Taoti Creative

I’m the former director of special events for Events DC, the sports and convention authority for Washington, D.C.

We had confirmed an event for The Wharf called The Clipper Around The World Yacht Race. This was a sailing yacht race that circumnavigated the world. Washington, D.C. was selected as a host port, and we were responsible for a number of activities to take place while the boats were at the DC Wharf. We needed a company to come in and oversee the family fun activation aspect of this large event.

Taoti Creative worked on event and vendor management. They were responsible for overseeing the vendors needed to execute this family fun activation. They also planned where the activations would take place within a set location. The family fun activation took place over three days. There were many moving logistics because of the different vendors they had to communicate with and talk through about loading. Some vendors were available on some days, while others were not. Taoti Creative worked through scheduling each vendor’s load-in and load-out and ensured that the space allocated for them was always active.

We worked with a supervisor and a senior event manager.

When we came to realize that we needed to hire a vendor to oversee the family fun portion of the activation, we reached out to our office of procurement. They provided us with a list of vendors that handled event firms for the company. My colleague and I researched the list of vendors and reached out to a handful of them. Taoti Creative came back with a very competitive cost estimate. I saw on Taoti Creative's website the type of portfolios they worked on, and was just impressed with the innovative projects they've overseen. Understanding the kind of work they'd done in the past and their positive reputation among our colleagues, we decided to go with Taoti Creative.

We spent $191,575.

We worked with Taoti Creative from March to July 2024.

With Taoti Creative and their previous experience with our company, they came in extremely flexible and had a great vision. It was great working with them to give them the parameters of our expectations. They came back to us with other ideas and ways to implement them.

Taoti Creative did a great job with project management. They delivered everything on time and communicated with us. We used a lot of email communication. We also had a lot of virtual meetings through Microsoft Teams.

Taoti Creative was transparent and open to receiving feedback. They also applied past experiences to the project.

The event we had them work on was something that their senior event manager had never done before. I think it was a learning lesson for all of us in terms of what worked, what didn’t work, and how we could modify the event to be better next time.

If you’re a new client of Taoti Creative, you can expect to have innovative thinkers. They’re willing to think outside the box and go the extra mile.

I’m the VP of Operations for a nonprofit organization.

We needed help redoing our organizational website.

Taoti Creative provided web development and design services. We had a website before, and the team took over for our previous vendor and rebuilt and redesigned it. We had a lot of sessions on rebranding and marketing the organization, simplifying the way we presented our work. We also held many sessions about our organization and how to best present it on the website.

We worked with 3–5 people regularly from their team.

We had an open process and collected quotes from several companies before selecting Taoti Creative. We liked their creativity and customer-oriented approach to everything.

We spent around $500,000.

We worked together from January 2021–February 2024.

Our old design was too convoluted, so Taoti Creative simplified it and made it modern. Overall, everything went well, and there weren’t any disruptions.

Their project management was great. It was clear what was in the budget and the additional services. They also had clear timelines. We used Trello for project management and Microsoft Teams and Zoom for meetings.

Their responsiveness to whatever demand we had was impressive.

We switched to another company for price reasons. Our previous vendor was a local DC-based company, and we switched to Taoti Creative. Their team was based in the Midwest, so pricing was an issue. However, that wasn’t a major concern. I understand that you pay for quality, and we got what we paid for from them.

Be very clear internally about your goals. Whenever we went off the timeline, it was because we weren’t clear on what we were looking for. To get the best out of the engagement and manage the budget, make sure to have a clear decision tree within your company to align your internal timeline with the vendor’s timeline.

I’m the associate director of the International Board of Heart Rhythm Examiners (IBHRE). Our parent organization is Heart Rhythm Society. IBHRE is a global leader in heart rhythm management, and I manage our certification program.

We needed everything to be updated. Heart Rhythm Society had just gone through a site migration and update, so we needed to make corresponding updates to keep up with our parent organization.

I worked very closely with Brittany (Project Manager & Producer) in doing an audit of the current site. They did a deep dive into what functionalities we had and what we would need to modernize. After identifying the many areas that could be streamlined or eliminated, they launched into the web redesign. Their work involved a change in our content management system.

I’ve worked primarily with Brittany, who’s been my main point of contact.

They were recommended to us by the Heart Rhythm Society. My contact there was confident that we would be successful since they’d had a great relationship together themselves.

We spent somewhere around $30,000. We also have a maintenance contract with them.

We started our engagement in December 2019 and wrapped up in August 2020.

Everything is working. In the month that we’ve gone live, we haven’t received any negative feedback. That’s a great sign, because a lot of times, no news is good news. We’ve only received positive feedback and compliments about the site’s new look and feel.

