 All right. Hello, everybody. We are now on our third episode of Let's Discuss with Parson's TKO. As you might recall, I'm Tony Capetschini, the CEO and co-founder of Parson's TKO. Still sort of newly shaved in case you don't recognize me, fans out there. But yes, I'm delighted to be joined by my colleagues today, and we're going to be the topic of today's discussion, the title is We Don't Build Websites. But I'm going to let my colleagues introduce themselves. I have Patty in the lower box here. Hey there, everyone. My name is Patty Deboe. I'm the president at Parson's TKO. Hey, everybody. I'm Nate Parsons of Parson's TKO, co-founder with Tony. Excellent. All right. So we don't build websites, but ironically we do. So why would we say something like that? I've been reading more and more. I think where we always get to is we end up in this place where a website redesign is seen as this status of progress or this state of transformation. But that project into itself isn't that, right? When it's just an RFP and I want to get on some new version of WordPress and it needs some new design. And I think when organizations don't knowingly go into it with the understanding that this is going to be so much broader than just those simple steps that it's hard to be successful. And I think that's where we came into it and we've had this talk with now current clients who were prospective clients at the time where we did say we don't build websites. We build business systems and business intelligence tools. The website needs to be a piece of that infrastructure, but it isn't a thing anymore. So this is where we want to take the conversation today and I'm going to let my colleagues dive in a little bit on those sites. We don't build websites. What's going on? Hey, I'll throw it over to Patty first. Yeah, sure. I guess my top line thinking on this is, you know, to Tony's point, the websites are not the thing anymore, right? They are one of many ways organizations of all sizes and all types are connecting with their audiences. And so the website needs to be considered just one piece of a whole in terms of the tools and channels through which you're reaching your audiences. So when people come at these questions from, we need to do a website, refresh or build. You know, our first question is always why and what are you trying to achieve? And also, how else are you doing that, right? If the goal is to push content out to folks or to drive conversions, we do want to know what are all the other ways and channels through which you're doing that. And so that's sort of part of our process. And part of the reason we say we don't build websites, we want to help you utilize your website as a tool to achieve the things that you're trying to do with your audience. Nate, do you have any initial thoughts to get us kicked up? Yeah, I mean, I like to, you know, where Patty was going with that. I mean, I agree. I mean, I think that one of the evolutions we've seen is that, you know, previously everything was broadcast, right? Like if you weren't on the web, you weren't anywhere in digital, right? You had to have a web presence for people to understand anything. And what you put on your website was what you were telling the world. But the reality is, is things have evolved, you know, but the tool sets have evolved to allow you to have one-on-one conversations instead of one conversation to many. But also it's gone from broadcasting to listening and interacting, you know, and there's more tools that need to be there to not just send your message out, but also to receive the responses and let there be responses. And, you know, you see that in the interactivity of things like Twitter, where you can interact with a celebrity or an organization and, you know, have a one-on-one experience with them, or Facebook, where you can kind of find groups of people and show your affinity there. And both of those places are really important for organizations, you know, and they're not the website. They're not even really connected directly to the website. And then on the websites themselves, you know, the original tooling, because the website was so focal, was trying to put all of the command and control software and infrastructure on the website where the reality is now you're trying to connect all these different things together. Like, what does it mean if somebody interacts with Facebook and your website, and your email newsletter comes to an in-person event? You know, and the website can't tell you everything about that experience or that interaction or that audience member's, you know, interest in your organization. And so that means that a lot of the tools and systems that you need to have a strong interaction with your audiences aren't just on your website anymore either. And so, you know, the website's kind of gone from being the very front of your engagement with your users to being kind of a midpoint or connective tissue piece. And because of that, you know, just rebuilding the website doesn't impact your engagement or your ability to interact with your audiences nearly as much or nearly as effectively as it did previously. So it's still important. But you can't just build a website and be done and you can't just have a strategy to revolve around your website. I mean, in that aspect too, is a website still the hub of the digital experience? You know, or is there something else there, right? If it's, yeah, I don't know. I'm going to let you guys riff on that. Is it the central point that actually we use it together or is it just a point? Because every time the last several years I've been in these conversations, it still comes across as it's the hub. Maybe it's because there's a sense that you actually own that property. You don't own your social channels. You don't own, you kind of own email, maybe not the mechanism that sends it out. But is there something else, right? Like is a CRM actually the hub of what that infrastructure is now and not a website? Yeah, I mean, I would say probably the CRM is the hub, right? Which is a less visible thing to your audience. But that shift that