Five Maples.

PUTNEY, VERMONT, USA · DEVELOPMENT COMMUNICATIONS FOR NONPROFIT ORGANIZATIONS

Five Maples helps non-profits raise money through writing, design, printing, direct mail and email communications. They are experts in direct response fundraising and work with over 100 clients throughout the US. With more than 20 employees and multiple freelancers, Five Maples have been in business since 2007.

Gary Henriksen is President and Owner of the company and shared his thoughts on working with Sustainable Digital.

Services provided: Web Design · Web Development · Search Engine Optimization

What challenges prompted you to work with Sustainable Digital?

We needed a web site that was a vehicle for our thought leadership in the practice of fundraising. Our website is key to attracting new business and for ongoing education of our current clients. We needed to upgrade the look and organization, SEO ranking and frequency of posting new content.

Most new business comes through searches for help in fundraising leading to our website, resulting in prospects contacting us for discussion and a proposal. A website with high authority as a whole and for the subject matter and keywords is needed to generate that interest.

Additionally we get referrals from current clients or contacts. Those referred always check our web site before contacting us. The website is critical to establish our credibility.

The site is also key in helping build our email list, so that we can provide subscribers with new content every two weeks and keep current clients and followers (not yet clients) engaged and educated.

During our due diligence while searching for a website firm, we became convinced by Sustainable Digital’s work for other clients and through discussion with them, that their web site approach was the right one for us, since they understood how to organize a content rich website. As things progressed, we also became convinced of Luis Roldán’s expertise in SEO.

We did an initial website rework project, in which the site was redesigned and moved to SquareSpace and since then have continued with a retainer, working with Luis weekly for continued updates, new content and SEO optimization.
We provide most of the writing and design elements for the site; Sustainable Digital does editing, layout, keyword and content research, and SEO optimization and provides overall guidance.

The leads coming in from the site have been essential to sustaining annual revenue growth between 10% and 20% and the site supports our other marketing communications efforts too, as we post a new article or blog post every two weeks and email our customer/marketing list the new content as well as post on social media. Our marketing list continues to build through good SEO alongside speaking at conferences. Our next steps are to continue the current process of expanding content, backlinking, building our list, and bi-weekly emails.