Forge Worldwide

I am the Marketing Manager Department of Early Childhood of an education company

Public School District in Boston, Massachusetts.

Referral

2-5 Employees

Develop a Brand strategy platform, creative concepts, and key campaign executions to support the BPS Universal Pre-K’s short and long-term awareness and growth of the program.

The Deliverables were used to measure the project's success

The team's project management was excellent. They were highly proactive and consistently delivered all items on time. We had weekly calls with the project manager, which ensured clear communication and alignment throughout the project. Whenever edits to deliverables were necessary, the team was incredibly responsive and adaptable, addressing our needs efficiently and working seamlessly within our timeline.

Virtual Meeting

What impressed me most about this company was their deep understanding of our mission and their respect for our internal processes. Despite the slower pace due to the need for significant internal alignment, they were patient and worked within our required timelines without compromising the quality of their work. Their alignment with our mission of centering families was evident throughout the project. They were highly responsive and embraced our feedback with a collaborative spirit, ensuring the final deliverables truly met our expectations.

Everything was great, and we had a fantastic experience working with Forge Worldwide. There’s nothing we would suggest changing, and we would love the opportunity to collaborate with them again in the future.

I am the Partner and Client Solutions Director of AT WORK COLLABORATIVE

We are a one stop shop for contract furnishings and interior and exterior architectural products.

Referral

2-5 Employees

Yes, we had an aggressive timeline and many stakeholders, so consistency in communication was key as well as candid feedback along the way to keep us on track. The team was always in alignment with our team which made for impactful collaboration.

Forge Worldwide's planning and the time they took to understand who we are and how they can help us were impressive. They also have a great model where each team member seems to bring a complimentary skill and perspective to the table. The are a top notch team!

I do not have areas of improvement, they only continue to refine and adapt evolve their skills as industry demands change.

I am the Marketing Writer and Editor of MSPCA-Angell

The MSPCA-Angell is a nonprofit animal hospital and rescue shelter.

Referral

2-5 Employees

This Scope Of Work :

Their professionalism, project management, and creative -- along with how quickly they understood the core vision of our brand -- enabled us to continue with the design, printing, and mailing of our donor magazine. They also recognized our need to operate within a limited nonprofit budget.

Forge's brand director, Millie Park, delivered a production schedule that worked within our time frame and was always flexible to adjust for delays. She communicated all the steps and was always an email away if we had questions; we never felt we were in the dark about our deliverables. All proofs were clean and error-free, and the art director, Meredith Wish, offered creative design solutions and worked with us to refresh pages if needed. They were always professional and precise—and, best of all, always a pleasure to work with.

Forge is a smaller agency than most in Boston, which we appreciate. They're genuinely collaborative, and you can tell they care about the work they do and each other as teammates. We are a very small marketing group at the MSPCA-Angell, and we appreciate the attention and responsiveness that Forge can give us because they are smaller—we're not lost in the shuffle as we have been in the past with larger agencies.

None! We really do love working with Forge—they genuinely feel like a part of the MSPCA-Angell team. And while we initially reached out to them to assist with designing our donor magazine, we're expanding our collaboration with them due to their professionalism and seamless coordination. They consistently offer suggestions to enhance our marketing outreach while recognizing our need to operate within a limited budget. We wholeheartedly recommend Forge Worldwide to any nonprofit needing a marketing partner who prioritizes excellence.

I am the Director of Marketing of Isenberg School of Management, UMass Amherst

The Isenberg School of Management at the Univeristy of Massachusetts, Amherst, is an AACSB-accredited instituion offering an exceptional education—whether students are undergraduate or graduate, on-campus or online, or studying full-time or part-time.

Word of Mouth

Through our long relationship with Forge Worldwide, their scope of work included brand development and strategy, student recruitment advertising, and engagement with key audiences. Deliverables included:

The Forge Worldwide team fully managed all projects--setting and driving the timelines and deliverables, which they always met. Projects were always colaborative, never perscriptive, and our internal needs were always considered throughout the process.

The most impressive quality of the Forge Worldwide team was their ability and willingness to roll up their sleeves and get down in the work with us. From strategy/planning workshops, creative production and development, to media executions and reporting, the Forge Worldwide team was with us ironing out details and doing the work. All levels of their team was invested in our success.

The Forge team is outstanding. They do great, thoughtful work. Their process is to always improve. From one project to the next, they took previous learnings and applied them going forward. If there is something to improve on, they're already working on it.

I work for the business school of a large public university. The school was founded 1947, and has more than 42,000 alumni in 86 countries. We offer Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB)-accredited courses to 4,800 students on campus, online, and in blended formats. The school's 3,400 undergraduates major in seven business disciplines, including industry specialties in sport management and hospitality and tourism management. Our 1,400 graduate students earn Master of Business Administration (MBA), Master of Science, and Doctor of Philosophy degrees.

I am the chief marketing officer, reporting directly to the dean. I directly manage a team of five FTEs (full-time employees), 10 to 15 student workers, and indirectly manage and approve the work of all academic departments and administrative groups across the business school. I also liaise with the university to coordinate marketing and communications efforts.