Nate was talking about also is, you know, away from we are just pushing content to audiences back to how are we engaging, how are we interacting and what do we know about our audience, right? And you're not getting a whole lot of that through your website. You're getting one channel of that. And if you've got great analytics and great capture and conversions on your website, you might be getting some pieces of that. But hopefully it's connected and feeding into a CRM and integrating with lots of data and information from other parts of your infrastructure that, you know, you can pull all this information together and learn something. So I think it would benefit organizations to sort of rethink what is the hub of their communications or outreach strategy. It's probably not the website. Or it, you know, it may be to some subset of your users, but is it to all of them? And are you capturing the right information in a way to even discern that, you know, as you kind of execute your content strategy? Yeah, I mean, I might, you know, I tend to abstract things even now higher level and say that the hub is where your interactions with your audiences are occurring. And I think it really is use case dependent then, right? Like, you know, if you're in an event, you know, Twitter might be a hub for that moment, right? Where you're getting real-time updates and you're interacting with people who are involved and engaged in that event right there. But, you know, subsequently when they go home from the event, you know, the website might become more of the focal point of that, you know? And so the CRM is often where that glue between all those interactions happens. But, you know, really what the focal point is is wherever you're having an interaction with your audiences and how you're tracking and interacting, tracking the interaction and then making different choices based on how well or how effective that interaction was. Now you can sustain and create that interaction in the future. And, you know, I think that's another key point, which is that the world's more complex. Like, because of mobile devices, people have interactions that are different, you know, at an event than they might at their desktop, you know, and they might have a different interaction at work than they do at home, you know? And so I think there's a kind of complexity to it that means that, you know, understanding who the audience member is and what their particular context is at that moment is important too. You know, even in personas for websites, they used to say, oh, this person has these demographics and they have these goals, but the reality is they have those demographics and they have those goals at a particular point in their day, you know, or at a particular goal that they're trying to achieve. And you really need goal-by-goal or situation-by-situation strategies because, you know, the website can't handle all those things because it's not going to be the primary thing they're looking at at certain times. And that's especially true when you get into, like, the mobile world of, like, Facebook Live or Periscope or things like that, where, you know, that's going to be really behind, you know, the experience on the websites could be very behind whatever's happening on those platforms or it's just going to be a window into what's happening in those platforms, but it isn't the experience itself. I really like what you went with that, Nate, on how the goals evolve because I think that's an important distinction about why we say we don't build websites, right? Any website firm or web-build firm is going to tell you they do a discovery and goal-setting process at the beginning of a big web-builder refresh. But I think our point of view and our process is to take that much bigger and broader and ask what your goals are broadly, not just for that website but for your audiences, and you make this good point that it's also not static, right? So it may change by audience segment, it may change over time, it may change for the channel through which they're interacting with you. And all of that is really important context to inform what might be some distinct goals for the website, but you can't know what success looks like unless you consider that holistically. Because you might have people interacting with your website and you might see traffic go down or engagement go down, and that might look bad in the context of a website alone. But something else is going on somewhere else that is actually more engaging and more productive for the interactions you have with your audience. I was thinking about audience, just nice to kind of your audience point there too, it's just, you know, I was reading this passage, it was great. It was, you know, digital transformation has to be about what your audience expectations are to make their lives easier, right? To make the tasks they're trying to accomplish easier. And you had mentioned that we're in discovery, Patty, you know, with a lot of groups right that into their contracts, we're going to do discovery. I've always hated it. I'm like, you're not trying to discover who you are, you know who you are. That's not what it is. We're trying to diagnose, I think, to your point, the why you are doing this, what it is supposed to do at the end of the day, and who is it supposed to serve. And we get a lot of time. So we know who our audiences are. And then, well, have you ever talked to them? Like, do they really want this? And, you know, and Nate and I have had this conversation before too, where a lot of groups we work with really have B2B outreach models, but operate in B2C type communication tactics. And I think there's this evolution that has to happen there too. But, you know, who are you actually talking to your audience is to get the experience they want to get involved. But I might want to take us in a slight direction of shift. Maybe it ties into what you guys were talking about earlier. You know, if we think about the hub and you think about that, it's more than the website now, right? And it's all these different tools. Website redesigns for the