The Client The Challenge The Solution

The Sargent Shriver Peace Institute, SSPI, is a not-for-profit foundation dedicated to the legacy of the first director of the Peace Corps and Presidential candidate, Sargent Shriver. Shriver was a key advisor and statesman during the Kennedy and Johnson administration, while also helping create and lead the Special Olympics and War on Poverty. The goal of the organization is to inspire conflict resolution and peace through the life's work, principles, and beliefs of Shriver.

SSPI came to BTG with a far-reaching goal: the desire to bring Sargent Shriver's legacy into the 21st century. At the time, their organization had no website or electronic archives.

The BTG team quickly took SSPI under its wings. Our managers met with SSPI directors to develop a comprehensive project strategy, while our designers set to work crafting a strong visual culture for the client's organization. These crucial planning stages formed the basis for a successful project outcome. Our team spearheaded several essential initiatives for their organization:

1. Brand Engineering – BTG assisted SSPI with the most fundamental and foundational elements of their organizational identity: the creation of a logo and brand design.
2. Website Development – Our team developed and manages SSPI's organizational website using cutting-edge web technologies and a proprietary BTG content management system.
3. Rich Online Media Deployment – Using proprietary BTG Flash players and AJAX image galleries, our team helped SSPI to convert their photos and videos to digital formats, published through their website.
4. Archival and Digitization Services – BTG's digitization services provided SSPI with a quick and cost-effective method to fully catalog, store, and index Sargent Shriver's lifetime of correspondences, while BTG's development team presented SSPI with innovative methods of online archive creation.

Brand Engineering
BTG began its work with SSPI by engineering the seminal components of the organization's identity. Our teams of designers worked with SSPI's directors to create a logo that expressed the goals and aims of the organization while elegantly and concisely constructing a professional appearance in both print and web media. Our team created the SSPI using the double-S initials of Sargent Shriver to create a heart, representing the kindness and generosity of spirit most exemplified by Shriver throughout his career in public service. Beyond creating an organizational logo, BTG assisted SSPI in determining its official colors, stationary, business cards, and organizational slogans.

BTG helped SSPI get its collective organizational identity off the ground through a combination of results-oriented designs and lengthy experience in expressing brand identity aesthetically. Website Development
After completing the design and creation of a solid brand identity for SSPI, BTG's development team began creation of a world-class website for their organization. BTG's design team created multiple drafts of different visions for the finished site. These blueprints provided the client with the opportunity to explore various approaches to the overall site concept. Following successive versioning, and conferencing with the client's management team, BTG's designers finalized a look and feel for the overall webpage.

Using BTG's InSite Methodology™, our team created an overarching motif behind the site itself. With an entire team of designers working full-time on the project, BTG kept the client informed throughout the process, while always maintaining the design's course. BTG generated all copy and content for the website, following direction from the client. Our team produced a finished, full version of the website within a short timeframe, which fully met and exceeded the expectations of the client. In addition to designing and developing a website, BTG deployed a customized version of our proprietary content management system, to be used by the client in maintaining and updating their site internally. BTG's content management software provides clients with powerful access to the data behind their website, while maintaining ease of use. As a result of BTG's success in developing a website for SSPI, our firm was contracted to manage site hosting and administration on behalf of the client. Rich Online Media Deployment
BTG stands at the forefront of the ever-growing and increasing proliferation of rich media content on the Internet. Our firm provides online video and photo hosting services and platforms, including Flash video, AJAX and dynamic video and photo galleries, and other valuable toolsets made available to our clients. For SSPI, BTG devised a full-fledged online media strategy to maximize exposure of rich media on the client's website. BTG's developers created vibrant dynamic photo galleries to showcase the client's library of images. The resulting feature utilized cutting-edge AJAX technology to dynamically allow the client to crop and resize images in uploading them to the gallery through BTG's content management system. Advanced web scripting allowed the images to play in a slideshow format, continuously streaming through a customized user interface comparable with such leading Internet photo sites as Snapfish and Flickr.

Our video development team encoded the client's organizational footage into Flash format, using BTG's proprietary Flash player technology. BTG created a fully-dynamic and scripted video showcase where visitors could play Flash video on-demand. The finished product proudly represented the impressive balance between art and technology that is at the core of our firm's aesthetic methods and techniques.

Archival and Digitization Services
SSPI had collected thousands of pieces of correspondences from throughout Sargent Shriver's lifetime, BTG set about digitizing and converting these printed materials into online accessible documents. Our digitization services team used special devices and software to rapidly scan and recognize over 10,000 individual paper documents using OCR software. The resulting information was collected into an archival database while the source images of the documents were converted to PDF format. Lastly, the scanned images were linked back with the recognized textual source to create a searchable PDF archive of client's entire collection. This digitized archive would become one of SSPI's featured technological assets, as well as an important resource for researchers and scholars around the world. BTG's team had quickly and effectively implemented a standard procedure for digitizing a large collection of primary source materials with tremendous accuracy, and publishing a full archive online, while preserving the visual qualities of the original documents. As BTG continues its work with SSPI, our team is working with the client to create a new type of collaborative archival and research tool to reach over 200,000 alumni members of the Peace Corps and other organizations touched by Shriver. Our successes for SSPI reflect the dedication and creativity of our firm in serving each of our clients.