At a Glance

Creative Repute delivered a ten-minute impact video, five social media reels, and a fully redesigned website for PowerCorpsPHL’s ten-year anniversary. The video lives on the new website and has been used at outreach events across Philadelphia. The website has now drawn over 6,000 organic search clicks and 50,000 impressions in its first 18 months, with Google search rankings improving from an average position of 14 to 8 over that period. Being on the first page of Google search results is important for a brand’s visibility as people will likely re-do their search rather than continue on to subsequent search page.

Organization Background

PowerCorpsPHL is a workforce development program based in Philadelphia, built through a partnership between AmeriCorps and the City of Philadelphia. The program works with un- and under-employed young adults, ages 18 to 30, offering a paid, immersive experience that runs anywhere from four to twenty-four months. At the end, members are connected to living-wage jobs in clean energy, green infrastructure, and community-based careers.

By the time Creative Repute came on board, PowerCorpsPHL was marking ten years of that work. The program had also grown beyond Philadelphia, actively designing and advising similar initiatives in cities across the country.

About the Project

The PowerCorpsPHL team came to us with two needs tied to their tenth anniversary: a website that matched the scope of what the organization had grown into, and a video that could put real faces and voices to their impact. 

Creative Repute was engaged to deliver:

• A ten-minute long-form impact video, built from interviews, b-roll filmed across the city, and motion graphics
• Five short-form social media reels for Instagram and TikTok, each with text overlays, statistics, light animation, and a clear call to action
• A fully redesigned and rebuilt website, built to serve prospective members, community partners, funders, and national stakeholders
• Four months of post-launch website maintenance, including SEO monitoring, analytics, and regular site audits

Both tracks (video and web) ran simultaneously, anchored by a shared discovery process and a single creative brief. Keeping those two workstreams connected without letting them collide required clear separation, consistent communication, and a dedicated Notion Board that tracked every deliverable across both.

Our Approach

Pre-Production

Weeks of pre-production work preceded the first shoot day. Interviewees were confirmed. Locations were scouted first on Google Earth, then in person. Minute-by-minute rundowns were built for each of three filming days, with rain dates scheduled in advance. Participant communications were handled so everyone arrived knowing exactly where to go and what to expect.

Video Production

The crew worked with $20,000 in professional-grade equipment: three 4K Sony cameras, a Canon camera, an Aston Spirit condenser microphone, a drone, a DJI RS 4 Pro Gimbal Stabilizer, and a full lighting setup. Multiple cameras ran simultaneously on every interview. Each hour-long session generated roughly four hours of footage across camera feeds plus a dedicated audio track.

Filming spanned three full days. Day one focused on interviews with participants, alumni, staff, and leadership. Day two followed members in the field doing the hands-on work the program is built around. Day three visited alumni at their job sites, a full-circle moment that showed where the program had actually taken people.

A conscious effort was made to ensure all participants were comfortable. PowerCorpsPHL’s members and alumni have navigated genuinely hard experiences like incarceration, unemployment, domestic instability, and other difficult situations. We were showing up and asking them to sit in front of a camera and talk about their lives. That is a big ask.

The environment was set up to put people first. Interview questions were built collaboratively with PowerCorpsPHL so those we interviewed felt aligned and to alleviate any stress of feeling caught off guard. On set, we kept the atmosphere warm and unhurried. We provided snacks and water, and a no pressure, no rush feel to the day. This allowed interviewees to focus on sharing their story. 

The edit is where everything came together. All footage was reviewed in full, dead space was trimmed, and audio was enhanced in Logic Pro before being synced back to the video files. That prep work set the editing team up to move confidently in Adobe Premiere Pro. A challenge in the edit was scope. Every interview was compelling, and PowerCorpsPHL’s work spans multiple programs, populations, and outcomes. The solution was to pair the strongest interview moments with motion graphics and statistics. Data carried the informational weight so individual voices could carry the emotional weight. Color correction and sound design were applied throughout to create visual consistency across scenes shot in very different conditions (indoor interview setups, outdoor job sites, drone footage, etc.) Auto-stabilization addressed shaky field footage. B-roll was woven throughout. The story arc was refined across multiple revision rounds until the final ten-minute cut was complete.

Five vertical-format social media reels were produced alongside the long-form film, each built to stand alone with its own hook, statistics, text overlays, and call to action.

Website Design & Development

Running alongside the video track was a full website redesign. The design team built a new site map from scratch in Figma, grounded in competitive research and the discovery findings. It went through three rounds of revisions before translating into a low-fidelity wireframe, which then became a high-fidelity interactive prototype with clickable navigation and responsive interactions. 

WordPress was the right CMS choice because PowerCorpsPHL needed to manage the site independently after handoff. Elementor handled the page building. The Neve theme provided a clean, customizable base modified to align with the brand. Advanced Custom Fields created custom post types for team profiles, job postings, memorials, and testimonials. Yoast SEO, Google Analytics, and Google Tag Manager were all configured at launch, with custom dashboards set up to track user behavior, form submissions, and conversion activity.

The site was tested across Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge on mobile, tablet, and desktop before launch. Four months of post-launch maintenance followed, with regular audits for SEO issues, broken links, and performance gaps.

Reflecting on the Work

Looking back, a few things stand out about how this project came together. Running video production and website development simultaneously requires real discipline. The two tracks share a foundation but operate on completely different timelines and have completely different tolerances for change. Keeping both on track came down to clear separation between the workstreams, 

The cultural sensitivity piece also shaped this project in ways that do not show up obviously in the final deliverables, but are in there. Going into an engagement where you are asking people who have experienced incarceration, unemployment, and real hardship to speak on camera is not something you can manage with a standard production checklist. The intentionality around how the interview environment was designed, how questions were framed, how the team showed up on set – that work mattered. It is what made the footage real.

The ten-minute impact video has shown up at outreach events and lives on the new website. Many of our Philadelphia area team members attended the official 10 year anniversary event where we got to mingle with the PowerCorpsPHL community and see the main debut of the impact video. 

The five short-form reels gave PowerCorpsPHL a content library they could actually use intentionally, that works for how people engage on social media. Together, they gave the organization a storytelling toolkit ready for the next decade.

The website launched as a platform that reflects who PowerCorpsPHL is at ten years in. Visitors can find what they are looking for quickly, whether they are a prospective member, a community partner, or a national stakeholder. Google Search Console data from the first 16 months post-launch tells the performance story directly:

• 6,320 clicks from organic search and 50,600 impressions from Google searches in the last 18 months.
• Average Google search position improved from 14 in early 2025 to 8 by early 2026, meaning the site ranks meaningfully higher in results than it did in its first months
• The /apply-now/ and /careers/ pages  are key information based pages for PowerCorpsPHL’s community. Together have earned over 29,000 impressions, indicating strong reach among the prospective member audience the site was built to serve
• Peak week reached 185 clicks in a single week (February 2026), more than 50 percent above the early-period weekly average