mission-driven sector, they tend to get this one-time big tranche of money. And then it's like, now everything has to fit against this and let's figure all the things out. And like, you can't, right? Nothing wins when you're trying to serve everything there. But there's also the question, when you look at all the pieces that have to tie in, you know, we mentioned CRM, we mentioned email marketing, we mentioned, you know, if you're an action organization, advocacy alerts, like who owns all those systems? That typically isn't a single department. So I'm wondering, you know, what needs to happen to make the integration across those work to really start transforming the organization too, right? If it's your main budget, do you, how do you invite your colleagues in or how do we approach this? You know, what are our thoughts? We like to say we start with diagnostics or strategy and planning. But I don't know if you guys want to riff on that, like what you've seen just out there between the departments, whether it's mission-driven or private sector work we've done and how ownership of this world kind of takes place. Yeah, I think you're hitting on something really important there, which is that, you know, as the interactions have become more rich and you have more capability to kind of know your audience and meet their needs more fully as an organization, the team sport of it has increased, right? Like it takes more departments working together and more systems working together to do really effective outreach or to manage those interactions. And, you know, there's a kind of challenge that a lot of organizations face, which is that budgeting and budget management is separated from, you know, the audience engagement and audience impact, you know? And it's often the, you know, job of the communications team or the development team to kind of advocate for budget for all of the outreach and audience engagement functions, even if that's not their purview. They're only focused on one high slice of that piece. And there's a lot of internal systems that play into these things that aren't considered as part of their budgets. You know, the workflow software your company uses, the internal chat software, the tools and systems you use to make reports or make content that then the web team or the communication team is asked to kind of, you know, engage the audiences with. There's all these back office pieces that are part of that puzzle too. And, you know, the most effective strategies we've seen are ones where organizations take a sort of portfolio management approach to that, where they kind of take all of the digital assets, all the systems, the tools, the processes, and they sort of put them in a value-based grid where they can kind of say, we're spending this much time and money on each of these things, and we think we're getting this much value out of it. And we're going to try and support that for this amount of time to have kind of put the continuity of operations and a, you know, rethink about the strategy at some point in the future. And through that lens, they're able to kind of really focus and hone down on the things that are valuable and remove the things that are less valuable. And, you know, that's very important, I think, because you have to have something that's neutral and organizational value-wide, you know, or value assessment to kind of get the right tools in place, because it's really easy for one department to devalue the work of another department or not see the value in terms of their own priorities, you know, even though they're playing into the overall impact of the organization. Yeah, some thoughts I had on the topic of, you know, how you work across departments. I guess the mantra I'll come back to is, you know, involvement does not equal good governance, right? And I think we see a lot of organizations believe they're doing the right thing by saying, yep, let's get communications involved. Let's get development involved. Whatever the various departments for our IT, you know, that all might have a piece of the pie in terms of, you know, what's on the website and have some stake in that game. But that doesn't equal good governance, right? And governance to me says, eventually someone has to be the decision maker and there has to be shared goals and definitions of success. So I think one of the challenges we see is that often through the web building process, what is success look like is not defined or is defined sort of more in technical terms, right? So we are building a website. We have requirements and specs. We might even have some engagement goals in terms of, you know, increases in web traffic or engagement on the site. But if there's not conversations happening around not only the governance of the process of the bill or the refresh itself, but also how is that going to be maintained going forward? Who has the ultimate say about content, decision making, taxonomy and other strategic decisions that are really going to influence that? It can put organizations in a position of feeling like they don't have success because maybe they're not getting the metrics they want even though, you know, the website was built to specification and we had all the right people involved but the right conversations weren't happening around governance and how that was going to be maintained in an ongoing fashion. I mean, it's interesting too. We're talking about organization-wide goals and we talked about budgeting. We've talked about departments. You know, when you think about budgeting too, are we still in a world where these website redesigns are a million-dollar projects, right? They're really expensive. Like, how much should you be investing in that versus these other components? And I think you're both hitting on different pieces of that, right? Patty's talking about what are the goals and outcomes we expect from the organization, whether it's from the communications team or from the marketing and outreach. And Nate, I think you had talked a little bit about it and what you had called it, a value-based grid approach to the portfolio. I mean, how does