Austin Housing Conservancy

David Steinwedell’s vision to alleviate the affordable housing crisis in Austin was powerful – and he needed a strong team on his side in order to bring this vision to fruition. With any big vision comes the serious risk of disjointed messaging. Steinwedell’s business efforts, Affordable Central Texas (ACT) and the Austin Housing Conservancy fund (AHC), were in danger of suffering at the hands of this disconnect. What started as two joint ventures intended to work cohesively towards a greater good had quickly turned into a disjuncture of language, vision and design.

When Steinwedell reached out to Red Fan Communications, their team realized that any press release would be ineffective without the unified messaging and integrated design that Austin Housing Conservancy (AHC) and Affordable Central Texas (ACT) needed to procure investors for their fund. Subsequently, Red Fan Communications partnered with Left Right Media to construct a marketing strategy, refurbish the brand and empower Steinwedell and his team to find success in their future endeavors.

Prior to developing any brand identity or design work for AHC and ACT, we sat down with Red Fan Communications and collaborated on a marketing strategy that would be most effective for the goal of these two brands, which was to procure investments that would be used to purchase affordable housing. We knew that we needed to get a clear message out to potential investors, so we decided to frame our marketing efforts around the fund that investors would be most involved with, Austin Housing Conservancy.

After making this decision, our strategy moved to research. We believe that good design is informed by meticulous research surrounding user types and user experience. Using thorough research and compelling copywriting provided by the Red Fan Communications team, we developed three personas and mapped out potential interactions with future collateral materials in order to ensure that the new unified design would respond to the needs of each consumer subset: investors, media, and the general public.

Good design is informed by meticulous research surrounding user types and user experience.

With these maps in mind, we evaluated the AHC’s current brand deck – making revisions to the logo, adjustments in color, and rounding out a toolkit with new guidelines that would more effectively convey the team’s vision and personality across all mediums.

To bring focus and prioritization to the outline of deliverables, our collaboration with Red Fan also helped to identify the impact opportunity of the AHC’s upcoming engagements. With an important investor luncheon on the horizon, our team’s were able to build a comprehensive one-sheet that would not only test new messaging and creative direction, but also build awareness. The success of this piece, followed by feedback we were able to gather from a small production run, allowed us to make adjustments for the development of the AHC’s next big objective – the website.

Our collaboration with Red Fan helped us identify the impact opportunity of upcoming engagements.

Our in-house development team gives our design team the ability to create solutions that aren’t bound by pre-made templates. This flexibility allows both design and messaging teams to create solutions informed by strategy, and not limited by framework constraints. With the user flow at the forefront, we were able to build a conversion-optimized website – complete with a lead generation component and investor gateway. With mobile users now accounting for over 50% of website traffic worldwide, all design decisions and navigational cues are also made in consideration of today’s most current screen sizes and aspect ratios.

Our website development at Left Right Media doesn’t stop at the front-end. We also take the time to develop a back-end solution that is easily updated by our clients. Taking into consideration how the AHC team would need to interact with, edit and monitor the website, we created a back-end interface that is intuitive enough for someone without development experience to update and adjust as the business evolves.

Our in-house development team gives our design team the ability to create solutions that aren’t limited by pre-made templates.

At the end of our project, we wanted to deliver David Steinwedell and his team at AHC more than a one-sheet, investor deck, email template, and a mobile-first website. We instilled the team with a toolkit and system for creating and delivering new products as the business evolves.

An important part of any project that we take on is transparency and education. Our work is founded on collaboration, not segmentation. So along our journey with AHC, we made calculated efforts to educate team members on marketing strategy, and brief them on how these different methods were influencing our design, development and branding work. As we filled in the AHC team on marketing tactics, they kept us up to date on all things that we needed to know regarding their customer base and vision. This type of partnership promotes maximum efficiency and eliminates the risk of oversight due to miscommunication.

Since AHC’s brand revamp and website launch in December, Red Fan Communications has been equipped with the materials they needed to grow AHC’s PR and earned media presence. They’ve seen a large increase in press, being cited in publications like Culturemap and Austin Business Journal. They’ve also received ample positive feedback from investors and media sources, like Impact Hub, whose Managing Director stated, “I am giving you all a standing ovation over here! And that website is DIVINE!”

David Steinwedell, CEO and President of AHC, left us with this: “We appreciate all the hard work you and your team put in to get us to this launch. The product is awesome and we are proud to share it.”