Creative and strategic studio for brands built with intention. We design brand foundations, creative systems, and storytelling that endure.
SMILE Mass
100%
Platform access recovered
3.9×
Instagram reach, fewer posts
13.1×
Email send rate, sustained
Page 1
Up from page three of Google
The Challenge
A nonprofit locked out of its own digital estate
SMILE Mass makes recreation possible for people with disabilities across Massachusetts — beach wheelchairs, accessible vacation rentals on Cape Cod and in New Hampshire, and year-round programs through Club SMILE Mass. Their tagline is creating a world without barriers.
They had spent years behind one of their own. Every platform the organisation depended on was controlled by a previous marketing company. Not shared. Not delegated. Held.
They could not log in to their own website hosting, see their own traffic, read their own search performance, or edit their own Google listing.
Access they did not have
Website hosting
Google Analytics 4
Google Search Console
Google Tag Manager
Google Business Profile
And One Thing Nobody Had Noticed
The website could not send email at all
Not degraded. Not slow. Not sending. Enquiry forms submitted into nothing, with no stored record and no error. Notifications still routed to a staff member who had left the organisation.
SMILE Mass lends accessible beach wheelchairs and books vacation properties to families planning the one holiday of the year their disabled child can actually take part in. Those families enquire through a form on the website. Every one of those enquiries was vanishing. The organisation had no idea how much it was losing, because the thing that would have told them was the thing that was broken.
What We Did
Foundations first, content second
Most engagements start with content, because content is visible and infrastructure is not. That order is backwards. We went and recovered every account SMILE Mass should always have owned, then rebuilt everything underneath.
01
Recovered every account
Hosting, Analytics, Search Console, Tag Manager, Business Profile and DNS administration — all retrieved from the previous agency and placed in SMILE Mass’s own name. They own them outright. If they ever leave us, they leave whole.
02
Migrated, secured, accelerated
The site moved onto WP Engine — managed infrastructure we administer directly. SSL active across root and www, a full performance pass applied, and the broken rotating event ticker on every page fixed. No downtime anyone noticed.
03
Fixed email at the DNS layer
A WordPress site that cannot send mail is a domain problem, not a plugin problem. We rebuilt SPF, DKIM and DMARC from scratch so mail is signed, verifiable and trusted — instead of silently discarded before reaching an inbox.
04
Then the content
The account was posting relentlessly and reaching nobody, with zero reels and zero video anywhere. We introduced both immediately, built around real people — coaches, participants, families — rather than graphics.
The Change That Moved Everything
Six times the reach, from the same account
Before — 40 days to 9 June
68 Instagram posts, 0 reels
69 Facebook posts, 0 videos
0 LinkedIn posts
Reach per Instagram post: 67
After — 40 days to 19 July
58 Instagram posts, 16 reels
64 Facebook posts, 16 videos
21 LinkedIn posts
Reach per Instagram post: 306
Median reel reach was 478 against 80 for a static image.
We proved it rather than claimed it. A Mann-Whitney U test returned p < 0.0001, so the difference isn’t sampling noise. Splitting by campaign showed the advantage holding in both halves. Removing the single largest outlier post still left reach up 2.84×.
See the reels
On Facebook · Watch on Facebook
On Instagram · Watch on Instagram
Results
Two matched 40-day windows
1 May – 9 June against 10 June – 19 July. Both exactly 40 days, so every change is a direct ratio — nothing scaled, normalised or modelled. Organic only, no paid spend in either period.
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Instagram accounts reached | 4,551 | 17,753 |
| Instagram engagements | 309 | 1,286 |
| Instagram new followers | 0 | 11 |
| Facebook accounts reached | 16,985 | 22,752 |
| LinkedIn impressions | 51 | 1,124 |
| LinkedIn click-through rate | 1.96% | 4.98% |
| Email daily send rate | 44.6/day | 582.9/day |
| Email open rate | 71% | 75% |
| Average Google position | 29.4 | 9.8 |
Thirteen times the email volume — and the open rate went up, not down. On search, an average position moving from 29.4 to 9.8 is the difference between page three and page one of Google. And for the first time in the organisation’s history, strangers started finding SMILE Mass by searching for what it does — beach wheelchair rental, wheelchair accessible beach house rentals — rather than by already knowing its name.
The Deliverable Behind The Deliverable
Reporting built to be checked, not admired
SMILE Mass spent years unable to see their own numbers. So we didn’t hand them a slide deck. We built a live monthly dashboard where every figure traces to a named, dated source file — and where we show our workings, including the parts that don’t flatter us.
We correct our own reports
The launch report read email bounce rate as improving. When the true month-by-month split arrived, it had in fact risen slightly. The next report states that correction openly, explains why the wider window pointed the wrong way, and confirms which part of the original finding still stands.
And flag our own recommendations
We recommended leaning on LinkedIn for sponsorship outreach. The next report opened that section by noting follower growth had stalled right after the recommendation went out, and advised diagnosing before pushing further. The recommendation that underperformed is reported as prominently as the ones that worked.
A client who can trust the corrections can trust everything else. That is what earned this relationship faster than any metric did.
SMILE Mass exists to create a world without barriers.
They had spent years behind one of their own — unable to reach their audience, see their own data, or even receive an email from a family that needed them. That barrier is gone.
Find SMILE Mass
The Full Case Study
Read the complete breakdown
Ten pages covering the access recovery, the migration and DNS work, every channel result, the search turnaround, and the reporting methodology behind it.
View the case study (PDF)
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