that play, right? I mean, how much money should I be trying to grab? Should I try to grab it all and then break it down into using a different tool? You know, I always think marketing automation is 2019. You really should be doing it by now, everybody. But most groups aren't because they've acquired a system and the system itself was a symbol of progress, but then no progression has been made. So what do you think in terms of that, just when you think about budgets across the portfolio? I mean, what do we see in these days? Yeah, I mean, I think you're hitting on something that's still in the sort of sea change moment from what I see, which is that, you know, there used to be a really good reason to invest a lot of money in your website technology, which is that it was so much better, you know, the year you rebuilt it than the years ago product that you were replacing. You know, and what we've seen is just like in mobile phones and computers, there's kind of a plateau that's happening in terms of, you know, web technology, in terms of content management systems and a lot of the other tools that lets you, like, run the business of having a website. And there's not a lot of bang for your buck that you're getting, you know, now than you would have gone through years ago. Like, they're better and certain, you know, quality of life ways, but there's not dramatic capability differences. And I think what that implies is that the real focus for organization should be in finding the top of the bell curve and how they're engaging with their audiences. And I do think it means they should be shifting their budgets from technology acquisition to strategy acquisition, in essence, having better tactics and strategies to engage their audiences and better workflows and content creation, you know, efforts internally to kind of create their kind of engagement and engaging, you know, experiences that those audiences want. And, you know, that's, that's something that we see them, a lot of organizations realizing, but often after they spend a bunch of money on a website rebuild that didn't move the needle much. And I think that that's one of the challenges, right? That it used to be you just got the new website and you got all this new technology and your numbers went up. And the reality is now you get a new website and your numbers go down sometimes because you've changed your SEO or you've changed your engagement approach and you can actually go down after spending a bunch of money instead of going dramatically up. And so I do think there needs to be a focus and that's also why we don't focus on the website as much is that the value of production for organizations is really in that interaction, optimization and not in that technology enablement. And I would also add a thing that I always try to apply to our operations even at Parsons TKO is can we do more with the tool we have before we think about something new and shiny, right? It's very appealing to kind of pivot to either just a website refresh or some new tool or some fancy new technology for any sort of audience engagement without really asking yourself whether you're getting the most out of the tool or the website, whatever it is that you have today. And in some cases there is a tendency to spend these big dollars, I think on websites because as Nate said years ago you got a lot. If you refresh your website every couple years there was a lot that was different in terms of the technology. It's not really the case anymore but I think people have lagged a little in terms of understanding the scale and scope of that. And you might be better off in a lot of cases doing a small 25K, 50K assessment of what do we really need, what is actually going to move the needle for our audiences and it might not be your website and that might save you from investing hundreds of thousands or even a million dollars or more on a brand new shiny website that isn't going to achieve the goals you have with your audience. And that money might be better spent investing in a new CRM or even investing in the integrations of your CRM with other systems or investing in some good governance and process around data so that you can make smarter decisions with the tools you have and have better processes around that. You might actually see a better lift and engagement from that than you would with even the fanciest newest website for your organization. Yeah, just to tag on to that. I mean, one of the things that we see especially in the sort of larger and more complex organizations that we work with is that they need just as much or they would benefit just as much from business process architecture as technical architecture, which is to say like, you know, they need to change the way they're working internally to get the most out of the interaction capabilities they have or are procuring. You know, it's really common for organizations to have more sophisticated capabilities than they have tactics that are being using or leveraging those capabilities. You know, and I think that's a key thing we try and focus on as well, which is the change management and, you know, governance and internal business processes that you're using to conduct your outreach internally need to be evolved at the same time or even ahead of time for your new technology procurement through your new website or even your existing website. And I think that's where a lot of the values locked up these days is in changing how people work as much as changing the, you know, how they're driving on the web. Yeah, I mean, I'd be curious if for both of your thoughts on this, I mean, can it happen in unison or does it have to, does one have to happen before the other? I think there's an ideal state and then there's, what did I have time and budget for at this point and how do I make that work and I'll tag in the last thought before I let you two have at it is I think you and I were having this conversation, which is a lot of times during the website redesign project too, it's owned by a single department and then how I think you mentioned, but how are they inviting the rest of the