Non-Profit Updates Website and Logo for 20th Anniversary

Over the past 20 years, the Women’s Business Development Council of Connecticut (WBDC) has helped more than 18,000 women across 169 Connecticut towns become better business people. Twenty years is a large milestone, and it came with the need for WBDC to take on a business challenge of their own — developing a new website that better represented their work and progress to the community they serve. In 2017, WBDC partnered with Ardent Communication and Beacon Digital Marketing to develop a more vibrant web presence that appealed to everyone from young entrepreneurs to mature business owners. To take WBDC to the next level, here’s how we got started.

Our Goals

Update the creative identity to give a more modern, energetic, youthful, and diverse look and feel

WBDC is a nonprofit organization that provides classes in business planning, accounting, marketing and other critical functions of business. Their mission is to educate, motivate and empower women to achieve economic independence and self-sufficiency. However, the group faced a challenge with appealing to all of the potential women who could benefit from their free classes and resources. The existing logo and branding had not been updated in many years, and much of the imagery on the website and in promotional materials wasn’t very vibrant.

With this in mind, we updated the logo, and created a more modern look and feel for the website and other digital assets like email templates and Facebook posts. 

To showcase the new site and drive registrations, we ran a Facebook Ad Campaign remarketing to anyone who had previously visited the WBDC site as well as geo-targeted to Connecticut toward women interested in entrepreneurship and business development. We delivered 10 new signups for WBDC within a week.

Implement a new CMS, a class registration and donation process, and email marketing tools

Our work also included updating WBDC’s overall digital strategy. First, we implemented a new CMS, migrating their site to the more user-friendly Wordpress platform. We custom designed the theme to align with WBDC’s new look and feel. Second, we helped WBDC update two important elements of their business strategy - class registrations and donations - by using Wufoo for form collection to capture registrants and an Authorize.net payment integration to significantly improve their donation process. Finally, we launched Campaign Monitor so WBDC would have an email marketing tool to use for basic automation and list segmentation.

Take a Look at WBDC Today

With a new website and branding, WBDC is now poised to reach their core audience and present a bright and dynamic presence that reflects their mission. As a result of their new digital strategy, they’ll be able to serve their community in new and better ways and meet their goal of helping women thrive in business.