Expertise

We're not a regular agency. Our approach cuts through the hype associated with social media, and focuses on the benefits that improved communications can deliver to your business. We put your users at the heart of everything we do, through our proven digital strategy process, our user-centred design process, our good practice approach to technology and our sustainability and monetisation services.

Digital strategy

Define your new web presence

Experience our Digital Strategy consultancy and you’ll never look at your business in the same way again.

Our consultants will help you redefine your entire new web presence, from the structure and content of your website to your visibility on social media platforms. They will help you create a web strategy that meets the evolving needs of your audiences, new and old, and ensure that your entire organisation has agreed and understood objectives for your online activity.

Find the way forward

This consultancy not only identifies a vision for your future website and web strategy, it also pinpoints the steps to realising that vision, in four key areas:

Communications: how to ensure that internally you understand each other’s needs and objectives sufficiently to ensure the web activity achieves all that’s planned for it
Content: how to make sure you’ve got the right content, presented well and easily findable
Community: how to build a true community of customers, members and others interested in what you do
Commerce: how to use all of these to produce new revenue streams.

Whatever technical solutions you choose, SiftGroups consultancy offers a challenging and refreshing exploration of your USP.

User experience

Putting users first

The needs of the user should always be at the heart of any scoping for a new website. It’s got to be intuitive for them to use.

It’s important to test your own internal knowledge of your audience’s objectives, their interests and goals by asking real people what they expect from your site.

User-centred design

So, to be sure we know what your users really need, we conduct detailed research, both with your current user groups and with prospective ones.

Our process takes this knowledge to inform the detailed planning of the site. We'll explore:

User research and insight - capturing valuable information through usability appraisals, interviews, polling, SEO analysis and competitor research
Use cases - developing goal-oriented scenarious of typical user tasks
Information Architecture - using card sorting and taxonomy development techniques resulting in a clear site map
Behavioural design - examining user flows and developing comprehensive wireframes
Prototyping - producing working prototypes before testing them on core audience groups

In all of these, we’ll adopt our good practice born of our experience on a wide range of sites and an equally wide range of users.

At every stage, our mantra is: simplify, then simplify some more.

Creative

Digital brands

A brand’s more than just a logo - it's the world's window into your organisation. We can help you create a digital brand from scratch or take your offline branding in new and exciting directions to maximise the potential of emerging web technology.

Art direction

Art direction's the 'ideas' part of design. All our work is informed by our team's experience of delivering award-winning conceptual creative for a variety of high-profile clients.

Interface design

We combine a strict focus on accessiblity with great ideas to create beautiful, engaging, usable interfaces.

Technology

Open source

We've been working with the open source framework Drupal since 2007 and we share its collaborative approach to platform development. Drupal is widely adopted by many brands, charities, government departments and other sectors, and it offers a future-proof, portable solution with tight integration to external systems.

Good practice

You can benefit from the lessons we’ve learned over the past decade through our Good Practice guidelines. These set out tried and tested approaches to user interaction and engagement, and can be applied to any technology – but, of course, our Drupal sites feature them out of the box.

Clever modules

Where we can, we’ll use existing modules built by the Drupal community, but if you need something bespoke we build our own, and then contribute them back to the wider community. Our Community Metrics module measures key community activity and helps you demonstrate ROI. Our Living Profile combines user profile data with user activity to provide focussed recommendations. Then there's our Chart Builder, Ask the Expert, Q&A...

Ongoing support

We can also provide a resilient, scalable hosting infrastructure tailored to the needs of specific sites, backed up by our 24/7 on-call enginnering team.

Community Training

Developing your skills

Strategy, design and build are all building blocks to a successful community, but true success requires continual care and attention, both to the traditional aspects of a community and to the content that surrounds it. To create a great site with a flourishing community, we recommend that the skills are widely distributed across your organisation, and not confined to the silo of the web team. Our unique suite of online and offline training courses gives your team its own community space to explore together, to learn from the SiftGroups expertise and to make the decisions that will take your organisation forward online.

Three online community training courses give people across your organisation a solid foundation in effective online engagement. The first, ‘Managing communities’, enables your cross-departmental team to find their online voices and learn about community as a community. The second, ‘Working with volunteers and champions’, builds on your internal team, defines your policies and processes and enables people to get to know each other. Finally, ‘Using social media to engage’, enables you to discover your organisation’s voice in the social media landscape.

Sustainability

We’ll support you in supporting them

Any community, whether new-born or fully-grown, needs careful nurturing day by day. New members need to be welcomed and shown the benefits of the community, while existing ones also need personal attention. Meanwhile the tone and direction of the discussions needs constant attention to ensure that they are providing real benefit both to you and to your community members.

For an online community this support is best carried out by an internal community management team. To help you get things up and running, we can support you by offering one-to-one mentoring with your in-house community manager, gradually introducing them to new skills and knowledge as the need arises.

Alternatively, if you aren’t yet able to manage your community in-house, we can help by providing direct community management services. We’ll work as part of your team and apply our experience and good practice to build up momentum; then, when you’re ready to pick up the reins we’ll work with you to ensure a smooth transition.

Content and Commerce

Our experienced team of journalists can help with planning and editing the right content for your site. They can also help with training your internal team with blogging, writing for the web and stimulating debate online.

Finally, we’ll train you to make money! It’s not about selling buttons and banners, but crafting specially tailored campaigns, focussing on high-quality engagement. Our trainers – who are actively involved in this form of selling with our sister company Sift Media - provide strategic training and development for business and sales teams aiming to do the same for their clients.