CASE STUDY 2

The Why

As a well-known investment institution, Charles Schwab has built a legacy helping clients grow their wealth. But, in the new era of one-click investing and gamification apps like Acorn, Charles Schwab was looking to support the younger generation on the path to growing wealth from the very beginning of their financial journey.

The What

In an effort to meet millennials where they were, Charles Schwab created a website for free financial education. Topics spanned everything from opening a child’s first educational savings account to managing a loved one’s estate. Charles Schwab had the content, but it was written by financial advisors and not for an audience used to five-minute reads and a high level of interactivity.

The How

The first step in translating any language is to understand it fluently. First, I had to immerse myself in the financial topics, many of which were as unknown to me as they would be to our audience. As my financial understanding expanded, I was able to articulate a thought that was new to me—that the true motivation of money comes from the vision of its transformation into personal accomplishment.

Like any plan, beginning with a goal is vital to success, but it’s not always easy to narrow one down. This insight lead to the additional of an interactive element on the landing page that asks visitors to “fill in the blank” to their dreams. Once a path is chosen, they are directed to the topic page that can help get them to the next step.

It was also important that readers weren’t just reading about finances in a voyeuristic way, but had the ability to understand the topic on a personal level, so we added interactive quizzes and tools to help people assess their individual situations with their real numbers.

The Win
In the end, there were over 200 pages of refreshed content and functionality. In addition to writing the topics pages, I worked on the content strategy from top to bottom, including the organization of the navigation. During the process, I implemented C2’s first dev-friendly copy doc, in which each page element, image and envisioned functionality was labeled for seamless handoff from creative to dev. After the project was complete, this became the template used throughout the agency for delivering digital content.

The Work