Tactile is very proud of its social mission—to do what we can to leave our corner of the planet and all the folks residing in it in better shape than we found it.

This translates into buying recycled office products, following sustainable practices, and most notably our pro bono program. Once a year we select a non-profit agency or organization to receive a web project for free. That’s right – totally free! So far there have been two beneficiaries of this program: Sunrise of Philadelphia and Philly AIDS Thrift.

In 2015 we worked with Sunrise of Philadelphia—an after school program in South Philly that provides academic enrichment, college and career programming, and workforce development to over 400 low-income youth in grades K-12 annually.

For Sunrise, we patched and updated an older installation of Drupal while refreshing the design and adding new interactive features. We integrated the site with their social media feeds, and installed a calendar module that was much easier for them to maintain.

At Sunrise’s request, we also developed and provided an 8-week workshop for their middle school students where we taught them programming basics using the popular video game Minecraft. The workshop was a blast! The students were so good at Minecraft and so quick to absorb the concepts presented that we had a hard time keeping up with them. We ended up developing much more content and covering a lot more ground than we ever anticipated we would need for such a short course.

In 2016 we worked with Philly AIDS Thrift—or PAT—which is a non-profit that operates two thrift stores in Philadelphia and distributes the proceeds to local organizations involved in the fight against HIV/AIDS. Their main beneficiary is the AIDS Fund, but they recently started a grants competition program to help them distribute funds to more agencies and organizations. They have raised and donated over 1.5 million dollars since opening in the fall of 2005.

For PAT, we took their existing website, which we had designed and developed for them in early 2012, and reworked it to be completely mobile compatible. This allowed them to leverage their existing technology investment while updating it to be more in line with the needs of their users. After the upgrade, their customers can now use tablets and smartphones to easily access the information on their website.

The benefits of our pro bono projects are obvious: commendable non-profit organizations get to take advantage of upgraded technology at no cost, which allows them to focus more of their resources on providing vital services. But what does Tactile get out of it?

We think the benefits are enormous. We get the opportunity to work closely with these non-profit agencies and make a real difference in helping them to achieve their missions. We get to know their staffs and clients very well, and at the end of the day we know we’ve had a real impact—however small—on people living and working in our local community. This translates directly into the strong feeling of family that we have here at Tactile, as well as increased job satisfaction and talent retention.

That’s what we mean when we say Tactile is designed to give a damn. We work hard to create the best damn designs and the best damn websites that we possibly can, and we believe our work can make a difference in our local community. By helping to improve our community, we’re helping to make our world a better place, one damn website at a time.