Case Study
St. Louis Economic Development Partnership
Crafting a digital vision for the St. Louis Economic Development Partnership
In 2013, a remarkable and historic partnership was formed.
The economic development entities of the City of St. Louis and St. Louis County merged. This merger allowed the region’s economic development story to be told with one significant and powerful voice. It also meant that more than a dozen organizations would be working in unison, which revealed a significant challenge: digitally, aesthetically and strategically the organizations were incompatible.
The Partnership chose Bigwidesky as its partner to create an integrated, cohesive strategy and presence. Because of the numerous partners and agendas, creating and developing a larger digital strategy that represented the new entity was going to take while.
To foster collaboration and determine areas of consensus among the stakeholders, Bigwidesky facilitated a number of our proprietary design-futures workshop exercises. As a result of this work, a number of insights were gained with the group.
To bridge the timeframe and allow the Partnership to tell its stories, Bigwidesky created an interim website that communicated the Partnership’s accomplishments in a powerful and shareable manner. The presentation and UX provided simple, enticing sharing functionality. This allowed for the greatest level of social engagement around the content, and thus supported and the extended the Partnership’s desire to impact audiences.
At the same time, Bigwidesky began work on what would become the final website that represented the newly-formed St. Louis Economic Development Partnership. Using the interim site as a beta test for a content-driven site, Bigwidesky completed a robust publishing platform that allows visitors to get the most up-to-date news on St. Louis economic development in a way that caters to their specific interests combined with the institutional information that shares the St. Louis Economic Development Partnership’s comprehensive offering.
In the fall of 2017, Bigwidesky was honored to work with the St. Louis Economic Development Partnership in creating the STL Hustle website, a digital platform used in St. Louis’ proposal for the Amazon HQ2 location bid.
The website highlighted and illustrated what makes St. Louis great as well as provided Amazon with their proposal requirements, to include location fly-over videos, interview videos with community leaders, and beautiful photography of St. Louis.