Our initial business challenge when we approached Forge was figuring out how we could grow our most important revenue generating programs, particularly our online MBA program. Since then, we've begun looking into how we can build awareness and reputational capital across a number of key audiences, including academic peers and alumni.

We have worked with Forge for about 18 months. They are managing our largest advertising budget for MBA recruitment, which includes creative development and production and media planning execution and measurement. They also have developed the creative campaign for a few other programs here, but without the ongoing media maintenance. We are planning to engage with Forge to start a new awareness campaign for the entire school.

We found them through a recommendation from a colleague. We met with Forge and another communications partner, and we felt Forge was a better fit based on our initial discussion around our strategic needs.

The cost was upward of $500,000.

It's an ongoing engagement. The current work we're doing with them is a look at our school's brand and positioning. That work is on a three-month timeline.

We are still establishing a baseline for our MBA recruitment advertising, but recent results indicate that we are increasing our reach in a highly efficient way. Our business results are promising since we started working with Forge Worldwide. All responses to Forge Worldwide's creative work have been nothing but positive.

We selected them in part because they indicated that they wanted to find partners who were willing to share as much data and information as possible. They want to build strong business case studies. Their greatest strengths are their great culture and smart people. You can tell they are all happy to work there and they like what they do. Their accounting people are very engaged and efficient, and they work hard to offer strategic business solutions. They are very thoughtful about using our budgets smartly. Their chief creative officer, Rob Stewart, is a very smart and strategic thinker with great experience. I like the way he thinks. He gets the big picture and knows where we need to go with our brand.

We have had some executional hiccups concerning some of our digital display campaigns and how they were tracked and measured. To be honest, I think our team shares some of the responsibility, too. My main critique is that Forge was a little too nice and should have been more forceful in saying what specific technical requirements we needed and not assumed that my team would know. To their credit, they have taken steps to amend this in the future.

I'm the internal communications manager at Harvard Medical Faculty Physicians at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Inc. (HMFP), which is a physician organization.

We needed to find a partner to work with who could help us answer the pivotal question of who our organization was. When my manager and I came on board a few years ago, our organization didn't have a communication function, and a lot of the physicians associated themselves with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, which is the practice in the hospital where they worked. However, HMFP is the organization physicians report to, and our challenge was to establish a brand identity and a logo.

The first project we worked on with Forge Worldwide was developing our logo and branding campaign. We started in September 2021, and the team rolled out our new logo and graphic guidelines in May 2022. Forge Worldwide worked on several facets, including conducting visioning exercises with all our corporation's stakeholders. We worked closely with the team's designers, who created our logo, graphic guidelines, and communication materials. Once the logo was in place, the team created the rest of our communication materials, delivering a full branding campaign. The second project we worked on with Forge Worldwide was rolling out a new website in August 2023. Once the team finished our branding project, they jumped on our website. Forge Worldwide created a state-of-the-art website, which was a continuation of our branding campaign. Our previous website was outdated, and we wanted to create a platform that showcased our organization's vision and values and that was representative of all our prospective and current positions. We have an ongoing web maintenance agreement, and the team supports us when we request edits.

We started working with a project manager who oversees the project. We also work with a branding specialist who has led meetings and visioning exercises. We currently work with a brand strategist and Caroline (VP, Accounts & Strategy), who is our main contact and started as our brand manager and was recently promoted. We also work with Forge Worldwide's creative team, working closely with one of their designers. We also work with the IT team on our website.

We've spent approximately $100,000 on the website project and another $100,000 on the branding project.

We engaged with Forge Worldwide in September 2021, and our engagement is ongoing.

We've had great results from Forge Worldwide's work. We rolled out our new logo and brand identity in our weekly newsletter, and the announcement was well received, with a high readership rate and a 52% open rate for the issue. This issue was one of our top newsletter stories for 2022. We've also seen an uptick in user activity on our LinkedIn account, and our overall social media followers have increased over the years. Moreover, we've received testimonials and positive reactions from our company's CEO and other teammates regarding the new logo and branding identity. Forge Worldwide's logo and marketing campaign won the NESHCo Lamplighter Award in 2023, an annual award issued by the New England Society of Healthcare Communications to honor excellence in healthcare communication. We won first place for the logo design and an award of excellence for the entire branding campaign. Additionally, Forge Worldwide has delivered a website that has also received great feedback from teammates of all our organization's levels. We've seen an uptick in user rates compared to our previous site. The site is engaging and representative of our positions, and the team has used real photos. A couple of weeks ago, we received an award of excellence from the NESHCo Lamplighterter Award for the website developed by Forge Worldwide. We're very excited that our work has been recognized.

I want to highlight Caroline, Joy (Brand Manager), and Meredith (Associate Creative Director), who are the main team we work with. They're fun, and Meredith has done an amazing design job. Rob (Principal & Executive) is working with us on a new project and is great. Lastly, Harry (CEO) has a great team and is present in some of our meetings.

Forge Worldwide has extensive knowledge in many different areas and topics. Forge Worldwide is an expert in many areas we aren't in and offers solutions to our communications group's requests. The team is a great partner to work with, and we have other exciting projects coming up, including another branding project and a brand video. Forge Worldwide goes above and beyond for the services they provide. The team is very engaged and offers solutions to our requests.

I haven't found anything for Forge Worldwide to improve.