WPCharitable & Studio 164a: #iusemake

We’ve featured nonprofit organizations that put Make to use for the greater good in this #iusemake series on the blog before. Today we’re excited to have the folks at Studio 164a — a design and development studio out of Australia. They recently released Charitable, a WordPress plugin designed to help nonprofits achieve even greater success online — and they built their own site using Make & Make Plus.

From the Charitable website:

Thousands of non-profits choose WordPress because it’s free, easy to use and boasts an unparalleled collection of plugins that extend its capabilities.

Charitable is a fundraising plugin that helps non-profits build awareness, empower ambassadors, and raise more money – all with their own website.

Tell us a little bit about your business and what you do?

Studio 164a is a 2-man team in Darwin, Australia. Wes is our Director of Design and helps our clients (a mix of non-profits, startups and social entrepreneurs) create unique brand identities and goal-driven websites. Eric is the Director of Code, and most of his time goes towards building Charitable, a donation plugin.

We launched Charitable just a few months ago, after many discussions with non-profits who were frustrated with traditional fundraising software. We created Charitable so that non-profits have a powerful fundraising solution that plugs directly into WordPress, without any transaction fees.

Even though there are a few other donation options out there for WordPress, we feel like there is still a lot of room to help people solve problems that other plugins aren’t solving. For example, we have a peer-to-peer fundraising extension, which offers a really powerful way for non-profits to grow their fundraising efforts.

Why did you pick Make & Make Plus for the website? Were you looking for specific features?

We needed a website to show off Charitable’s features and sell extensions. We wanted to speed up the development process, so rather than building a site from scratch we decided to look at a few of the page builder themes. Make caught our eye because of its combination of simplicity, flexibility, and ease of use.

Once we started using Make, we realised we could really use the features of Make Plus, so upgrading was a no-brainer.

Make’s integration with Easy Digital Downloads made the process of setting up an eCommerce store quick and easy.

When it came time to relaunching the Studio 164a website, we didn’t think twice about using Make again.

How long did it take you to put a site together? What was the process like? Any favorite plugins?

It took us about three weeks to put the Charitable site together, although it is constantly evolving.

We put together some initial ideas of how we wanted each page to look, and then the process of implementing them was fast and enjoyable. It allowed Eric, our Director of Code, to spend most of his time building Charitable, rather than being held up with website development.

Some of our favourite plugins include:

• Ninja Forms
• Yoast SEO
• WP Rocket
• Jetpack

When it came to rebuilding the Studio 164a website, we chose to use Make again. We iterated live on a staging site, and launched within a week!

Has the new site made an impact on the business/brand?

We only had a basic landing page before, so we don’t have much to compare it to, but wpcharitable.com has certainly helped us position Charitable as a professional, reliable fundraising platform.

We’ve been able to use Make to quickly create landing pages where we can focus on specific segments of our target market.

How can we follow you?

We love connecting with people in the WordPress/non-profit/fundraising arenas:

Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wpcharitable
Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/wpcharitable

For Studio 164a news and updates, connect with us here:

Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Studio164a/
Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Studio164a

If you’re using Make & Make Plus as the foundation for your site, we’d love to hear about it! Reach out on Twitter using the hashtag #iusemake to grab our attention!