Building Entrepreneurial Ecosystems
Endeavor Global
Endeavor is an organization that leads a global community of high-impact entrepreneurs.
Dream big. Scale up. Pay it forward.
Overview:
We partnered with Endeavor, the leading global community of high-impact entrepreneurs, to design and build their new visual identity and digital presence. Endeavor.org is now the digital hub for community growth, engagement with entrepreneurs, and a platform to create a lasting impact in developing markets around the globe.
The Challenge:
Endeavor’s mission is to build thriving entrepreneurial ecosystems around the world by investing locally in big-thinking entrepreneurs. The impact that those entrepreneurs make can be multiplied with support from Endeavor’s mentorship and its extended investor community. When Endeavor-supported companies succeed, their local economies also succeed, creating an ecosystem of economic development.
To attract new entrepreneurs and engage the global community that comes with being an Endeavor Entrepreneur, we collaborated with the organization to modernize their visual brand and build a fast-loading and user-friendly website. With more than 40 local offices across five continents, Endeavor has a very diverse user audience and an even more complicated set of stakeholders. Through a close collaboration spanning nearly a year, we built a digital brand and ecosystem that will fuel their important work for years to come.
Entrepreneur First
Endeavor Entrepreneurs are not like any other entrepreneur—they have a proven business model, and they have big dreams for how their idea can scale up. Most importantly, they want to pay it forward to their local economies and future entrepreneurs by creating career and mentorship opportunities for the next group. Endeavor is an organization built for entrepreneurs, by entrepreneurs, which is why they were our most important audience.
The new brand is rooted in the energy of Endeavor entrepreneurs. Our colorful and lively approach highlights their core ethic: “dreaming big, scaling up, and paying it forward”. Through community-focused photography, topography inspired patterns, and the intersection of geometry and color, the brand visually represents the growth and possibility in each Endeavor Entrepreneur.
Discovery Across Time Zones
To create an online experience for entrepreneurs our team needed to go through the experience—so we embedded ourselves with entrepreneurs during an International Selection Panel and followed their thoughts, emotions and experiences. We followed up with stakeholder interviews of mentors, board members and local office directors to comprehensively understand user pathways and goals.
Beginning with the information architecture, our challenge was to create an organization and labeling system for users with different native languages and needs. We organized interactive workshops with breakout groups around the world to brainstorm, strategize and build a framework that achieved the primary goal: be welcoming and engaging for entrepreneurs.
Because the website is built for entrepreneurs first, it was critical that user interface and layout was tested by entrepreneurs—both longtime mentors and new Endeavor applicants. Through an iterative design process we facilitated user testing on clickable prototypes of the website, measuring user success, time-taken and general feedback. The insights from the study informed both our design revisions and development approach of the overall infrastructure.
Discovery Across Time Zones
To create an online experience for entrepreneurs our team needed to go through the experience—so we embedded ourselves with entrepreneurs during an International Selection Panel and followed their thoughts, emotions and experiences. We followed up with stakeholder interviews of mentors, board members and local office directors to comprehensively understand user pathways and goals.
Beginning with the information architecture, our challenge was to create an organization and labeling system for users with different native languages and needs. We organized interactive workshops with breakout groups around the world to brainstorm, strategize and build a framework that achieved the primary goal: be welcoming and engaging for entrepreneurs.
Because the website is built for entrepreneurs first, it was critical that user interface and layout was tested by entrepreneurs—both longtime mentors and new Endeavor applicants. Through an iterative design process we facilitated user testing on clickable prototypes of the website, measuring user success, time-taken and general feedback. The insights from the study informed both our design revisions and development approach of the overall infrastructure.
A Global Portfolio
Each year a panel of industry leaders who are Endeavor mentors meet to hear new entrepreneurs pitch their companies and select some to join the Endeavor community. After extensive user testing and revisions we created a digital listing of those companies, allowing entrepreneurs to find or discover companies based on their needs. The result is a multi-faceted index to sort and filter more than 900 company profiles which showcase the diversity of verticals in Endeavor’s portfolio. After finding a company, users can easily connect directly with those entrepreneurs or that local office. Taking that one step further, we created a similar index of Endeavor Catalyst companies—which filters and sorts companies by investment status.
The site is designed in Figma and built on WordPress with a highly customized admin and front end. Through a robust BugHerd QA process we kept the site accessible, performant, and true to Endeavor’s bold new brand. To build the companies index we leveraged custom Javascript for logic and advanced features for filtering and organic search-as-you-type experience.
The Entrepreneur Experience
What distinguishes Endeavor from its competitors is the entrepreneur community, and we built the site to showcase that experience. Endeavor Entrepreneurs have inspiring personal and business stories, and their success can be a guidebook for others. Because the best people to introduce the culture and spirit of Endeavor are their entrepreneurs themselves, we created a robust collection of success stories that puts this diverse community front and center.
For users just getting their company off the ground, and also those ready to pitch at an International Selection Panel, the site is welcoming and outlines steps for getting involved.
Pay it Forward
Endeavor’s guiding principle is giving back—both to local communities and also to the network of entrepreneurs. Their impact is multiplied when entrepreneurs mentor future members, invest in their companies and create more jobs and opportunities. To highlight that mission, we developed opportunities for engagement and community events throughout the website.
Content is programmatically dispersed throughout the site based on location and content type to keep users engaged and increase their discovery of new information. The knowledge center serves as the main index for this content where longtime entrepreneurs can sign up for future mentorship events, and aspirational entrepreneurs can attend trainings and programs.