organization to realize something will be different in a way that it's positive feedback in, but then an output back to say, oh yeah, and it will be different soon. I wonder if you guys have any thoughts on that variety of questions that I just tossed at you. Yeah, I mean, one initial thought is just to reiterate that change management as a process needs to go hand in hand. If you are doing a website refresh or build, you know, I think there will always be multiple stakeholders who are providing inputs to the website, providing content who have expectations about what they're going to get out of it, whether it be donations or engagement. And oftentimes there's just a lack of understanding and because they're not folks who maybe work in the comms world who are familiar with being website admins, lack of understanding of, you know, the goals and the governance of the website itself, of the processes, or even sometimes the time it takes, right? In order to take a piece of content from written to website ready. And what does that look like? And then what are the expected pieces of feedback? People might sort of expect that more content drives more engagement. You know, I think most folks that work in the communications world and are managing websites know that you've got a test, you've got to iterate, you've got to kind of adapt your content strategy, your governance, all of this to what you're hearing from your audiences and you have to track that. And so even the plans and the governance you set up during the process of a website refresh may need to be changed six months down the line. And if that isn't being continuously communicated to all the stakeholders, you know, there's an opportunity for it to look like failure, right? I think that's a concern I always have with these sorts of things is, you know, both setting the right goals up front and then being agile with them because the definition of success is going to change. And folks outside the communications department or whoever's managing your website in particular may not be as attuned to those fluctuations. So change management through the process of the building and change management beyond to make sure that all the stakeholders are engaged and understand those evolutions. Yeah, I like that a lot. I mean, I think one of the other things that made me think of is that, you know, for a lot of our organizations we work with, they see the website as like something that's going to talk to crowds of people rather than to individuals. And I think that's a key change that will help with the change management and lets the change management happen more simultaneously within those projects. Like if more organizations saw web projects as audience engagement projects, I think they would change the way they work. Like one of our clients that we were doing a web redesigned for as a third or fourth project into a strategy, a greater strategy we built for them, had a VP comment to us that they really wished that the website could help them have better interactions with these key external stakeholders that he had a personal one-on-one relationship with. And we realized in that conversation that he didn't have a CRM integration into his email. And so when he emailed with the folks, he wasn't able to see that data captured in an interaction sort of way with the CRM. And then we also realized that within the CRM there was no kind of reporting dashboard that was configured and set up for him with the right kind of interactions and the right kind of information about those contexts that he needed and he wanted. And we saw that when he was trying to enable and use the website for to help further that interaction with that external stakeholder wasn't enabled or configured, that whole tool chain should be part of the web engagement experience that we're trying to enable with any kind of web project. But it's often that stuff is seen as a totally different kind of project from the website project. It's a key evolution that helps the change management happen in the right places, which is when people start seeing the website as being something that's about individual interactions with any audience member, no matter if they're a job applicant or an important stakeholder or a donor or whatever the role is of that external person, it helps focus people in the right kind of area to change the internal business practices that need to happen. Because the worst thing that can happen is for an individual to fall through the cracks and not have the right interaction, not have someone who's responsible for working with them. And that's really different from crowds where people are like, oh, the crowds are mostly in the right place, it's fine. And I think that that's a real difference that helps people get to the right level of detail for changing the business practices. Nate, you mentioned something that was really interesting to me about that particular client where the website redesign we did with them was a third or fourth project. And it makes me ask the question, when is the right time to do a website redesign or refresh that's a major undertaking? Because part of it is, what work have you done leading up to that? And maybe you both have a perspective on where we've seen that work or not. But I think the other part is what is in or out of scope of a website redesign, right? If the website is also a channel for job applicants, are we allowed to question that process during the website redesign or is it like no? And I think to your point that doing this as a third or fourth step, if there's been an intentionality around, you know what, we're not prioritizing the job applicant process right now for XYZ reason. It's actually a little bit easier to kind of reign in or define that scope of the website redesign itself. But I don't know, Tony or Nate, if you have thoughts on when has that been successful or not with organizations we've worked with. Yeah, I mean, I'll dive in. So, you know, I'd say that the most, the most valuable time for any organization to consider web redesign is when they have developed some strong strategies