AmpliFund Rebrand and Website Redesign

The Challenge

Over the years, StreamLink Software developed several successful SaaS solutions. But after seeing the potential of AmpliFund, its grant management software, the company decided to exclusively focus on scaling to capitalize on market potential. Recognizing the need for increased brand awareness, StreamLink Software came to Walker Sands to implement a strategic public relations campaign and to refresh the AmpliFund brand, which was poised for explosive growth in its market.

As it stood, AmpliFund’s marketing materials and website, streamlinksoftware.com, presented a confusing brand and product identity. Both names – StreamLink Software and AmpliFund – were often used interchangeably in marketing materials. Additionally, the website struggled with design and performance issues. It needed improvements across user experience, content and responsiveness – all with the goal of converting qualified leads.

Walker Sands recognized the lack of clarity in AmpliFund’s brand and website had the potential to confuse media and customers, diluting the potential of any PR campaign designed to generate leads and drive brand awareness for the company.

The Solution

To maximize future PR efforts, Walker Sands and StreamLink Software decided to prioritize the rebrand around its flagship product, AmpliFund, while shifting the StreamLink Software brand to the background. AmpliFund needed an updated, modern brand to clarify its identity and a powerful new website to drive lead generation and fill the sales pipeline.

Rebrand

With AmpliFund poised for accelerated growth, the Walker Sands team kicked off the rebrand project with a discovery phase that included research into AmpliFund’s market landscape, brand positioning and target audiences. From there, Walker Sands refined user persona documentation that outlined how prospects would interact with AmpliFund’s new brand and website by clearly defining user pain points, software needs and the benefits of AmpliFund.

Using the information from their research and user personas, the Walker Sands creative team set a goal to create a brand that was credible, approachable and reliable. Walker Sands began the visual identity concepting phase, which included the development of three comprehensive, unique design system presentations. The chosen design system featured an identity motivated by the term “process” – a series of actions or steps taken in order to achieve a particular end.

AmpliFund’s audiences rely on transparency in the grant management lifecycle, and they thrive on visibility before, during and after each step in the process. Rather than representing grant management as a linear process, Walker Sands created an identity system that showcased the process as iterative steps.

To further support this story, Walker Sands crafted a new logo that includes an italic font and gradients to suggest both forward progress and thought. The logo was paired with a tech-driven, bold color palette that is modern and approachable. In addition, Walker Sands created a human-centric photo library with a custom application that makes the brand more ownable and personable.

To empower AmpliFund’s in-house marketing team, Walker Sands created user-friendly brand guidelines that visually and verbally defined consistent use of the brand’s logo, color palette, typography and photography across multiple channels. This new style guide was instrumental in guiding the subsequent website redesign project.

Website redesign

To kick off the website redesign, Walker Sands conducted a full content audit of all URLs on the existing site to better understand which pages were driving SEO value and where gaps existed. Based on those findings, Walker Sands developed a new sitemap and navigation recommendations with user pathways optimized for conversion.

With the audit complete, the Walker Sands team implemented a content strategy, which involved keyword research and search optimization for new web content, along with strengthened messaging and CTAs geared toward AmpliFund’s targeted personas. It also included a full redirect and content migration strategy of over 550 URLs to maintain domain equity and further improve SEO value in the transfer from streamlinksoftware.com to amplifund.com.

Once this strategic work was done, Walker Sands’ UX designers created wireframes and graphic mockups to show how the new branding would come to life on the various pages across the website. Walker Sands’ developers then built custom, mobile-first WordPress templates with highly optimized pagespeed times that could be easily edited and managed by AmpliFund’s in-house marketing team after launch.

The Results

AmpliFund’s clear, unique identity and brand application allow the company to visually establish credibility and professionalism with its audience, while also effectively differentiating it from StreamLink Software. Additionally, AmpliFund’s new website has been extremely successful in achieving the company’s top marketing goals, with results showing improvements across traffic and performance:

• 161% increase in conversion rates
• 58% decrease in cost per conversion
• 120% increase in organic traffic to the homepage
• 500% increase in traffic to the pricing page
• 71% pagespeed improvement cutting from 9 seconds to 2.6 seconds
• 37% improvement in Google Lighthouse scores from a D+ to an A+ rating

Together, AmpliFund’s new brand and website accurately reflect its position as a forward-thinking, modern tech company in the fast-growing grant management software market.