They were very accommodating in leading me through all the steps. We communicated primarily through email, which I’m most comfortable with.

They’re very prompt and collaborative in their troubleshooting approach. We can just set up a call to address any issue we might run into.

No, I don’t think so.

If you’re not comfortable with something or are unfamiliar with a process, don’t be afraid to ask questions. The end product is something you’re responsible for, so make sure to clarify any areas that you’re unclear about.

I am the digital marketing manager at Focal Point Data Risk. We provide cybersecurity services to companies of all sizes across the US. Our core services are data privacy advisory, identity and access management advisory, and implementation and cybersecurity training.

Last year I was tasked with revamping the website, which we hadn’t done in about three years, so I decided to bring on a partner agency to help us with that process.

We are a relatively small marketing team and didn’t have the skills in-house to do all of the tasks associated with a large redesign. We were switching from Drupal to WordPress and there were a lot of different heavy-lift ideas that we wanted to implement on the back- and frontend of the site, so Taoti Creative helped us to implement those changes.

Christine (Project Manager) was our main point of contact, and we worked with a few other individuals including Katie (design lead) and James (technical lead).

We had originally reached out to a couple of vendors that specialized in Drupal and realized that it would be incredibly expensive to get as detailed as we wanted to on the backend of a Drupal site. Taoti had capabilities in both Drupal and WordPress, so they were able to help us weigh the pros and cons given our budget and decide what the best way forward would be.

Our cap for the project was $40,000, and they were able to help us finish the site for a little bit less than that.

The work on the site lasted from April–September 2019, but we are continuing to work with them on basic maintenance and updates on an ongoing basis.

I was really impressed with their project management throughout the whole thing. Our deadline was extremely tight, and they stayed on task the entire time. We had weekly staff meetings, and toward the end met even more frequently, and their team was constantly available for calls in between those. They used internal tools to track progress and leave comments as well.

Project management was a huge strength for them, but on top of that, their flexibility really became a huge asset to our work together. Since we’re both smaller firms, it was great to see them take our problem and come up with an innovative solution that was clearly tailored to us.

There wasn’t anything significant that I think they could have done better. A couple of small elements of the project ended up getting left by the wayside rather than included in the initial budget for the scope which would have been nice to know about in advance, but none of them were in any way critical to the product so that was a very small issue on the whole.

Lay out your 3–5 main goals for the project very clearly to their team at the beginning of the project and then build out your plan off of those things. Taoti Creative is very goal-oriented, so structuring your solution around those is a really effective way of making sure you get what you want in the end.

I’m the head of outreach of a research subsidiary of a major media company. We survey policymakers.

We have three audiences for our website: policymakers, potential clients, and potential job candidates. Our website previously only addressed one of those audiences — our clients. Other audiences would have a hard time navigating our website, learning about us, and getting interested in what we do.

Taoti Creative created a website that was tailored for each audience we serve. They started with creating the wireframe and then built out the actual website. We wrote the copy ourselves, but Taoti Creative provided some low-level suggestions.

Charlotte (Project Manager) has been our point of contact throughout the relationship.

We did a lot of research into potential partners. A couple of members of my staff and I looked at websites we found compelling and a few were designed by Taoti Creative. That’s what really drew us to their team.

We’ve spent about $55,000.

The project started in October 2019. The website launched in mid-February 2020 with little to no issues to meet our deadline. It was a tight turnaround, but Taoti Creative was amenable to that. We’re now going back and forth on final edits and finishing up the QA process.

It’s still very early, and we didn’t do a good job of tracking our engagement metrics. However, it’s been a huge help to direct people to our website when they have questions. We know our website is a user-friendly and comprehensive resource with consistent messaging. It’s a powerful tool for sales and engagement with our audiences, especially policymakers.

They’re excellent. I have no constructive feedback. Our deliverables arrive on time and are of high quality. Taoti Creative is always specific about what they need from us, such as feedback on a deliverable within 48 hours. Because of their quality of work, that short turnaround was never a problem.

It’s a relatively small firm, so we had access to stakeholders throughout the team and felt well taken care of even though we’re a small-dollar client. We have a talented team and can make all sorts of asks and get thoughtful responses and inputs from a lot of people. Plus, the deliverables felt like they came from a larger firm. However, if we worked with a larger firm, I feel we wouldn’t have been able to get such a top-notch team at the same price.

No, the experience has been very positive for us.

Be direct about your needs and limitations. Taoti Creative is very amenable within a lot of different constraints, but the more they know ahead of time, the better they plan for your project.