or opinions about how they want to engage their audiences and who those audiences are. And they see a real disconnect between that theory of engagement or that plan of engagement and what's enabled or available on the website. You know, like basically you've identified roadblocks that need to be overcome by, you know, investing in that technology to smooth out the pathway there. You know, and I think if you don't have that theory and you're not really sure that's why it's good to do other projects to kind of get that model in place and try and figure out is the website really where the bang for the buck, you know, and your organization is, is it going to deliver real value? Because it's really easy to look at the visuals or the subjective looking field of a website and be like, oh, I don't like how this looks. It doesn't represent our brand or how it feels to work with this organization. And that could be true, but it could still be a really effective business tool if your, you know, interactions are being met on there really well. And, you know, that kind of plays into scope. So like in the nonprofit and think tank world, job applicant areas of the website always generate a lot of traffic. There's a lot of interest in them. And the people visiting those often have a lot of affinity with the organization or are building it by reading a lot, preparing for job interviews, thinking about applying and working there. And, you know, if you don't leverage that engagement in some positive and useful way for the organization, you're leaving a lot on the table, you know? And so that's an argument for getting involved much more heavily in a process area that most people in the communications team would be like, oh, that's just the job section. We don't need to worry about that. But the reality is it's a huge honeypot for engagement. And so, yeah, I think there's a lot of strategy that needs to be figured out before you can, you know, both define the scope of the website project and also figure out when and where the value of it is. And, you know, I think a lot of times what we find is that the website shouldn't be first because you need a lot of other tools in place to make the website valuable, right? Like if you don't have a good analytics and data model, then all the interactions on the website won't be tracked and useful for you to make better decisions. And if you don't have a way to track and connect with those one-on-one user experiences, then all the affinity you're building with particular audience members, you can't leverage this effectively or heavily after they visit the website. So there's a lot of arguments, I think, in favor of moving the website back in the sort of stack of priorities of projects. But I think a lot of organizations see it as so internally valuable because of that visual brand affinity that, you know, executives and other people feel when you relaunch it that it kind of often trumps the actual business value that could be delivered from it. Yeah, I mean, I just keep thinking, too, on the what you have to figure out, I mean, the website is really large conversion point. Well, who are you trying to convert and why? What is it you're doing with your content on that channel to convert them? What's the point? I was in a conversation with the perspective group that I was trying to woo in and maybe work for our TKO, but it was a very interesting response. It was like, we don't really have a bottom line in that way. We don't do online donations and we don't do advocacy. We just have these materials we put out. I'm like, oh, there has to be some point for that or else why have a website at all? You just save all that time and money and just pump that out to all the different newspapers around the country or where you think any of the big funders are if that's what you're interested in. So I think there's some work that has to be done in that. You know, in my head, it's always like, what's the point of your website? Because the internet is really just overcrowded place. You're not just homesteading anymore like, here's my spot. Everybody will eventually drop by and say, hi, like it doesn't work that way. So if you really don't have an opinion on why you have the site and what you're trying to drive with it, I don't know how it even works within the operation or why you carry the expense. That's why I'd be more interested in, those are tough conversations, I think internally at organizations to say, hey, we actually have to make a shift. Oh, we do want to convert people. Oh, we do want to get them to do something next. I think as a company, our company is very happy to go in and start facilitating those dialogues. They're really hard to do though, when it's like, oh yeah, and in two weeks, you're supposed to sign off on design, right? You're trying to do all that at once and it doesn't, none of it's going to, who cares what the new colors are. If you haven't thought about the conversion and where it's supposed to be and why it's supposed to be there. Including even, yeah, just thinking about your budget that you put into something like that. So that would be my thought on it, why it's better to wait to a rethink, take the time. It's interesting too. A lot of website redesigns either come on the heels of, or the toes of, like right before, groups decide to launch into strategic, like we're going to rethink the whole strategic objectives of the organization. It's like, man, that would have been great to get into that conversation before you did this project. That might change everything. You know, and on that external versus internal voice too, we've seen this just in information architectures over the years, internal programs change, things shift, priorities shift, but then a lot of times they build these information architectures based off of what their organizational structure is. And now you got to rehash that every time and try to re-explain that to the world. And I think those are lost opportunities as well. Those are my two quick cents, aren't they? Tony, the thing you said about, you know, trying to work on visual designs