The Lightstone Community Development Corporation is a US Treasury certified Community Development Financial Institution investing in microenterprise and small start-up businesses in rural West Virginia and Virginia. During a period of growth, organizational change, and changes in the funding environment, Lightstone needed help creating a strategic blueprint and implementation plan for change.

Telosphere partner Alex Struminger has worked with Lightstone over the past three years on several projects, including an executive management role, to help manage and facilitate organizational development, deliver the organization's message more effectively, and to build collaboration with community partners across the state of West Virginia. This work helped Lightstone to complete a 2-year organizational development program "transistion for sustainability." This exercise impacted organizational structure, leveraging key relationships, process reengineering, financial and information management systems, corporate identity and marketplace analysis, and governance/management transition.

Lightstone's state-wide economic community development mission requires strong stakeholder collaboration, as well as the ability to deliver and act on complex program performance information. Collaboration across distances in ruralmountain communities requires strong innovative use of telecommunications and Internet techologies to help bridge the "rural digital divide" (in areas where low-bandwidth 24k modem speeds are still common!), as well as good inter-company communication and analytical tools to extend the organization's message.

The project also included redesign of the corporate identity (including logo, communication tools, and a completely new Web site in collaboration with Irish digital design firm RedMoonMedia), financial and administrative reporting tools, and graphical presentation tools. Telosphere also created Information Architecture and presentation tools for a proposal to the US Department of Commerce "Technology Opportunities Program." This included strategy and design for a sophisticated, but easy-to-use online tool that will serve as a business hub and "virtual marketplace." More than just an Internet development project, the strategy requires strong partnerships and a deep understanding of local community needs. The virtual marketplace will create new business opportunities by linking and leveraging assets for remote mountain communities that are often hundreds of miles apart from one another, and suffer from generations of endemic poverty.

For a current draft of the white paper "a stakeholder mapping approach" to Web content organization, click here.

For an in-depth review of the brand identity design process, click here.

Learn more by visiting the Lightstone website.