearheaded the transition from the Teamwork project management platform to a client-owned SharePoint workspace, allowing for greater partner accountability and departmental reporting.
Development and curation of a marketing team knowledgebase
Alongside maintaining solid records on projects, tasks, and big decisions, BIPi has also developed and currently maintains an internal knowledgebase for policies, procedures, and processes used by the marketing department.
This includes basic how-tos for onboarding and training new employees, guidelines for the web-content aspect of crisis communications, internal best practices for web content accessibility, and official processes for communication and team utilization on new builds.
Task organization, progress monitoring, and asynchronous communication management
Successfully managing a sprawling team that includes an internal client team as well as external vendors can be complicated in the best of times. Throw in a wrench like employee turnover or an external crisis, and it can get downright stressful.
BIPi acts as a central hub for managing the myriad moving parts of website maintenance and new website builds. Tracking tasks, ensuring that team members have the resources they need, and keeping a handle on multiple simultaneous projects is at the core of how we support the ChanceLight marketing department and the company at large.
The transition from Teamwork to Sharepoint allowed us to cut away some of the “dead wood” that had built up over the course of several years, streamlining the way the marketing team communicates both internally and with employees across the company. The current web operations team has worked together for over three years now, and this transition allowed us a sort of informal “reset” in terms of expectations and processes, putting the marketing department in a solid position in relation to other departments.
Strategic consultation for long-term WordPress success
It’s not enough to just keep the ship aright – you’ve got to also be moving forward! BIPi uses our years of experience to provide strategic consultation on the growth and success of the marketing department, including vetting of new partnerships, research and testing of new software solutions, and recommendations for employee job descriptions and department expansion.
The most important project we’ve completed thus far in this area is our work on website accessibility for the ChanceLight family of sites. In addition to many hours spent making small tweaks to the sites to improve their accessibility to all users, we led the development of an “accessibility footer” that was rolled out to all sites, both standardizing the availability of accessibility tools and creating a consistent user experience of those tools for site visitors. The accessibility efforts are ongoing (as they should be!), with the ultimate goal of providing a quality user experience for all users.
Key to this aspect of our services has been our close relationship with ChanceLight’s CMO. Our expertise, combined with our ability to act independently when necessary, allows us to provide ChanceLight the absolute best advice when it comes to planning for the future.
The ChanceLight family of sites are all custom coded by our friends at Copper Leaf Creative. If you’re curious about how Berry Interesting Productions can help your team manage a large family of sites with a small internal marketing team, we’re always happy to help! Drop us a line or book a consultation directly with our fearless leader, D’nelle. You can also sign up to get emails from Berry Interesting, and we’ll keep you in the loop.