when you're not clear on the engagement goals, I think you just highlighted sort of the crux of the reason why web design projects often go off the rails, over budget, three times as long as they were intended to because, you know, hopefully you're working with someone that's doing it that is asking the right kind of questions. But even if the, you know, the from doing the web build is not, hopefully internally, this is going to raise a lot of questions, right? So not just the design, but the analytics questions. How do we want to set that up? Well, I don't know, what are we trying to achieve? And it can really get off the rails from what you think is a simple design choice, is this red or blue? Or a simple, you know, how do we configure Google analytics question? It really starts to uncover some of these strategic things. And, you know, if your organization hasn't answered those, that is really going to kind of derail, you know, a good web design process because you won't be able to quickly get to what people agree is the right, you know, strategy in, you know, whatever small nuanced part of the web build in terms of features or design or something to actually achieve the goals, because no one's clear what the goals are. So it actually sometimes winds up saving you money, I think, in the long run to invest a little bit up front in the planning and the kind of cross organizational goal setting or, you know, audience engagement, you know, definition of what that looks like before you launch into either a web build or any other frankly kind of major technology investment. A lot of what we're saying, I think applies to other sorts of technology builds or investments as well. Yeah, and I have a theory about your theory, Tony, which is that I think that the web build projects often uncover that brand dissonance, that kind of discussion at the highest levels of organizations where they realize what they're trying to say and promote has evolved within the organization. And that is often why I think there are so many leadership sort of strategy sessions that often follow website builds and often unfortunately aren't happening before them, you know, because it's that idea of, you know, one of the evolutions that you see on websites is that the home pages of websites used to be about vibrancy, like what's the newest thing, whatever organization or whatever group has done, like here's our brand new newest thing. And the reality is that as Facebook and Twitter and all these other places where you hear about content and Google search engines and things like that, exposed content, you don't enter through the home pages frequently as you used to. You used to, you know, hear about an organ type in their organization's URL into the browser. And now you search on Google and you pop into an article or a deep page or product page or whatever. And when you go up to the main home page of an organization, you're trying to figure out who they are. It's kind of the about page for them now. And I think that combined with the mission and the brand kind of discussion of like who we are and how we're trying to represent ourselves in the web opens a lot of doors for organizations, which is good to kind of reevaluate who they are and what kind of interactions they're trying to have. But that's exactly again, why we think those projects should be intentional and happen before the website, right? Because the website would greatly, greatly benefit from representing the results of all those conversations and all the insights the organization generates. And you can have those without the website projects. So you can save all that money and effort and rebuilding if you just move the website down in terms of the strategic planning of your sort of technology rollout. And that's what we try and facilitate a lot or to kind of get executives and getting leadership teams into those deep think places about who they are or what they're really trying to accomplish and to like see the web as a business tool, not as a poster about the organization. Yeah. I mean, you're tapping into my favorite saying of all time that I coined maybe, which is technology is easy and people are hard, right? These are not easy conversations. And then the website redesign project becomes a foil for having to sort of have the conversation but not really answering it. But everyone can point to that piece of technology or that design screen about the things they don't like about what they are struggling with internally with the organization instead of really facilitating a deeper dialogue about what that means as an organization. And I think there's a lot of hard moments. It's in 2019, like, where are you positioned? You know, are you positioned for success? We're seeing a big movement in the foundation space, right? Like bigger bets on funding, right? And so what are you doing to position yourself within that space as well as these questions that I think these groups need to start asking. But, you know, you had talked about this before, right? If you think about the evolution of technology from 95 to 99, 99 to 2009 to where we're at today, like it's happened fast. You might have to leapfrog to get ahead to be where you needed to be, but you really got to start thinking about how you're going to get there. And it doesn't happen by just tapping into the code that happens with getting your team together and getting some internal alignment. Well, we're getting close to time. So I'm wondering if either of you have any final closing thoughts? Just one quick one throughout there, which is that another thing that's happening is that because of the evolution of data standards and, you know, the ability to capture and connect data and juxtapose it next to each other, the other reason the websites are sort of not becoming as important is because you might actually want your content to be somewhere else besides your website for people to discover it, you know? And, you know, just a popular, easy example of this is sort of like Apple News, you know, where they were able to get all of these different organizations' news in