The Impact Awards
Celebrating SA businesses making an impact
Overview
The Impact Awards is an initiative set out with the intention to identify and celebrate successful businesses making waves in their industry and generating major economic value in South Australia. Since their inception in 2015, The Impact Awards has honoured upwards of 40 high achieving local businesses and created a trusted recognition platform, all the while seeking to inspire smaller companies to think global.
Exo Digital was engaged to give the Impact Awards a complete uplift coinciding with their 2023 event; iterating on their branding and visual identity to position the organisation as a leader in business expertise and appeal to more diverse sponsors and applicants. What resulted was a highly impactful rebrand and distinguished site that places excellence and industry leaders at the forefront.
Challenge
The Impact Awards has a clear vision, but felt that in order to further establish their standing in South Australia’s business sector, they needed a new look. This uplift needed to maintain their values of excellence, innovation and success, but also bring on an instantly recognisable and strong voice that inspired future leaders.
Paired with a bold rebrand, they were also looking for a new website that would showcase its winners, sponsors and ambassadors with a more scalable approach and allow the team to manage and update the content as The Impact Awards continues to grow.
Our Proposal
- Discovery
- Brand Strategy
- Website Design
- Website Development
Exo Digital fostered a cooperative approach, building a collaborative relationship with the team at The Impact Awards to ensure complete synergy throughout the process. Being an established and successful organisation already, it was important that we uplifted the brand while maintaining its integrity. By working to weekly reviews, we were able to ensure each step was approached with consideration.
As a first milestone, we needed to reach some form of release to align with the opening of 2023 nominations. This milestone placed some time restraint on the original full-scope timeline so we worked alongside the Impact Awards team to compromise an iterative MVP release. This involved complete branding and a single page Nominations information page so that visitors were able to nominate their businesses without the confusion of a rebrand part-way through the application process.
The nature of this engagement and the approach taken allowed for a flexible, agile way of working, meaning Exo Digital could get iterations out without compromising quality or integrity, whilst also maintaining transparency with The Impact Awards.
The Solution
01.
Research and Brand Discovery
Exo Digital worked through a comprehensive workshop to get a sense of how the Impact Awards were occupying the business awards space and refined their core values. We then used these findings to deliver a vibrant, recognisable brand package that could be implemented across various social media, web and physical platforms.
02.
Scalable and Intuitive User Interface Design
With the nature of a yearly event, Exo Digital made sure that the approach to the Web Design and CMS structure considered scalability and growth.
03.
Website Stability
After assessing the needs of The Impact Awards, Exo Digital recommended their website be hosted on Siteground and built with Wordpress. The combination of the two allows for incredible stability and scalability, while also providing a familiar back-end for the Impact Awards team to manage their content.
04.
Going live
In preparation for launch, Exo Digital created a library of video tutorials to assist The Impact Awards team with setting up their new site.
Consulting
Project Management Support
A dedicated Project Manager led the project from beginning to end, covering all bases and liaising between Exo Digital and The Impact Awards. Clear communication between the teams was an essential part of the project’s success and this involved weekly recap reporting, prioritisation of tasks, meeting facilitation and ensuring team members on both sides were clear and unblocked to keep the wheels turning. Taking the guesswork out of running a project meant that the Exo Digital team were focused on their tasks and expertise, ensuring a smooth process and a successful launch.
UI & UX Design
Branding Workshop
A critical step in the branding exercise is to dive deep into the strategy, values, competitor analysis and goals of the business. Exo Digital hosted a branding workshop where we went through a number of exercises and reflections. Taking this approach ensures branding materials are informed and reflective of the business at its core.
Web Design
Once the branding is locked and approved, we moved into the space of considerate website design. Utilising both our findings from the branding phase and the wider goals of the business, Exo Digital designed a scalable interface that made navigating through the site intuitive and dynamic.
Web & App Development
Wordpress Development and Plugins
Using a combination of plugins available through Wordpress allowed us to customise the website to the requirements of Impact Awards whilst mirroring the design work, to give the look, feel and experience the client was after. This included tailoring the forms used on the website along with adding animation to the pages to make them more interactive.
