Will Digital is my new company. I’ve started it to help quality businesses create quality online presences. Through Will Digital, we’ll offer straightforward, transparently priced consulting on content and digital presence strategy to as many high-quality organizations as possible. I believe that our mixture of industry expertise and values-based, results-oriented work will make Will Digital a valuable partner for businesses that want to perform better on the web. (In a hurry? Skip to the end.)
1/why + what
I’ve been lucky to travel quite a bit in the last few years, and talk to people from a lot of industries. I’ve yet to meet someone—whether she’s a group manager at a megacorp or a small-business owner in a rural community—who isn’t concerned about maintaining a substantive and competitive digital strategy. Sometimes these people are long-tenured digital marketers who want incremental upticks in key metrics; sometimes they’re single-location shop owners who want a website that isn’t expensive, isn’t ugly, and shows up nicely on their kids’ cell phones.
There’s widespread anxiety about the seemingly simple practice of representing oneself and one’s organization online. The things that many organizations do well in person—including skills as elemental as articulating what they offer, and why they’re worth hiring or buying from—aren’t well expressed on the online platforms that people use to find those organizations. In other words, firms’ strengths just don’t come through on the web.
I’m confident that the vast majority of businesses can record a lot of user experience and bottom-line victories by clarifying the language that they use to represent themselves to the public, and creating simple yet potent distribution strategies for that voice. Deserving, people-serving outfits can see more success by both finding language that expresses their offerings and methodically finding customers to show that language to. Creating this strategy with our clients will be Will Digital’s core competency.
2/broader context
The web has created an enormous megaphone for people who offer goods, services, and support, but the folks who benefit most from the web are often not the people who actually run great organizations. The learning curve to run an effective digital presence is too steep, and running a tight and ethical ship doesn’t mean that you have the time or resources to set up the online operation that you deserve. (The flipside is also true: having the time or resources to set up a successful online operation doesn’t mean that you run a tight and ethical ship.)
This quality-presence gap presents a business opportunity, but I also believe that the too-loose correlation between real-world quality and internet presence goes a long way toward explaining the fissures of our public life. Look at the occupant of the White House. Look at ” ‘fake’ ‘news’ ” (interpret that however you wish). The online and the physical have diverged enough to allow monstrous misrepresentations not only of what in fact exists, but also precisely how in fact it exists.
I don’t think that Will Digital is going to fix this problem, but I’m starting it with the conviction that giving high-quality organizations a better chance to represent themselves and thrive online will contribute something to the aim of making the internet a system that more accurately represents the non-digital world, and in turn leads to fairer interaction between people.
3/commitments
There are two elements that I want to put on the record in this introduction post that don’t explicitly touch the work we’ll produce for clients, but nonetheless shape both the output of the company and the way in which we’ll operate:
- The publication of papers on industry topics
- An unparalleled bar for the treatment of people who work for or with Will Digital
Will Digital is a consulting and design outfit, full-stop. It isn’t a publication or news outlet. It will, however, have a prominently displayed space for papers on topics that inflect our work and our industry. You’re in that section now, and it will grow as we do. In the near future, I’ll add a paper on reading the broader industry, based on what I’ve learned and how I think folks often misinterpret the strategies of platform operators. More positions will follow in the future.
I believe that we need to have devoted space for stances on particular questions, that we need to make those stances public and readily accessible, and that we need to share what might be valuable with an audience that’s larger than our client list. These papers won’t always speak as monolithic or even representative voices of the company, but they will speak. I consider this goal fundamental to our overall company mission; these papers will be free and hopefully practical resources for anyone on the planet who’s interested in them and has a decent internet connection.
Second, and more importantly, I won’t run a company that doesn’t hold an impeccable standard of humane and life-enhancing conduct as its foremost operating principle. For clients we work with, this means transparently priced services, discretion, and a shared desire for your operation to excel. We’ll offer you genuine partnership, not one-off contract work. If anything prevents Will Digital from offering you that commitment, we won’t waste your time, money, or energy pretending otherwise.
For folks we pay to help us produce work, this means more-than-fair compensation and a mutual expectation of everyday honesty. We’ll create and maintain a higher standard for the people we hire, or I’ll shut this down. As the firm grows, I’ll provide more public detail about the specific policies we create to formalize, systematize, and enforce this commitment.
4/the end
I’ll end with some concrete examples of how we can help your day-to-day work. If you:
- are starting a business and want someone to help you craft your message, language, and presence online,
- need a one-page summary of your non-profit to use in donor pitches,
- want to re-work all of your social media, blog, and website channels,
- understand that your firm’s voice no longer represents the firm’s values and goals, and need to rebuild that voice accordingly,
- run a great restaurant and just want to figure out how the internet can help you without getting some obnoxious upsell about buying ads,
my email address is willys@willdigital.io. You can send us details about your organization, the challenges you’re facing, or the work you’d like done.
Thanks for reading,
Willys
