Web Marketing Consulting
Roadmapping
starting at $5000
The process of redesigning a website can be intimidating.
You know the goals you want to achieve, how you want to organize your content, and the audience you want to reach, but the advice you get on technology is confusing, the quotes you receive vary widely in price, and the recommendations you get about which software to choose conflict.
What if instead of confusion, your way forward was clear?
Roadmapping provides that clarity.
Let us put our decades of experience to work on creating a comprehensive plan for your next site build, redesign, or refresh.
Unlike other firms, we start with your goals. We’ll look at your board book, your annual report, or your grant proposals to understand your mission and the key metrics you need to achieve.
From there, we’ll explore what technologies will work best to reach those goals given your existing assets, manpower, timeline, and budget.
In other words, we learn about where you want to go, where you are now, and figure out a way to chart a course between the two that you can afford.
Roadmaps can then be used to guide your internal team, hire a freelancer, or send out a Request For Proposal (RFP).
Build Management
pricing based on total project cost
When a website build project gets underway, the relationship with your contractor can feel very one-sided. It’s sort of like working with a home contractor—when technical subjects come up, you end up taking their word for it.
You end up accepting budget overruns, timelines that stretch on forever, and a less-than-perfect final product because you have no way to push back when it comes to the technical details.
That’s where we can help. Just as a construction manager makes sure a building is built to spec, we can help you manage your website buildout.
We’ll make sure whoever is building your site is doing so according to the specs you’ve agreed to and that you’re taking delivery of high-quality, well-architected code that can continue down the upgrade path of whatever platform you’re using. We’ll help you manage your project timeline, adapt to changes in scope, and negotiate change orders where needed.
When you need a reality check from a trusted advisor, we’ll be there to help you make the best decisions on software platforms, hosting, and third-party service integrations.
As your project nears completion, we’ll work with your team to make sure that your site launches with content that’s complete, structured in a way that makes sense to your audience, and retains the incoming links from other sites that you’ve built up over the course of years, which vital to for future SEO campaigns.
Search Engine Marketing
SEO Audit
Starting at $5000
The majority of traffic online is driven through search engines and think tanks are uniquely suited to capture that traffic.
Since 2018, Google has prioritized E-A-T, content with Expertise, Authority, and Trust. Conveniently, think tanks employ world-class experts, build brands based on their authority, and cultivate reputations of based on research people can trust.
This means that think tanks are perfectly positioned to take advantage of search engines so long as they have a sound strategy and get the technical execution right.
Each Tallest Tree SEO engagement begins with an SEO audit.
This audit includes the standard things you’d expect—we check for errors, crawl your entire site, and find areas where you site needs to come into line with best practices.
But we go farther than the standard SEO audit. We look for areas where you can emphasize your topical authority, leverage internal link, take advantage of clustering or siloing, add structured data, prune your content, or other strategies that go beyond simple technical execution.
After your audit is complete, you case use it to execute changes with your internal team or an outside contractor. Tallest Tree is also available to help you execute your SEO strategy through either a quarterly retainer or on a project basis.
Google AdGrants PPC Campaigns
$3000 per quarter
Google’s AdGrants program makes $10,000 a month in Google Ads credit available to non-profits.
While this grant is an amazing opportunity for think tanks and research centers, many organizations struggle to spend the grant each month.
We can help you generate traffic—but more importantly, conversions—with your Google Ad Grant account.
We help our clients target keywords that are high-volume and relevant to their content. Those keywords form the foundation of campaigns and the ad groups and ad copy we create within them.
Reach a new audience, grow your list, recruit volunteers, and even grow your donor base through this exciting program.
We’re only able to take on 2 additional AdGrants clients at this time.
Web Design & Development
PolicyPress
Starting at $25,000
For over a decade we’ve worked with think tanks of all sizes at both the state and national levels to present research and other content effectively online.
In the course of doing this work, we’ve seen the same problems over and over again and we’ve solved the same problems over and over again.
But in order for good ideas to win the policy debate, we’ve got to stop fixing the same old problems and start building platforms for success.
That’s exactly what we aim to do with PolicyPress.
PolicyPress is a custom deployment of WordPress that incorporates all of the best practices we’ve learned over the years we’ve worked with think tanks.
Those features include:
Guide visitors through your longer publications by providing links to the main sections. The sections are highlighted as users make their way through the document.
Cite your sources just as you would in a printed publication. In-line footnotes automatically create a references section at the bottom of each page.
Modeled on old-school card catalogs, each piece of content can cite related works and off-site citations. These relationships help spread link equity and teach search engines how content interrelates.
Your organization, its work, and the people who create that work are represented by structured data. This makes it clear to search engines how those elements relate to each other and how they connect to the rest of the web.
PolicyPress employs a “headless” architecture, allowing us to use WordPress, the world’s most popular content management system, while adopting a lightening-fast JavaScript frontend.
Unlike traditional WordPress implementation, this means that content entry and content display are totally separated, creating a more secure platform and accelerating our future development.
It’s like a think tank in a box. Except it’s not in a box, it’s running on super-secure cloud infrastructure.
PolicyPress means that any think tank, big or small, can build a rich content library that generates search engine traffic and converts that traffic into citations, subscribers, and donors.
Custom Development
custom work starts with roadmapping
We take on custom development projects selectively and only after we’ve completed the roadmapping process with a client.
This is for a very simple reason — custom development is expensive, complex, and it’s easy for the final product to miss the mark and end up serving an organization poorly.
We’ve developed PolicyPress precisely because custom development shouldn’t be necessary when your use case is similar to your peers. While think tanks have needs that differ from typical non-profits or publishers, their needs are similar enough to each other that a standardized solution like PolicyPress should fit most organizations.
Similarly, maintaining custom software and making it comply with modern UX, SEO, accessibility, and technical performance standards can often be more expensive than migrating to a platform that already meets or exceeds those standards. We hate to see organizations burn up their online marketing budgets throwing good money after bad. Think tankers should know better than to succumb to the sunk cost fallacy!
With those caveats out of the way, if you’ve got content that needs to be presented in a totally unique way or you need changes made to an existing custom website, we’re glad to explore the possibilities with you. Roadmapping makes sure we do that in a way that maximizes your return on investment.