A Coming Together
An active and vibrant organization for many years, as of 2005 the Lincoln County Historical Association had no web presence and was in search of a boost to membership and involvement. Headed by a young and forward thinking director, Jason Harpe, the LCHA set out to develop a partnership on the long term project of brand building and introducing the Association to a new and expanding generation, both locally and globally.
"I was so excited to find such a talented firm that is both local and so capable. They brought the complete package to the table - solid and practical consulting to narrow down the goals, planning and scheduling to get us there and a final product that absolutely and continuously exceeds our expectations." says Harpe.
Ari Miller, co-founder of The First 1000 began working with the LCHA in late 2005 and has worked extensively with them ever since. What began as a web design project blossomed into a partnership that has yielded tremendous results.
Logo Development
“Getting a solid feel for what best and most concisely represents the client can be difficult.” says Miller. “The LCHA, however, is a great organization. Working with them has been a pleasure. In going through some vintage photography from the county, I came across a group photo on one of the shifts at a local textile mill, circa 1928. For some reason those faces struck me and once Jason saw them in context, we knew we had a winner.”
From there the overall look and feel of the new LCHA brand began to emerge. The next phase was a web site.
Web 1.0
According to Harpe - “Working within a confined budget and needing to first introduce our existing membership and community to finding us on the web, design was of the utmost importance. We wanted to set a visual bar that allowed our web presence to reflect how we see ourselves. Ari did a fantastic job capturing this.”
Over the following years, membership and community involvement sky-rocketed. This was accomplished through the work of Jason Harpe and his army of dedicated volunteers combined with the support of solid media - mailings, posters, brochures, etc. All developed by Miller. And of course the web site continued to evolve and expand. Large, on-going community projects became more and more prevalent as fund-raising improved - projects like Lincoln County Voices.
Lincoln County Voices is an on-going project to collect, archive and share the oral history of the African-American community in Lincoln County. Although the LCHA has always shined at the collection and curation of local history, the short-coming was the ability to readily share this wealth of knowledge.
“Voices showed how vital the Internet is as a tool of distribution. No other media allows for the sharing of both the written and spoken word, unlimited distribution and the ability to maintain and add to the collection.” said Harpe.
The success of the “micro-site” concept lead to further online opportunities, some beyond the scope of the original site framework. Blogging and social networking became an essential tool in keeping the Association community up-to-date and “in the loop”. As events and announcements become more and more frequent a more robust calendar of events solution was needed. This combined with the desire to eventually share the entirety of the LCHA collections on-line has lead to the complete redesign that is underway now.
