Armadillo Studios Inc.

VentureQuest 2020 & Armadillo Studios

Armadillo Studios is once again proud to be acting as an in-kind sponsor for Bow Valley College’s 2020 VentureQuest Awards.

Since 2015, we have had the opportunity to work with many of the finalists of these awards and provide some of the winners with $1,500 of in-kind online development and guidance to help kick start their business ideas. Most recently we worked with Amber of Once Upon A Story to get her business web site up and running. With the reception banquet this evening, we are looking forward to working with the latest crop of young entrepreneurs from Bow Valley College in 2020.


Donations, WordPress and GiveWP

With The 2020 edition of #GivingTuesday just wrapped up and the all important year-end fundraising push around the corner, I wanted to take a couple of seconds to talk about one of my favourite tools for WordPress – GiveWP.

Over the past couple of years, I have been using GiveWP to power the donation processing side of some of our most successful WordPress installs. Essentially, it’s an all-in-one third party WordPress plug-in that allows any organization to accept donations seamlessly and through an enhanced user interface. In particular, GiveWP has been invaluable when working with political campaigns, community organizations (that are not registered charities) and businesses looking to leverage a donation model for their revenue generation.

But what makes GiveWP different from the dozens of third party external donation tools and WooCommerce enabled set-ups? Here are the just some of the key features that I believe give GiveWP the edge:

  1. The core GiveWP install is free and relatively easy to install. Development time takes about an hour or two to set-up and the core plug-in comes with a slew of core features that are hard to find in most donation solutions. Additional add-ons are relatively inexpensive to add to a single domain (in comparison to the full cost of other WordPress Donation tools).
  2. GiveWP is incredibly versatile and isn’t only for registered charities, it works for non-registered charities, organizations looking to leverage a donation model (cough bloggers cough) and most importantly any sized political campaigns.
  3. Two key design features that are incredibly advantageous for online donation campaigns – fundraising goal trackers and donation amount buttons – come prepackaged and ready to go with the base install of GiveWP. (Click here to checkout the tool in action)
  4. It connects with Paypal and Stripe, right out of the box. The plug-in recently improved it’s core install to include both Stripe and Paypal payments gateways.
  5. Using GiveWP allows you to keep users on your site, without having to take them to a third party donation site.
  6. It comes with a full suite of reporting features within the WordPress backend to monitor donations and the email template set-up is easy to set-up to track donations received.

So if you’re a non-profit or an organization that is reevaluating your donation process after #GivingTuesday or looking to beef up your WordPress web site by accepting donations through your site before year-end or even frustrated by the existing tools out there, check out GiveWP.com. When it comes to the available tools out there, you won’t be disappointed at how powerful and easy-to-use the tool is.


Honoured To Support Calgary Alpha House

Yesterday, I was incredibly humbled and touched to receive this special print in recognition of the years of support Armadillo Studios has provided to Calgary Alpha House. It has been an honour to have the opportunity to work with Calgary Alpha House Society for the past few years, as they are a critical and part of the Calgary community. Thank you for this special gift. It’s going to have a nice spot in the office.


Campaigning With WordPress – Design and Story Telling Lessons From The World of Political Web Design

A couple of years ago, I had the pleasure of presenting at WordCamp YYC on my experiences using WordPress for political campaigns. Earlier this week I stumbled upon the posting of the full talk on WordPress.TV, so I figured it was time to share for those who weren’t at WordCamp Calgary 2017.

With the another round of municipal elections set in Alberta for October 2017, we are about to be bombarded by candidates vying for our votes and attention. But what makes a good Political Campaign Web Site? What makes people take notice of a candidate? And are there lessons about design, branding and functionality that we can learn from campaign web sites to enhance our own business and non-profit web sites. This honest and frank talk will dive into the world of political web design to provide you with ideas on how better tell the story of your organization and get people to buy in to your message.


Campaigning With WordPress & WordCamp Calgary 2017

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of giving a talk at WordCamp Calgary 2017 called Campaigning With WordPress: Design and Story Telling Lessons From The World of Political Web Design. At the request of many attendees I’ve attached my slides for download and viewing via Slide Share below.

Thank you once again to the entire team that put on WordCamp Calgary 2017. They did a fantastic job and it was a pleasure to have the opportunity to chat about the intersection of WordPress and the Political technology world. I hope everyone had a great time at the talk.