Our blogs tell a story. Not just the individual entries, but the top-level blog page too. Looking across the last couple of years, you can see how and when we began to form a deeper understanding of our purpose, and you can see where we began to focus on particular types of content.
This is all very intentional, and is part of our wider move from a generalist web design agency to a technology agency. Before you read on, it may be beneficial to check out our previous blog, where we looked at the evolution of digital agencies, and how and why technology agencies have spurred off from more traditional setups. Check it out via the link below:
What Is A Technology Agency And Why Do We Identify As One?
Why an agency should find their purpose
It’s rare that you’ll hear a design agency describe their purpose as ‘to do good design’. That’s kind of obvious. (Although there’s probably a few out there somewhere.) Instead, agencies will use their expertise to satisfy a particular need within the market. That could be based on industry or based on a solution.
A great example of industry-specific purpose is a digital agency local to us who specialise in the beauty industry, delivering websites, brand work and campaign support for haircare, skincare and dermatological brands.
A little further down the road, we know another agency who demonstrates a solution-based purpose by focusing purely on behavioural science as a project delivery method. So no particular industry, but high-performance marketing campaigns influenced by neuroscience and objective research, regardless of the brand’s industry.
Is AndAnotherDay industry-specific or solution-based?
Well, we’re actually a bit of both.
We build technology that makes the world a better place and solves human problems. Our work should always be ethical and should always align with our values. We simply won’t take on work that goes against this. In many ways, we have created a niche for ourselves, but with the rise of the B Corp movement and more and more businesses focusing on sustainability, there is no shortage of opportunity.
But what about our industry-specific purpose? We think that comes hand-in-hand with the solutions that we want to build. A good sense check for us is 1% for the Planet’s issues page. We joined them late last year, pledging to donate 1% of our gross profit to their approved non-profits organisations. These organisations span across climate, water, food, land, people and more. We feel that these are the kinds of areas we’d also like to contribute to, not only with our 1% donation, but our actual expertise too.
Previous examples of this include our work with Hitachi on a sustainability IoT project and our work with Woodfood around disrupting the fund management market and making it accessible to more than just the privileged few.
When we found our purpose, we also honed our expertise
A few years ago, we were more of a generalist web agency, offering everything from WordPress to digital marketing to CRM support and even SEO. Our skills were spread quite broadly and this was a good approach to take for picking up just about any kind of work.
Now, as we focus on ethical and sustainable ventures, we are understanding that we need to be even more focused on what we can offer these organisations and businesses. Because these businesses have a deeper technological need for a very particular type of product, which responds to a very particular kind of problem.
When we look at the issues facing our environment, our populations and our climate, we know that technology is key in helping us find solutions. A beautiful, responsive website or a rock solid CRM isn’t going to save the world. Neither is killer SEO or branding. By focusing our brilliant people, who are for the most part engineers, and focusing our collective expertise on building platforms, digital products, back-ends and applications, we can dive a lot deeper into project work and start to make a real difference.
It’s a brave move to make, but one that we felt was entirely necessary to find our place in agency world. Today, in 2021, we feel more focused, we feel like we have a greater purpose, and we know we have the perfect team to tackle some of the biggest challenges that we face as a planet.
If you’d like to know more about what we do, who we do it for, or perhaps even become part of the AndAnotherDay team, please do get in touch.