How we work

No black boxes. You'll see every step — and help shape it.

You arrive with something. A problem that won't fix itself. A vision you can't quite explain yet. A site that's underperforming and you don't know why. A board getting impatient. A new program that has to land well. Wherever you start, the work moves through the same four steps, in the same order.

1

Listen

Before we make anything, we figure out what's actually going on. That looks like a discovery conversation, then deeper interviews with the people who do the work and the people who use the thing. If it's a website project, we pull analytics and run a content audit. If it's a brand question, we look at how you actually show up across every touchpoint — often inconsistently, which is normal. If AI is on the table, we have an honest conversation about what it can actually do for you versus what the trend reports are promising.

For a typical nonprofit rebrand discovery, that might mean a stakeholder workshop, six to eight user interviews, a competitive scan, and a content audit — wrapped up in about two weeks. The output isn't a forty-page deck. It's a shared understanding and a short, plain-language plan: here's what we found, here's what we'd do, here's what we wouldn't bother doing. You can pressure-test it in a single meeting.

2

Sketch

Once we know what we're building, we draw it. Loose first, refined second. If you need a new brand, this is where naming, identity work, and messaging happen together — they're really one thing pretending to be three. If you've already got a brand, we skip that part and go straight to wireframes and content mapping. Design follows: real interfaces, illustrations, motion, whatever the work needs.

A mid-sized rebuild might chain a positioning workshop → identity design → a working brand system → wireframes → high-fidelity pages, all in a shared Figma you can comment on at midnight. The goal of this step: by the end of it, nobody on your team is surprised by what comes next.

3

Build

The actual making. Webflow when it fits, custom code when it doesn't, full web applications when you need them, AI integrations where they genuinely earn their keep. Accessibility is built in from the start, not bolted on the week before launch. Performance is treated as a feature, not an afterthought.

For a volunteer-driven nonprofit, the build phase might chain a Webflow rebuild → a custom donation form → an AI-assisted volunteer intake flow → a dashboard showing leadership where staff time actually goes. You're not handed a finished thing at the end — you watch it get built, on a staging URL, with us answering questions as they come up. By launch day your team already knows how to use it, because they've watched it come together for a month.

4

Tend

Most agencies stop at launch. We don't. The thing you launch on Tuesday is going to need attention on Friday, and again next month, and again next quarter. So we stay.

What that looks like depends on what you need: one client gets a monthly conversion review and quarterly content refreshes; another gets a Slack channel and ongoing SEO work; another just wants a quarterly accessibility audit and the option to send us a request when something breaks. Either way, you own everything we built. No vendor lock-in. If you want to leave next year, you take the whole thing with you — and we write you a clean handoff doc on the way out.

You don't have to start at Listen.Plenty of organizations come to us mid-stream — strategy already done, a brand book sitting in a Drive folder somewhere, an existing site that just needs ongoing care. We can come in at any step and pick up cleanly from wherever you actually are. Tell us what you've got and what you don't; we'll tell you what's worth doing next.
What we do

The whole catalog, in plain language.

The story above is how we work. Here's the full list of what we can do inside it. Open any line for the detail — it's a lot, but you almost certainly don't need all of it. Tell us the problem; we'll tell you which parts matter.

Strategy & Research

Discovery & stakeholder interviews

Conversations with leadership, staff, and the people actually using your thing, so we understand the situation before we start solving anything. Mostly listening, some coffee.

User research & journey mapping

Talking to real users about how they actually move through your product or service — versus how you assume they do. Almost always different.

Competitive & landscape analysis

A clear-eyed look at what your peers are doing well, what they're doing badly, and where the gaps in the conversation are.

Content audits

A page-by-page review of what you have, what's working, what's outdated, and what's quietly broken. The world's least sexy spreadsheet. Also one of the most useful.

Sitemap & information architecture

Mapping where everything lives on your site and how users get from one thing to another. A blueprint, except we're allowed to move walls.

Persona development

Short, useful profiles of the people you're actually trying to reach. We use them. We don't print them on a poster.

Usability testing

Watching real people try to use what you've already got, and noting the moments where they get stuck, confused, or visibly mad.

AI strategy & honest assessments

A grounded conversation about where AI will genuinely help you, where it'll waste your money, and where the trend reports are lying to everyone.

Brand

Naming

Workshops and structured exploration to land on a name that works, sounds good out loud, and isn't already trademarked by a yoga studio in Oregon. We check.

Brand strategy & positioning

Figuring out who you are, who you're not, who you're talking to, and what makes you genuinely different. The unsexy part that makes the rest of the brand work.

Visual identity design

Logos, colors, type, and the rules for how it all fits together. The visible part of the brand iceberg.

Logo design & evolution

New marks from scratch, or careful updates to existing ones that won't make your long-time customers feel like you sold the company.

Messaging, voice & verbal identity

How you sound when you write, talk, post, pitch, or apologize. Not just a tagline.

Brand systems & guidelines

A working document that explains how your brand actually works, with examples of right and wrong. Built for the contractor you'll hire in three years.

Sales & marketing collateral

Decks, one-pagers, sell sheets, capabilities decks — the materials your team actually needs to do their jobs.

Editorial direction

Setting the standards for photography, illustration, and writing across your brand, so everything feels like it came from the same place.

Design

UI/UX design

Designing the screens, interactions, and flows people actually use. Hi, this is most of what we do.

