The Lemelson Foundation

Overview

A variety of Flash Based Interactive Presentations, from slide shows to fully narrated presentations.

Challenges

Build an exciting new website with Flash and video that mission, programs and philanthropic efforts of The Lemelson Foundation in 3 months.

Solutions

Every year the Lemelson Foundation through it's funded program at MIT gives a $500,000 prize to the inventor of the year. 3 months prior to that ceremony in 2001, the Foundation selected EnSky to create the Inaugural site for the Lemelson Foundation. This was the first site we had done, (besides our own) where we had been given the budget and full creative control for creating and gathering all the content we would need to develop the site. We immediately flew down to Washington D.C to visit the Lemelson Center at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History. There we worked with the Lemelson Center staff, who helped us wade through the steps involved in using SINMAH and SINMAS artifacts on the Lemelson Foundation website. Our plan was to create a fully narrated Interactive Flash movie, an inventor timeline that took the viewer on a journey to meet some famous inventors of our past up to the accomplishments of Jerome Lemelson, and The Lemelson Foundation and introduce the inventors of tomorrow in the form of e-teams. The Flash movie would be the centerpiece of the website, and would be deployed on the day that MIT would announce the 2001 Lemelson Prize winner. The finished website was deployed on time and on budget, and lauded a huge success, praised by MIT, Smithsonian Institution and our client the Lemelson Foundation, finally had a website that they were proud to point people to who wanted to learn more about the Foundation. Over the next two years the Lemelson Foundation used the team at EnSky to document The Lemelson Foundations activities and events, as well as events put on by the funded programs at Hampshire College, MIT, Smithsonian Institution National Museum of American History's - Lemelson Center, and NCIIA. We added pictures, and video to the exploring Innovation section of the website, and created a new section using MySQL and PHP called 3ivision, (denoting the three i's in our the slogan we coined for the Foundation "inspiring invention and innovation". 3ivision is a searchable database of video content generated by the programs endeavors as well as events we documented using EnSky DV Film and Production capabilities. Another big part of the project was to increase The website visibility and ranking on search engines. We created a very cost effective web marketing strategy that drastically increased the sites position on the major search engines and paid listings which drove substantial new traffic to the site. From it's initial 54 a week (just after we unveiled the new site) to an average of 1,500-2000 visitors per week by the end of 2002. More importantly it put some distance on search engines to website listings of websites promoting The Lemelson Foundation's philanthropic efforts and websites that spread disinformation (mostly by law firms) describing opinions of lawsuits ongoing between The Lemelson's Patent Attorney's and Lawyers representing companies who are in violation of Lemelson Patents.