The Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention

The Challenge

The Cade Museum is located in Gainesville, FL. Unlike traditional museums, Cade is focused on transforming communities by inspiring and equipping future inventors, entrepreneurs, and visionaries. Coining the term “inventivity,” the museum is a tangible space to spark curiosity and foster creativity.

This museum is a recognizable landmark in the Gainesville community. You experience a brand that is built on whimsy and innovation. However, the Cade team faced a challenge: their online presence fell short of cultivating the same experience online.

The website was inconsistent with their brand, lacked a clear user journey, had broken features, and desired calls to action were buried or nonexistent. The Cade Museum needed to offer the same inspiring experience online that mirrored their already strong in-person interactions.

Visit The Website

Our Vision

We knew that the Cade Museum already had an incredible brand to work off of with our website design. Our main focus was to leverage their in-person experience as well as their strong social media presence to craft a new visual identity online. This was also an opportunity to go beyond just highlighting Cade’s exhibits and actually weave in their mission throughout the content, visuals, and strategy.

Instill Consistency

This web design needed to unite users’ experiences with Cade’s brand across their digital channels and physical location. The website serves as a hub for information, planning, and capturing new interest.

Embrace Creativity

The Cade Museum is focused on creativity and invention. The final product needed to look great but also offer innovative features that captured the heart of the Cade.

Multiply Impact

This new website allowed our team to better highlight Cade’s heart for transforming communities. They wanted to be known as “a mission with a museum,” and, therefore, that mission needed to be prioritized in all aspects of this project.

The Solution

This engagement brought an exciting challenge of elevating a recognizable brand online that also would support a robust inbound marketing strategy. While we strategized on a new website for the Cade Museum, we simultaneously began supporting their digital marketing efforts. This combination offered a unique opportunity to create a sustainable brand system and inbound marketing funnel.

Our full scope of work included a new custom-designed and developed website as well as a well-rounded, ongoing digital marketing strategy.

Brand Alignment

We first began this partnership by developing a deep understanding of the Cade Museum’s visual and verbal identity. A great foundation had been built previously. Our task was to take that and amplify it through our web design and strategic brand recommendations.

Brand alignment was found by identifying the attributes of Cade’s brand as well as intaking their current brand elements. These tools aided our design team in crafting a web design that captured the bold characteristics of the Cade Museum while also highlighting the movement and energy that their physical museum exhibits offer.

Sitemap Development

Every website first begins with a blueprint for the user journey. Our sitemap development process is crucial for not only the navigation of the website but also for the intentionality of the content layout. Our sitemap needed to highlight the most important calls to action and also house different places for information based on our various user groups.

Website Design & Development

Bold & Interactive Elements

It was a joy to create a design that captured the essence of Cade’s whimsical brand. We experimented with illustrations, animations, bold colors, and parallax features to create a website that felt as inviting and exhilarating as the museum feels when someone visits.

The Cade Museum’s new website showcases their unique brand and makes them competitive against other museums at a regional and national level. At the 2023 AAF-NCFL American Advertising Awards, Cade’s website was awarded Local Gold Award for Consumer Website and the Best Overall Website!

Events Functionality

The old website lacked clarity when it came to the numerous events, exhibits, and camps that the Cade Museum consistently offers year-round. One of the major new functionality additions to the website was including both an event calendar that showed a high-level view of everything going on at the Cade and also individual pages with more detailed information. Users can now easily view events that interest them or their families, learn more, and choose to register or purchase tickets.

Prioritizing Missional Impact

“A mission with a museum” has been part of the Cade’s identity long before the physical museum was even open. Historically, it’s been something that is felt by the team internally as well as through their community outreach programs. However, it was not as obvious to the countless visitors and brand advocates of the museum.

With this new website, we had the opportunity to highlight this mission through our content and design. The very first thing someone sees when they visit the homepage is that mission statement. It’s felt throughout the content, user journey, and, now, marketing messages.

The Cade is better positioned to invite people into their vision “to spread an inventive mindset across the world” and make creativity and invention accessible to all. With clearer calls to action, more engaging content, and highlighting their outreach in the Gainesville community, the Cade’s website showcases that they are more than just a museum.

Inbound Marketing

Throughout our website project, the need for more consistent marketing leadership became clearer to Cade’s team. While the new website was being designed and built, we were working on a multi-channel strategy to take Cade’s marketing to the next level.

Social Media Marketing

The strongest channel Cade had prior to partnering with PHOS was their social media presence. It was both engaging and showcased their unique brand extremely well. Our marketers were able to continue delivering timely information and also experiment with new content styles and graphic directions, creating more engagement among their loyal followers.

Campaign Development & Leadership

We also understood that the Cade Museum is consistently bringing new, exciting exhibits and events to the community. This required intentional planning and strategic direction to utilize their multiple digital channels well.

In collaboration with the marketing and communications team at the Cade, our team is able to align on campaign messaging, creative direction, channel strategy, and timelines to facilitate the best campaign experience that produces results.

We leveraged this with the highly anticipated Tom Petty “Among the Wildflowers” exhibit. From planning to production to monitoring, we have partnered with Cade to maximize promotion and nurture excitement throughout a 6-month campaign.

Cade Prize

Mission is at the top of our minds throughout our strategy. Cade Prize is one of the largest initiatives the Cade Museum takes on each year. It is vital to amplifying their goal of investing in the next generation of innovators and creators. We have had the opportunity to come alongside the Cade Prize team to assist with the promotion and execution of this annual campaign.

The Impact

Launching the brand new Cade website has resulted in a huge lift in reach and engagement among website users. In the first two months after the website launched, users increased by 32%. In just 60 days, the new site had reached over 20,000 people.

We have also seen a great impact as a result of the ongoing inbound marketing strategies we’ve been implementing. In that same time period, organic traffic to the website increased by 40%. Social media, a channel that had proved to be a rich opportunity for Cade, also contributed to this growth. In the first 60 days of the website, traffic from social media users soared over 500%!

The new website allows for our marketing efforts to flourish. Brand consistency is a trust builder. Now that the new website and marketing messages align, guests can trust what they experience online will match the experience they get when they visit the Cade Museum.

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"PHOS is a fun and innovative company to work with. Their team took plenty of time getting to know our DNA, which helped build a firm foundation for our partnership. Communication is key. Both sides worked hard to make sure we were working smarter, not harder. I appreciate their honesty and integrity. "

—Jody Farmer, Senior Manager of Marketing & Community Engagement