Trusted by leaders in the nonprofit world
At Fifty & Fifty, we are more than a creative studio. We partner exclusively with nonprofits, architecting top-shelf design and technology solutions for the world’s leading humanitarian causes. Why? Because as people and professionals, we want to do more than sell a product—we want to engage the world in the worthwhile. Armed with creative chops in the digital arena, we craft clear, purposeful, bleeding-edge websites for missions that are socially and ethically defensible. Our big tent goal is to see good causes take up more of the popular culture space, but day-to-day we try to live by a simple, true wisdom: Do more for those who need it most.
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Recent Work
To date, we’ve partnered with organizations promoting education, sustainable peace, political action, youth engagement, fundraising, and creative arts. And we’re just getting started. Click around and see a few of our most recent of these partnerships.
See our Work -
Kony2012 - 1 of 2
Stopping the World's Worst War Criminal
Meet the Client
Invisible Children is a nonprofit that exists to bring an end to LRA atrocities through awareness, advocacy, civilian protection, and rehabilitation and recovery.
The Challenge
Invisible Children gave us the goal to make African war criminal, Joseph Kony, famous in a way that would mirror the 2012 elections and actively engage culture and policy makers. The core idea: if people recognized who Kony was, they would no longer sit idly by.
The Solution
For anything to go viral, above all it has to be easily shareable, so we put a tremendous amount of effort into making sure the social aspects of Kony2012 were as simple as possible, allowing people to effortlessly tweet and share the film with friends in minutes. Our philosophy—and ultimate success—capitalized on "one-click" engagements, trackable user progress, and making the user connection to policy and culture makers—largely through Twitter—seamless. And that was the catalyst, really. Crowd-sourcing.
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Kony 2012 - 2 of 2
Timeline
Technology
The Results
From the day it released, Kony2012 was a viral phenomenon and a game changer in online storytelling.
- 4 million visits to the website the first day; 10 million visits the first week
- 5 million tweets in the first week
- 100 million views of the documentary on YouTube in six days, making it the fastest video ever to reach this target
- 3.6 million pledges to IC’s Kony campaign
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Donately
The Power to Spoil Your Donors
The Challenge
Transparency and financial accountability are buzzwords in the nonprofit realm, but not without reason. When people give, they want to know—and, moreover, deserve to know—what the dollars they earned working 9-5 are going toward. Since we’re always working to see good causes take up more of the popular culture space, we at Fifty decided to tackle the behemoth that is giving. We asked ourselves: How could we help organizations love on and inform the great person who is the giver? What is the most crystal clear, effective platform we could create to manage donations online?
The Solution
Studies show that over 65% of online donors prefer to use the organization’s website when reaching in their pocket, so we decided to create a platform that would add features to help those donors, rather than the few who stray away to give on an external platform. The result: Donately.
Visit the Donately Site -
World Vision ACT:S
A Place to Find and Share Your Activism
The Challenge
World Vision is one of the largest relief and development organizations in the world, serving over 97 countries. And in its 60 plus years of operation, its tapped into a community of young do-gooders—high school and college age students who care deeply about the world they inhabit. The goal of World Vision Act:S was to harness the power of such a massive network of likeminded individuals, allowing young people to share ideas and activism opportunities in a way that was simultaneously individualized, intuitive, and useful.
The Solution
To meet World Vision ACT:S’ needs, we created an activism application that modeled a hunter and gatherer mentality. Members could both find and share their knowledge and passion about justice through postings of resources, stories, and actions. A visually compelling and intuitive website, World Vision ACT:S was built from the ground up using an original Facebook plug-in and no third party systems. The site provides a novel way of uploading content that relies heavily on user generation and personal connection.
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Flood Church
Rethinking Online Community
The Challenge
Flood Church, based in San Diego, California, is centered in community. It’s a place of worship that delivers connected experiences across multiple platforms. In re-architecting their website, Flood’s goal was to foster offline community through intelligent online guidance, encouraging people to engage with the church in times other than just Sunday morning.
The Solution
Flood’s prior website had been a static place, full of overall helpful, though generic information. Our solution was to create a single sign on through Facebook that would pull data on the user and connect and integrate with CRM and Salesforce. By identifying who a person was (sex, age, key demographic), and what they were interested in, the Flood website could customize the information it provided—recommending groups, events, and impact opportunities that aligned with the specific individual who was logged on. Put simply: the church could minister in a newly meaningful way.