Wireframes & content mapping

Low-fidelity sketches of every page, with all the content blocked in but none of the pretty stuff yet. The skeleton before the skin.

Design systems & UI kits

A library of reusable components — buttons, forms, cards, the whole vocabulary — so your team can build consistent pages without reinventing each one.

High-fidelity website design

The polished, pixel-level designs of every page, complete with real content and ready to hand to engineering.

Product design

Designing the interfaces of actual software — apps, dashboards, internal tools. The screens, not the swag.

Illustration & graphic design

Custom illustrations, infographics, and visual assets. Made by people who can actually draw.

Animation & motion design

The moments where things move on screen. Used when they earn their keep, not because everyone else has spinning text.

3D design

Three-dimensional models, scenes, and animations, for projects where it's the right call and not just trend-following.

Voice & chat interface design

Designing how conversational interfaces — chatbots, voice assistants, AI agents — actually talk. By people who've talked to humans before.

Moodboards & creative direction

Setting the visual tone and aesthetic direction for a project, then keeping everyone aligned to it as the work progresses.

Engineering

Webflow development

Building sites on Webflow that look great, run fast, and don't fall apart the moment a non-technical teammate edits a headline.

Custom front-end development

Hand-written code for sites and interfaces that need more than a no-code platform can give them. React, Next.js, the usual suspects.

Full web applications

Real applications, with logins, databases, dashboards, and multi-user flows. Not glorified landing pages.

Back-end development & APIs

The server-side code that makes apps work. The plumbing. Designed by people who care that it doesn't leak.

Database architecture & data migration

Designing how data is stored, structured, and connected — and moving it from old systems to new ones without losing anything. Boring, critical, easy to mess up.

Accessibility implementation & WCAG audits

Building (and auditing) sites that actually work for people using screen readers, keyboards, voice control, and varying levels of vision. Built in from the start, not bolted on.

Performance optimization

Making your site load fast on a five-year-old Android with two bars of service. The unglamorous part of engineering that real users notice.

CMS architecture & content modeling

Structuring your content management system so non-technical teammates can publish and update things without breaking the site or calling us.

AI & Automation

AI strategy & roadmapping

Figuring out where AI will genuinely help your organization, in what order, and what it'll cost. Often the answer is “less than you'd think” or “more than your vendor said.”

Prompt engineering & workflow design

Writing instructions and structuring how AI tools are used in your work. Mostly a fancy name for “writing clearly and testing what you wrote.”

Custom LLM agents

Building purpose-built AI agents for specific tasks — intake flows, internal search, customer support triage — in the cases where they're genuinely better than the alternative.

RAG systems & data integration

Connecting AI models to your actual data — documents, databases, knowledge bases — so they answer from your reality, not the open internet.

Fine-tuning & model selection

Picking the right model for the job (smaller and cheaper is often better) and adjusting it on your data when off-the-shelf isn't quite enough.

AI + Webflow integration

Embedding real AI features — chat, personalization, smart search, content generation — into Webflow sites without making it feel duct-taped on.

AI-driven personalization

Customizing what visitors see based on who they are and how they got there. Used judiciously, because creepy is bad for business.

Voice & chat interfaces

Building the working layer behind the conversation: handoffs to humans, context retention, safety guardrails — the stuff that determines whether a chatbot is useful or just embarrassing.

No-code AI prototypes

Quick, scrappy prototypes built with no-code tools to test whether an AI idea is even worth doing before anyone writes real code.

AI-assisted asset generation

Using AI tools in our production process to generate images, copy variations, and design assets faster — where it actually helps, and without making everything look the same.

Process & workflow automation

Stitching together your tools, AI or otherwise, so the repetitive parts of your team's work happen on their own. Less of your team's day spent copy-pasting.

Content & Production

Copywriting & editorial

Writing the words on your site, in your campaigns, in your emails. So they sound like you, not like an agency wrote them for you.

Photo direction & shoot management

Planning, casting, and running photo shoots — from creative brief to final selects. Without the precious treatment.

Video production & post-production

Concept, script, shoot, edit, color, sound. End-to-end video, scoped to what you actually need it for.

Talent, set & location scouting

Finding the right people, places, and props for shoots. We know good talent agents and good farms.

Campaign development & execution

Planning and running multi-touch marketing campaigns across whatever channels make sense for what you're trying to do.

Illustration & graphic asset production

Producing the illustrations, icons, social graphics, and one-off visual pieces that campaigns and content actually need. By people who can draw.

Growth & Care

SEO strategy

Making your site findable in traditional search engines. Honest tracking, no magic-beans promises, no buying links.

Generative search optimization (AEO/GEO)

Structuring your content so it shows up well inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overviews. Because that's where a real chunk of search traffic is now.

SEM & paid search

Paid search campaigns run with restraint, clear targeting, and reporting that tells you what you're actually getting for the money.

A/B testing & conversion optimization

Testing changes against each other to see what actually moves the number. The slow, unglamorous work of making things measurably better.

Custom analytics dashboards

Built to show what's actually happening on your site or product, not vanity metrics designed to flatter a board deck.

Ongoing usability research

Continuing to watch real users after launch, because what people do on your site changes over time, and so should your site.

AI consulting & second opinions

On-call expertise for the moments you need a calm, vendor-neutral perspective before signing a six-figure contract.

Reporting in plain English

Monthly or quarterly summaries of what happened, what worked, what didn't, and what we'd recommend next. In words you can read at the airport.