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Tern Heads

Membership website, branding

An online membership platform connecting students, graduates, educators and employers

Tern Heads came to us as a start-up needing a feature-rich community membership website. The idea was to let students find internships and opportunities, gain real experience and collaborate with industry professionals before heading into their careers. It is a career development platform for emerging creatives looking for their first jobs or clients.

ClientTern Heads
IndustryEducation and careers
Specialist areasMembership website, branding
The Tern Heads member dashboard
Opportunity listings on Tern Heads
The process

Four audiences, one platform, launched in stages.

We scoped out every user journey and every feature the platform needed to work, because a student, a graduate, an educator and an employer all want different things from the same site. Getting that wrong at the start would have been expensive to unpick later.

This was a heavily involved project, so we phased the features across several releases. That let the site go live and build interest within the creative industry rather than waiting for everything to be finished at once.

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The Tern Heads brand markThe Tern Heads platform on a mobile phone
What we built

A start-up needs an audience before it needs a launch date.

A membership platform with nobody on it is not much use to anyone, so the brand and the marketing ran alongside the build rather than after it.

01Branding strategy

Tern Heads arrived as an idea rather than a brand, so we built the identity first: a name and mark that reads as credible to an employer and appealing to a nineteen-year-old designer at the same time.

02A membership website

The platform itself, built to handle four distinct user types with their own permissions, content and reasons for logging in.

03A bespoke member dashboard

Rather than a generic account page, each member gets a dashboard built around what they came for: opportunities to apply for, work to show, or students to reach.

04Custom user onboarding

Sign-up is where membership platforms lose people. We built onboarding that gets someone to a useful, populated profile rather than dropping them into an empty account.

05Marketing strategy

We built awareness, social following and an email list during the build, so there was an audience to launch to on day one instead of an empty platform.

06Ongoing hosting, support and care

We host and maintain the platform, so features could keep shipping in stages after launch as interest grew.

The employer side of Tern Heads on a mobile phone
The Tern Heads member experience on mobile
Collaboration features on the Tern Heads platform
"designbox have been a huge support for me and my business for the past five years. Their up-to-date knowledge of digital design, marketing and the tech industry itself is fantastic, and I would recommend them to anyone."
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