front of many more people once you made it available to Apple via their special, you know, data format to add it into Apple News, you know? And that up in the whole new marketplace to organizations to the web wasn't. And no matter of tinkering with their website was going to get them to that Apple News place. And that's happening in a lot of different areas, you know, for our academic clients like, you know, the Folger Shakespeare Library, they've adopted standards that let their, you know, digital assets that they're actually curating internally be juxtaposed with other organizations like, you know, the Royal Library in England and Stanford University and other people. And all of that is happening through this API data layer, not through their website. And so, you know, that's another piece of the puzzle, which is that your content and your impact and your influence might not be happening on your website. And so you might want to be investing in making sure you can deliver your content and your message as much as you want. And that delivery mechanism isn't just the website anymore. You know, that used to be the default. And now it's just one of several arrows in the quiver. Yeah, I'll just layer onto that. I mean, it almost sounds to me like some of the points you're making, Nate, is that the website almost just becomes the content repository. And maybe or hopefully organizations also have some sort of good governance and tools internally for that. But people are not coming to your website, depending on who you are as an organization, landing on the homepage and browsing around necessarily. They're searching. They're being directed there from other places. And organizations spend an immense amount of time thinking through the content and the navigation of their website. Not that that isn't important. But, you know, not shouldn't be at the neglect of thinking through these other pathways. Actually, I was just reading an article this morning that was talking about kind of anecdotally, but how bad most companies and organizations aren't describing who they are and what they do and how now lots of people just go to Wikipedia to figure that out because it's actually usually a better, more plain language thing. And it's like, how many people are thinking about that as a channel for people to like learn about their organization? And what is it that's appealing about that versus the about page on your website if someone was actually looking at it? Or is that irrelevant? Because people are Googling and going to Wikipedia knowing that's the plain language place to get it. So it really reframes kind of the common knowledge about what are the important components of a website? What is the job of the individual pieces of content on a website? How are people getting to them? The world has changed in a lot of ways. You know, compared to the point you made, Nate, that like the technology of websites is starting to plateau, but the world around it has really evolved. And we need to reframe the way we think about it. Well, this is a very enjoyable conversation. Oh, how am I to cut you off, Nate? What are we going to say? Oh, I just thought, I love that point, Patty. I thought it was great. And I just say that's another piece of it too, which is reputation management has become important. And that's part of both what needs to happen with your content design and your website strategy, but also why people go to Wikipedia, because they're actually sort of also checking up a little on your reputation by looking at Wikipedia. And, you know, organizations, when they're thinking about their website, should be steering into that, which is that it needs to be a reputation management device in addition to being a content delivery and an engagement gluing device and all these other pieces. And that's another important reason that it should be part of a wider strategy. Well, we touched on that a little bit and let's discuss number two, the value of content. But reputation management, I think, has always been important, but not maybe at the apex or the forefront that it should have been for most of the mission-driven sector. I mean, when Coca-Cola thinks about its brand, it actually insigns a value to it, right? There is like monetary value that mission-driven sector has to start thinking about that a lot more because it is a halo that they can give out in many different ways. We see it done with cause marketing campaigns, right? And just because you're not doing a cause marketing campaign, you're not action-oriented, like you still have that brand halo and how are you managing it across all of these? So this has been a great conversation. I mean, I'm sure we can keep riffing. You know, I think it is safe to say we don't build websites because these really are business systems, right? These are business strategies and these are transformation efforts. And for us as a company, we need groups that are ready to go into that with us. You know, my favorite line is always, wow, this was a lot more than just a website. You know, when we've done that with a few clients and we've first started out and that felt really good. That's exactly the response we want because it is more than that. And hopefully folks who've listened to this conversation will get some of that out of this too. It's so many pieces and so many layers and putting them together in the right combination and mixture of your organization can really be an amplifier or a dampening effect. So, you know, think about how you're taking those on. So for anyone who's listening, if you really like this, you know, give us a like or a thumbs up or share, put some comments down there below. It would be really great to hear what you're thinking about what we're doing here in the less discussed series. As always, these were informed conversations, but informal. You know, we haven't, you could see, we haven't scripted these. We're not that good at acting and improv. But yeah, we're always willing for new ideas too. So if you have some, put them below, drop us a note. Feel free to reach out to us anytime. We definitely like talking.