Client Endorsements
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"The relationship we have with the team at Fifty & Fifty is foundational to our success. They root for us and we root for them. They know the DNA of our company and our goals so they are able to help us articulate that on the web." Noelle Jouglet, Communications Director at Invisible Children
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"Your work and dedication is an inspiration to each of us! And your passion for changing the world and commitment to doing your best comes through with every project. We are so excited and inspired by everything you touch. Keep up the good work!" James Pedrick, Senior Advocacy Advisor for Partnerships, Innovation & Strategic Planning at World Vision
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"Fifty & Fifty has some incredibly talented designers and developers. They do fantastic work and I've been really pleased with working with them. But what makes Fifty & Fifty different? To me it's why they do what they do and that why is what makes them great and will build them toward being the best. They do what they do because they are passionate about changing the world, they just happen to be designing great websites and building brands." Greg Spencer, Director of Marketing at The Paradigm Project
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"Fifty & Fifty represents the cutting edge of design and functionality; we wouldn't go anywhere else." Bryn Mooser, Co-Founder of Ryot
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About Us
We aren't out to save the world, but to tell the stories of people who are.
A new solution – one that all nonprofits can benefit from.
When Javan Van Gronigen founded Fifty & Fifty in 2009, he wanted to do business on a different premise. The idea: provide top-shelf web and technology solutions for the world’s leading humanitarian causes, and do it at such a level for which there are no substitutes.
His new endeavor would take out the middleman, the unnecessary billable hours, and form a creative collective that could cut straight to the heart of interactive solutions. It would be a scalable group of inventive minds with practical talents who—project to project—could use their abilities as web designers, architects, and content creators to fashion websites for the common good—websites that are clear, functional, and beautiful. Not to mention every bit as good, if not better, than the products of the big boys.
The result was Fifty & Fifty—a humanitarian creative studio that fosters a culture of jeans, Keurig machines, downright excellence, and a brindle boxer at the conference table. While suits and cubicles might prove absent, the design cohort is flexible and fluent. Without the constraints of Big Brother CEO, the designers and programmers can bob and weave quickly, implementing cutting-edge technology and design on the regular.
And here’s the key—a simple but important one: the team at Fifty cares. They’re invested in each organization they partner with. They believe in the causes, they understand the issues, and they work to meaningfully address each project they put their fingerprint on.
To this end, Fifty works solely with nonprofits—people and missions that are socially and ethically defensible. Everything is founded on the premise of partnership. The gist is: two people have to jump up to the table and be equally yoked in order to come up with a solution that is as impactful as it is beautiful. While Fifty & Fifty brings the design and innovation capacity, the nonprofit brings the story. With both parties bringing fundamental components to the drawing board, everyone is invested. Everyone is involved. And that’s when magic really happens.
Explore our Services -
What we do
Full-Service Interactive
THE BASICS
Shared background in the nonprofit and interactive agency space
Boutique agency with scalability
30 years collective digital development experience, 10 years dedicated nonprofit focus
BIG PICTURE
PROJECT EXPLORATION
BRANDING
ONLINE STRATEGY
INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
DESIGN
DEVELOPMENT
LONG-TERM PARTNERSHIPS
DETAILS
Exploration
Ideation
Content strategy
Information architecture
User experience
Branding
Print/web/application design
Application development
Mobile development
System scaling & hosting
System management
Marketing
SEO
User Testing
Long-term maintenance
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We work with clients everywhere
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We have over 30 clients doing work in 80 countries... and counting
- Afghanistan
- Argentina
- Australia
- Bangladesh
- Benin
- Bhutan
- Bolivia
- Bosnia
- Brazil
- Bulgaria
- Burkina Faso
- Burma
- Burundi
- Cambodia
- Central African Republic
- China
- Colombia
- Congo
- Dominican Republic
- Ecuador
- Egypt
- El Salvador
- Ethiopia
- Georgia
- Ghana
- Guatemala
- Haiti
- Honduras
- Hungary
- India
- Indonesia
- Iraq
- Italy
- Ivory Coast
- Jamaica
- Kazakhstan
- Kenya
- Kyrgyzstan
- Laos
- Lebanon
- Liberia
- Malawi
- Mali
- Mexico
- Moldova
- Mongolia
- Mozambique
- Nepal
- Nicaragua
- Nigeria
- North KoreaPakistan
- Palestine
- Panama
- Paraguay
- Peru
- Philippines
- Romania
- Russia
- Rwanda
- Senegal
- Serbia
- Sierra Leone
- South Africa
- Suriname
- Swaziland
- Taiwan
- Tajikstan
- Tanzania
- Thailand
- Tibet
- Timor-Leste
- Togo
- Turkey
- United States
- Uganda
- Ukraine
- Vietnam
- Zambia
- Zimbabwe
