Helping Schools Help Students
WEB DEVELOPMENT
Client Background
Vemo Education is a startup that is focused on helping schools help students. They strive to make educational financing more equitable to universities and their students by democratizing access to education. These efforts are even more relevant considering the student loan crisis; more Americans are burdened by student debt now more than ever before. Vemo is innovating a new solution and is making passions and dreams more attainable (and affordable) for students by taking hold of an old idea and putting it to action in a new and original way.
Income share agreements (ISAs) are contracts between students and their schools in which students receive funding for their education in exchange for a fixed percentage of their post-graduate income for a certain period of time. They help to eradicate barriers to quality education by creating an alternative to financing based on income after graduation. Advantages in this agreement exist for both parties: for the student, college and their post-grad payments are affordable, and the universities are empowered to prepare their students to the best of their ability with the hopes of sending them off to high-paying and impressive careers.
Project Overview
During a time when Vemo was receiving a lot of attention from the public for their approach to ISAs, their website was outdated and lacked the aesthetics and functionality that a website with high traffic demands. They came to Fifth Tribe initially for a website redesign in order to better communicate their services and explain ISAs to potential clients. The expected deliverables for the project were the following: 1) An updated Vemo Education site with content flow structure, created on WordPress 2) embedded Hubspot forms, 3) a creative blog section, 4) a training session for all Vemo employees to facilitate easy operation and updates to the site, and 5) Google Analytics. Not only did we successfully accomplish these goals, but the Fifth Tribe team was also able to give Vemo much more: a new brand and brand story, two aspects of their organization that they had never fully developed.
The Strategy
Fifth Tribe understands the power of branding across all sectors, and we were able to recognize that Vemo’s brand was underdeveloped; in other words, it could BE more… their story could SAY more. By working collaboratively with the team at Vemo, we were able to make the Vemo story and identity something concrete – something that could be read, understood, and publicized.
The result of the Vemo project was more than just a website redesign. Though each employee was happy and impressed by their new site and it had immediate success with bringing in leads after its launch, the internal impact was something special and enduring. Fifth Tribe gave Vemo a brand story that they had not had before. We were able to work with them to answer the crucial questions, “What is Vemo?” and “What does Vemo REALLY want to do?” in order to give them a more definitive direction. The final product was a redesigned and updated website that answered the project’s deliverables, as well as a brand with a mission to structure value-oriented programs to align schools with the success of their students.
The Result
The website that Fifth Tribe created for Vemo achieved the outlined goals, with special emphasis placed on the aesthetics and functionality of the website. When asked about the impact of our project on their user engagement, Vemo remarked that, “We’ve been very happy with the site overall and have received lots of compliments on its design from our investors. The updated design [Fifth Tribe] delivered has already improved our bounce rate, which has helped with sales overall.” Vemo’s website features custom drawings for the Vemo icons, which became the logos for all of their marketing and sales. Eventually, these vector-based icons became identifiable for the entire Vemo brand. Along these same lines, the project took a turn towards a complete brand makeover. Vemo stated that, “Even though we didn’t intentionally engage them for any branding work, we’re very happy with their designs, from the colors to the illustrations they created.”
