Case Study: Design Commission

Figuring out how to grow

David Conrad, the co-founder of Design Commission, had a problem.  Thanks to loyal clients like Sony, Corbis, and Paul Allen's Vulcan Labs, his agency had grown from two to six people in just 18 months.  That 300% growth made it difficult to keep using email for collaboration.

"Email is a habit we're trying to break," said Conrad.  "It's incredibly dispersed, and trying to find the password to Campaign Monitor takes 30 minutes when it should take 30 seconds."

Nor was this simply an issue of convenience.  It had real impact on Design Commission's business and bottom line.

"This translates into real financial benefits," said Conrad.  "I have more time to work on billable projects because I'm not spending that extra 29:30 hunting down information I'm not being paid to find.  There's also a boost to general morale.  It drives me nuts when I can't find a piece of information I need to do my job."

Design Commission Chooses PBworks over Basecamp and Google Sites

Conrad looked at a lot of different options before choosing PBworks.  Design Commission already used Basecamp to manage client-related projects, but that tool lacked the necessary comprehensiveness and permanence.  "The problem with Basecamp is that it doesn't let you tie everything together; there's no way to see all your different projects at once," said Conrad.  "Also, it's temporal; there's a begin date and an end date.  PBworks lets us organize information for use in perpetuity."

Conrad liked PBworks's flexibility and openness, citing its open APIs and widget support as evidence that PBworks gives its users the opportunity to build on top of the base platform.

Design Commission was also already a Google customer, managing email using Google Apps.  But when Conrad reviewed Google Sites, he concluded it wasn't going to meet his needs.

"Google Sites was a disappointing experience," said Conrad.  "It's too confusing and didn't do a good job of getting me into a mode where I could create useful pages.  There's nothing cohesive about the experience.  I don't even know the URL.  I had to log into my Google account and hunt around for the link.  With PBworks, we know exactly where to go, and there's a place that's got all the content I'm looking for."

Design Commission had already had a good experience with PBworks, thanks to one of its projects with Vulcan Labs, and that recommendation helped make going with PBworks an easy decision.

PBworks = $2,000/month in Productivity Gains

After choosing PBworks, Design Commission moved quickly to make PBworks an integral part of the team's workflow.  Now the team members all use PBworks on a daily basis.  Among its uses:

• Recording the notes from the company's internal meetings
• Recording the notes from the company's partner and client meetings
• Organizing and recording the company's staff meetings
• Providing a central repository of login information for software and Web-based tools
• Storing contact information, both for staff and for key vendors and partners
• Planning and managing company projects and events

"We have a company retreat coming up in a couple of weeks, and we're storing all the information about the retreat on PBworks," said Conrad.  "Everything from logistics--directions and who's cooking what--to planning out our meeting agenda.  That's temporal, but some of that information needs to live on, and PBworks lets us do that."

And while Design Commission specializes in telling stories through design, they made the decision to use PBworks based on cold, hard ROI.  "We figure that we save on the order of an hour per week for each of our six team members, and we hope it will be more than that in the long run.  Conservatively, we're improving productivity at least $2,000 per month."