The NetRaising Experience
Kayla Thomet
What’s your NetRaising experience?
Oh. It was so easy. I had just come out of college and I had studied Public Relations. When I first came onto OBC, and I got introduced to Kurt and got to start asking him my questions, had him help me fix problems, it was just a game changer because he didn’t just take my problem and fix it. He first took the time to set up the meeting, meet me, get to know me and established that relationship. And then he explained to me what he was doing and how he was fixing it. And he said, “Oh. I get why this is hard. It was confusing to me at first too. Here are some tips of how I understood it. Here’s how I learned it. Here’s how I’m going to make it easier for you to work with it”. And he just took that and ran with it. And he was just so collaborative and welcoming and open to our ideas. And his personality is just really wonderful to work with too.
He helped us create exactly the vision that we wanted. We worked with the designer first to see how we wanted it to look and then we worked with Kurt to see how we wanted it to function.
It was really wonderful to work 100% with Kurt and with NetRaising as we worked with a designer that they recommended. And to have that be such a seamless, easy transition, it felt like working with one cohesive team and that was really wonderful. When you’re working with different contractors, with different agencies, it can sometimes feel very disconnected and it can fall on you to be the connector, but Kurt just really stepped up into that role and made it feel like we were working just within one company itself, which was great. And to be able to be as creative as we wanted and really take the time to thoughtfully design it. He stepped back and let us work with the designer and then he came in with the technical aspects. That was just a really wonderful experience and it really breathed life into our dreams.
With our other site, it’s a self-hosted WordPress, so it’s a nightmare. And especially with no necessary programming background, but Kurt has always been receptive to our questions about that. Even though it’s a site he doesn’t run. He’s not getting any money for it, any commission for it, but he’ll always be available for questions. And he also goes out of his way to send us updates about bugs or malware that he hears about, or he’ll go out of his way to send us articles that might affect our WordPress site. And he just remembers us, the small fry, and our website that he’s not even working on and make sure that he’s also taking care of that. So that’s just above and beyond.
He’s built the website to be so user-friendly for us versus, we have to build the WordPress site to make it user-friendly and there’re plug-ins and it’s just kind of a nightmare to navigate. And there’s no customer service. It doesn’t exist for it. So I would say… I’ll spend 12 hours trying to solve one thing on the WordPress site versus 12 minutes sending an email to Kurt and receiving a response back five minutes later, “Oh. Fixed it for you.” So it’s really a huge difference.
He is so quick and he responds to you, he’s also very attentive to our capacity. And so there have been multiple times where I’ve been way too busy to take the time to… ‘Cause what I like to do is learn from him ‘cause he’ll explain to you what he’s doing, he’ll walk you through how to do it on your own in the future. But there have been multiple times when I’ve just been overwhelmed and way too busy. So I’ve just shot him a, “Please help me.” And he helps me and doesn’t push it and it’s just, ‘Oh. Got it done for you. Let me know if you need anything else. I’m here.” So he’s always attentive too to your capacity, which is really nice.
Kurt is always updating us about the updates that he does and about the patches that he puts in and the security that he is ensuring we have, it really makes it nice for us not to have to worry about that. Especially in today’s day and age where everybody’s trying to hack you.
They’re ‘yes men.’ They say yes to your fun ideas first or they say, “Let’s see how we can make that work.” Or, “Let’s do something similar.” Instead of, “Oh. That’s going to be too hard.” ‘Cause I’ve worked with a lot of people like contractors, developers who they say it’s going to be hard and it’s not necessarily in their forte and so they don’t want to do it, and they don’t even want to entertain it and they want to bring you down to their level. But I feel like Kurt always meets us at our level. ‘Cause obviously he’s way more talented than us, and he matches our energy. And it holds a lot of weight too, ‘cause he’s… You really trust him and his recommendations and what he’s saying.
Kayla Thomet
Manager Digital Communication
Oregon Business Council