The Dance of the Deer Foundation asked us to integrate an educational membership platform into Shamanism.com to expand its outreach.
Since Shaman instructors can reach only limited audiences in-person—and attending retreats requires extensive travel, the Dance of the Deer foundation wanted to find creative ways to expand their business digitally.
The goal was to expand Shamanism.com to offer memberships to video classes, webinars, and other exclusive online content. The strategy for the membership addition was to provide multi-tiers of valuable content, presented in an easy-to-use user interface.
The Dance of the Deer Foundation had a long wishlist and a fixed budget for the project. To meet their goals and deliver an MVP in budget, we carefully planned five production sprints. Our first sprint was research and discovery, which involved investigating tools and technologies to accomplish the goals as efficiently as possible. After this phase, we had a solid plan.
We carefully planned the UI and UX for video sections to be intuitive for users. To create the video experience, we used Wistia and custom post-types. As videos are added, members can see their participants and biographies for the instructors. We even added a rating system, so members can give feedback on videos or search for the most popular videos on Shamanism.
To ensure the membership section of Shamanism benefited from organic SEO as much as possible, we planned for aspects of the membership community to be open to the public. This included free transcripts and other select videos. We also made sure that all video content is indexable on search engines. The end result? Their additional content is helping to drive new customers.
What’s it like ‘working Agile’ on a project? As features are developed, we listen to feedback and constantly prioritize what’s most needed for launch. We frequently discuss the goals and re-evaluate. If something is no longer needed, we may temporarily backlog it—if we decide it doesn’t fit in the current budget. At the end of an Agile project, there is usually a backlog of tasks for future phases.
R&D starts with a kickoff meeting to discuss the project goals & requirements. We ask the right questions to understand every aspect of the project. After we have a thorough understanding of the project goals, we create a project plan, breaking everything down into sprints with milestones.
During production sprints, we complete the work that we carefully planned during our research and discovery. Every Monday, we get on the phone with our clients to outline the weeks’ goals. We talk about what was accomplished last week, we take feedback into consideration, and we outline what’s next. During the week, our clients provide feedback and comment on work in our project management software—Asana. A project manager is always available to answer questions or communicate change requests. When Friday comes, all of our clients receive a status report in their inbox to summarize our progress for the week.
As the project wraps up, we go through a rigorous Quality Assurance process to make sure the site is perfect. Off-boarding also includes time to train our clients on how to use their new site. This may include making screencasts or live video chat tutorials.
Our team delivered a modern site with multi-tier membership, available in English or German. The intuitive UI design makes the content appealing and quickly engages users. It looks terrific both on desktop and mobile.
The video membership backend was customized to fit the needs of the Dance of the Deer Foundation, so it was an easy integration into their workflow. Now anyone can benefit from ancient Shaman teachings, anywhere on earth.
What We Accomplished:
"I truly appreciate the great work everyone put into this project & the amazing way it flowed so smoothly. I'm extremely happy with everything, and look forward to continuing to work with all. Once again, thank you. You're an amazing, kind & extremely capable team. It's refreshing to work with such a great crew, and it's a pleasure to know each of you."
Creative Director
Front-end Developer
Backend Developer
Backend Developer
Project Manager