Introduce your business and what you do there.

We’re the Association of Former Students of Texas A&M University. We’re an independent, nonprofit alumni association. I’m the assistant VP for communications, which includes traditional communications and our web operations.

What challenge were you trying to address with Inventive?

We have a yearly series of events called Aggie Muster on or around April 21st at hundreds of locations around the world. It’s a memorial service type of event in which people who attended Texas A&M come together and honor fellow former students who have died in the past year. There’s a large ceremony that also takes place on Texas A&M’s campus.

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was impossible for alumni to come together and have our traditional muster ceremony, which has happened for over a ceremony. This was a big deal, and though local volunteers put on these events the association provides a lot of support. When it became apparent that these ceremonies wouldn’t be safe, we tried to create a virtual version. Ultimately, they built a shared platform where all these events could be streamed. Anybody, anywhere in the world could find a ceremony on our site.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We started working with them three weeks before the ceremonies. Our web operations team is only three full-time professionals and one part-time student, which didn’t give us the necessary bandwidth. Inventive built an interactive website from scratch. Several of the ceremonies were streamed live like Zoom or Facebook or YouTube events and then were recorded and stored on our website.

Hosting those video streams was the primary goal, but another important piece of the ceremony is the reading of the names of the dead. As the name of someone you know is called people call out “here,” symbolizing that the person still exists within the watchers’ hearts. To accommodate this, Inventive Works built a function where, if you were on the site, you could click on the name being read and it would post a “here,” for whichever name was being read. This created a rolling stream of people saying “here.” You couldn’t even read them all at times because so many people were engaging.

The third primary function they delivered was the reflections displays, which was central to the main ceremony at Texas A&M’s campus. It’s a physical display with pictures of the person and a number of their artifacts (watch, t-shirt, trophy, etc.) contributed by the families. Inventive built a virtual display in which you could click on someone’s name and see photos and add a personal recollection of that person. Everyone could see all of the recollections.

Had we done this locally and ourselves, we would have had trouble with servers but they brought them online as we needed them during the day. We peaked at 25,000 simultaneously on the site, as well as 50,000 unique visitors overall.

What is the team composition?

Our main point of contact was Maisy (Project Manager), but I’m not sure how many people in total were assigned. I think I interacted with about eight of them over our three-week project.

How did you come to work with Inventive?

They came to us via a recommendation from the University. We’re independent of the University but we do work closely with them on a lot of things, particularly their marketing and communications department this time. They helped us conceptualize the whole project and had a pre-existing relationship with Inventive. We didn’t run a bidding process or anything like that.

How much have you invested with them?

The contract was for around $60,000. We actually received a generous grant from the University so there were very minimal expenses from our own budget.

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked together from March until May 2020. After the ceremony, we had to transfer everything from them to us.

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What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

The largest ceremony is always the one on the University’s campus seeing as the student body is there and they have the most accommodations. They can hold about 13,000­-14,000 at that event, but when the campus ceremony started this year 25,000 watched it. That moment, at that event, was the largest attendance at an Aggie Muster ever recorded. We made the ceremony available to more people than would have been able to experience it at the live event. We basically doubled it.

For us, just being able to put on the ceremonies was a success. Everyone felt really strongly that we shouldn’t postpone until next year because it’s so fundamental to the experience of being a Texas A&M Aggie, as well as because if we ever didn’t do it we would run the risk of the tradition dying. We couldn’t let the moment pass.

We were also happy with the number of countries people were streaming from. Additionally, there was pleasing anecdotal feedback. A number of people wrote, emailed, and called us to say how much it meant to them to have their loved ones honored that year. The experience was smooth, too. So smooth, in fact, that we’ve decided to do the same thing every year going forward. Muster will continue to be streamed live going forward, even if we are able to gather in person.

How did Inventive Works, LLC perform from a project management standpoint?

I’m not sure what they used on their end but our interactions were primarily over Zoom and Slack, as well as GitHub at the end. Mostly they were showing us designs using a screen-sharing functionality in Zoom.

What did you find most impressive about them?

There’s a lot of colleges and universities in this country and Texas A&M is fundamentally different, exemplified by our muster ceremonies. To work effectively with the association, and by extension the University, you have to make an effort to understand the ways in which we’re different. Inventive did that really well. There weren’t any alumni on their team but they pushed to understand the psychology of our alumni. They wouldn’t have been able to execute it the way they did without doing that work.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I don’t think it would be fair to even be critical because of the intense circumstances and timeline in which we presented the project. It wasn’t perfect every step of the way but I can’t beef about anything because they did what we asked them to do and hit a deadline without one minute of flexibility.