Founders First Capital Partners Brand & Website Refresh
Our collaboration with Founders First Capital Partners involved a strategic website redesign for this unique revenue-based investment and acceleration initiative, dedicated to supporting women, people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, military veterans, and businesses in low-to-moderate-income areas. Founders First Capital Partners has pioneered a proprietary platform that fosters a nurturing ecosystem, empowering these underrepresented founders to emerge as premium wage job creators within their communities. By providing revenue-based funding and business acceleration support, they focus on elevating service-based businesses located beyond the traditional financial hubs of Silicon Valley and New York City.
The organization’s business accelerator programs, learning resources, and growth strategies are designed to transform these service-based businesses into $5M to $10M recurring revenue, tech-enabled companies.
In their quest to develop a strong brand identity and online presence to captivate their ideal clients, Founders First Capital Partners enlisted our support.
Brand Guidelines
Founder’s First required comprehensive brand guidelines to establish a consistent and recognizable brand identity. These guidelines serve as a rulebook that delineates the overall aesthetics and ambiance of the brand, ensuring it is consistently recognized and resonated with across various platforms.
Creating a Unified Voice
A detailed brand style guide encompasses elements ranging from typography and color schemes to tone of voice and core values. This guide offers the essential directives for consistently conveying your brand's message effectively in all your company's marketing efforts.
Brand Guidelines
Developing brand guidelines entails establishing clear parameters for logo utilization, specifying allowable and restricted practices for vendors, particularly concerning licensing, to maintain uniformity in accessibility and layout. These standards assist both internal and external stakeholders in correctly engaging with the brand's logo, textual, and visual components.
Accessibility
Creating a website with accessibility in mind benefits all users. A product designed for maximum accessibility not only saves time and resources in the long term but also offers instant advantages to a wider audience, while decreasing the overall risk to the organization.
Process Notes
To initiate our process, it was crucial to comprehend why the core audience was exiting the application flow prematurely. Therefore, we conducted a heuristic evaluation and user interviews with the primary demographic that Founder’s First aimed to assist, applying the criteria established by their funding prerequisites. These conversations revealed significant bottlenecks in the application pathway, necessitating manual intervention by customer service to call and verify user information. This step was crucial to accurately categorize individuals as either qualified or unqualified candidates for funding.
Step 1. How much funding do you need?
Step 2. Tell us about your business.
Project Overview
The redesign of Founders First Capital Partners’ website had four key objectives, each of which was crucial for the organization’s growth and ability to serve its unique clientele effectively.
Increase Lead Generation and Quality
Improve User Engagement and Conversion
Transform the website into a high-performance tool that captures visitor interest and converts it into actionable outcomes, such as filling out applications or signing up for advisory services.
Enhance Brand Perception
Align Website with Mission and Values
Ensure that the website serves as an extension of the organization's core mission of inclusivity and empowerment, embodying these values in its design, layout, and content.
Complex Service Offering
Variety of Financial Products: The organization offers a range of complex services like revenue-based funding, term loans, and advisory services.
Terminology and Jargon: Financial services come with specific jargon that could be confusing for some of the target audience.
Diverse Audience
Multiple Demographics: Serving a wide array of demographics, from women to military veterans to people of color, necessitated a design that resonates universally.
Varied Financial Literacy: The audience could range from financially savvy individuals to those who are new to revenue-based financing and loans.
User Experience
Information Overload: With a complex ecosystem and multiple service offerings, there's a risk of overwhelming the visitor with too much information.
Navigation: With such a wide array of services and content to display, creating intuitive navigation was a challenge.
Metrics Driven Goals
Tracking and Analysis: To measure the effectiveness of the redesign, implementing the right tools to track user engagement, conversions, and other key performance indicators was crucial.
Balancing Aesthetics with Functionality: While the design had to be visually appealing, it also had to perform well, both in terms of speed and in fulfilling the business objectives.
User-Centric Design
Information Architecture
Content Strategy
Visual Identity
Increase Lead Generation and Quality
Amplify the website’s ability to attract and retain high-quality leads who not only require the financial services provided but also align with Founders First Capital Partners’ organizational goals and mission.
Improve User Engagement and Conversion
Transform the website into a high-performance tool that captures visitor interest and converts it into actionable outcomes, such as filling out applications or signing up for advisory services.
Enhance Brand Perception
Elevate the organization's image by developing a website that reflects its expertise, commitment, and role as a leader in revenue-based funding and financial services for underrepresented founders.
Align Website with Mission and Values
Ensure that the website serves as an extension of the organization's core mission of inclusivity and empowerment, embodying these values in its design, layout, and content.
Complex Service Offering
Variety of Financial Products: The organization offers a range of complex services like revenue-based funding, term loans, and advisory services.
Terminology and Jargon: Financial services come with specific jargon that could be confusing for some of the target audience.
Diverse Audience
Multiple Demographics: Serving a wide array of demographics, from women to military veterans to people of color, necessitated a design that resonates universally.
Varied Financial Literacy: The audience could range from financially savvy individuals to those who are new to revenue-based financing and loans.
User Experience
Information Overload: With a complex ecosystem and multiple service offerings, there's a risk of overwhelming the visitor with too much information.
Navigation: With such a wide array of services and content to display, creating intuitive navigation was a challenge.
Metrics Driven Goals
Tracking and Analysis: To measure the effectiveness of the redesign, implementing the right tools to track user engagement, conversions, and other key performance indicators was crucial.
Balancing Aesthetics with Functionality: While the design had to be visually appealing, it also had to perform well, both in terms of speed and in fulfilling the business objectives.
User-Centric Design
Focused on a user-centric design, the redesign aimed to enhance the user experience, making it easier for prospects to navigate and complete actions.
Information Architecture
A streamlined information architecture was employed to help users effortlessly find what they were looking for.
Content Strategy
New content was developed to clearly explain the unique offerings of Founders First Capital Partners, particularly their revenue-based financing model.
Visual Identity
A refreshed visual identity, including color schemes and typography, was developed to ensure resonance with the diverse audience the organization serves.
Outcome
Our new site is wildly successful with massive increases in the number of applications—and quality applications, which is even more critical.
Chris Deon
Head of Marketing
