BACKGROUND
Services: Advertising/Marketing / Brand Design (Word/Logo Mark) / Content Creation / Digital Advertising / Email and Online Fundraising / Email Marketing / Events Management / Graphic Design / Message Development / Strategic Planning / Website Design and Development
In 1715, a hurricane destroyed a fleet of Spanish ships filled with gold and silver making the journey back to Spain from from the New World. These ships – and the treasure – now sit off the coast of Florida and have become one of the state’s most fascinating historical recoveries. The 1715 Fleet Society was founded to research the history of the fleet, as well as its loss, rediscovery, and recovery.
In 2014, the Fleet Society wanted to rebrand its site in anticipation of the 300th Anniversary happening in 2015. The website was redesigned with a fresh look, and it’s hundreds of pages of content were also redesigned.
In 2019, we re-launched yet another version of the Fleet Society website with a new style, home page, and internal menu system.
STRATEGY
The goal of the site is to pique the visitor’s interest with interesting facts and photos from the incident and the recovery. Secondarily, our plan was to convey, in a graphical way, the rich visual history of the fleet, and to disseminate historically accurate information about the fleet and the people involved with its continued recovery.
Fleet Society directors also wanted to put their membership online and allow for new signups to happen online.
WORK
RESULTS
For an organization dedicated to lost treasure, we’ve created a gorgeous platform to learn about the 1715 Fleet. With such gems as “Treasure of the Month” and pages showcasing actual gold coins recovered from the disaster, the visitor is immediately drawn in with interest to learn more about the event.
The focus was consistently on showcasing images of coins and treasure, and backing them up with historically accurate information and rich comments from site members and visitors.
In the years before working with us they generated fewer than 20 online memberships, and since we’ve helped them generate nearly 100 new memberships, driven, in part, by the new websites.
Traffic has increased steadily in the time we’ve managed it for the Fleet Society, more than doubling in its first two years, and continually increasing in both page views and user-base.