Expertise
What We Value & What We Do
At ThinkShout, it's not about the technology. Don't get us wrong, we're geeks - big geeks with lots of heart. But what makes us special is our commitment to producing sustainable, open source solutions for people who are making lasting social change.
Our business model is simple to understand, unique in its execution:
- Believe and invest in your team - and you'll build good tools.
- Listen and find inspiration in your clients - and you'll build even better tools.
- Trust that if you are transparent, candid and honest - the work will always be there.
It's upon these values that we've pulled together a incredible team and a great process. We begin every project with a rigorous Discovery phase and emphasize clear communication and top-notch project management.
Okay, so generally we get paid to build websites. But sometimes that's not what your organization needs - and we'll tell you that up front. ThinkShout's philosophy is grounded in founder Sean Larkin's ten years of experience leading organizational development trainings for nonprofits.
Large or small, we begin every web development project by examining our client's overarching business objectives and/or goals for social change. We encourage our clients to consider how their web-based tools fit into their overall communication and organizational strategy. We facilitate technology budgeting discussions. And often, we work with our nonprofit clients to development long-term fundraising plans to support the continual maintenance and growth of their website and other communication tools.
Building lasting, meaningful websites isn't just about "slinging code". It's about good content, smart information architecture and graphic design that enhances your organization's message. Similarly, budgeting for your website isn't as simple as just adding up the cost of a number of "off the shelf" features.
Our leadership team brings over forty years of collective experience building online tools. Before we dive into code, we will begin your web development project by talking with you about your organization's goals and leading your organization through a Discovery process. As part of this process, we'll help you identify key functionality and will present you with wireframes and prototypes of your website. Then, before we move into implementation, we will work with you to develop a roadmap for the iterative and long-term development of your web-based tools.
As more and more productivity tools move into the Cloud, integration of these services has become critical. At ThinkShout, we pride ourselves on being integration specialists. We have integrated Drupal with a wide variety of CRM solutions, such as Salesforce, CiviCRM, and Microsoft Dynamics. Moreover, our most prominent Drupal contribution has been our MailChimp integration, which is actively used on over 5,000 websites around the world.
ThinkShout is quickly becoming a nationally-recognized leader in open source, online mapping. Our mapping clients and collaborators include Oregon Metro, OpenPlans, and even the National Park Service. In the last two years, we’ve built over thirty web-based maps for local river conservation and water trail organizations across the country. We partner with cartographers to develop beautiful, map-driven data visualizations.
We have made significant contributions back to the open source mapping community - including cutting-edge Drupal integrations with mapping services and tools such as OpenLayers, Leaflet, Mapstraction, and MapBox.
ThinkShout's team has been building robust web applications with Drupal since the framework's 4.6 release six years ago. We're not exclusively wedded to Drupal, but we are wedded to open source and we do see Drupal as one of the best tools for our nonprofit and enterprise clients to quickly and affordably launch beautiful, easy-to-maintain websites, as well as to glue together complex web services and social media mash-ups with third-party tools like Facebook, Twitter and Google Maps.