The NetRaising Experience

Erika Mahoney Yen

What’s your NetRaising experience?

I feel so great. So great. It’s beautiful. We had launched another website with NetRaising, I want to say like five years ago… and this [new site] is totally in line with the branding of our current site. And the process was just really fabulous working with Megan on this.

Since then, they’ve made so many strides… Bigger strides with web development and what they can do. But what struck me from the beginning was just the thoroughness of Kurt. And his appreciation for the process.

Very long phone calls with Kurt… The Kurt phone call. The thoroughness in… He can really go into the history of each website and the process of getting it designed, the security aspects of it, and the reasoning for some of the decisions that they make. And also, having a great view of how to make sure that the websites are accessible, visually, and adding in features to increase accessibility to folks that need different ways to access web materials.

I can just say, as working with… If there’s a problem, if we have a question, if there’s any kind of initiation of communication, they are on it, and so responsive. Yeah, any questions, any ideas, Megan’s always… She’s super creative and intentional about creating materials for website, because she can see how that can help her other clients. If you’re asking for this, you know, let me create it in a sustainable way that I can transfer that code over to another client. So they definitely work smarter. Not harder. You can tell.

The responsiveness and openness that they have toward ideas that we might have. They’re always trying to find a way that implements those ideas without… Sometimes those ideas are like, a little too big. And it’s like, this slideshow that has a video is going to like slow things down. And helping us always weigh the cost benefits of some of those things, I think is really great. They’re able to bring us down to earth.

It’s like, “Remember what our core values are for this website. And we want to make sure that it’s nimble enough that people who have limited Wi-Fi access and those kinds of things that it’s not taking a long time for things to load and they get frustrated”, adding some bells and whistles may look cool, but they are always like, “Well, but what if we try it like this way instead?” Or kind of always doing like a “Yes, and…” in helping us think through those ideas very thoroughly. They’re not just like, “yes, yes, yes” to everything. It’s, “let’s think this through,” and that intentionality of what they do for us.

I will put together… just InDesign some static templates of some ideas that I have. And yeah, they’re able to just magically render it into a web, clickable, functional piece. You can see how they took my vision and made it a reality. We made some slight modifications to work around some of those pieces where it made sense in a static format but it didn’t translate as well to a web format and so we just made those little design shifts, but always stayed within the branding and the look and feel that we started off with.

With the amount of care and understanding that they have in thinking about all the different audiences and keeping websites nimble, I think it’s also extremely cost-efficient to have their services.

In the past, (it’s been a long time since I’ve worked with anyone else besides NetRaising), but in the past, it’s been like, [a vendor builds] the website, they hand it over to you and they are just like… Maybe there’s a little bit of back and forth, but once the project is finished, they move on.

With NetRaising you have this retainer where you can continue to use their services and work closely with them. If anything comes up, they’re there for us and they’re always thinking about the long term and making sure we’re updated to the most current platform and that we have all of those tools to continue to be successful. So I think it works especially well for nonprofits and people who have a smaller communications team to make an interface that’s easy for folks to update. They do a great job there but also provide pretty cost-effective, ongoing support, which I really appreciate.

Also, I wanted to point out, they can do incredible things when it comes to accessibility and offering websites in different languages. They do incredible work in that area.  We’ve created websites in the past for individual lease-ups that were like… We manually translated them into six languages, which was a feat to do. But yeah, they did incredible work there.

Erika Mahoney Yen
Fundraising and Marketing Specialist
Reach Community Development