Annual Report
Mangrove Web Development
Mangrove Web is a woman-owned website design and development company with a diverse, talented team distributed around the globe. We’ve been building websites since 2009 that amplify the work of change-making organizations and increase the competitive power of businesses owned by historically marginalized people. As a Certified B Corp and Public Benefit Corporation, we prioritize working with businesses that share our value of balancing people, planet, purpose, and profit.
This report shares our success in 2021 as we operate a business based on our values, and serves as our annual benefit report for the year.
This year we launched our new brand and website, hired a few new amazing team members, and dug deep into our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion work.
In 2021 we finally launched our new brand and website! We soft-launched in May with the design of our 2020 annual report. In July 2021 we launched our redesigned website. We couldn’t have made this happen without our partners, the branding geniuses at Four Fin.
Four Fin gently yet decisively led us through the creative process (that we are more accustomed to leading), and we are so proud of the results. Our new website more clearly reflects the value and integrity of our work.
If you’d like to learn more about our process and learnings, you can read our blog post about revamping our roots.
2021 presented us with multiple opportunities to use and refine our inclusive hiring practices as we added several new team members during the year.
Aykan Burçak is a front-end developer based in Turkey. Victor Martins is a self-taught front-end developer and Webflow expert from Nigeria; he is currently based near Moscow. Antoinette Williams is a project manager based in Copenhagen, Denmark.
A hiring framework that emphasizes inclusivity must be used with great intention, each time. We captured our current process and advice in this blog post. Our key advice is: expand your horizons, be transparent, and don’t rush it.
In May 2021 our leadership team completed a Dismantling White Supremacy learning cohort with other B Corps as part of the Hella Social Impact Intensive. The 6-week training emphasized the generational and multidimensional effects of white supremacy culture in the workplace and gave us a framework for how to "Notice, Name, and Dismantle" these characteristics when we see them. Within Mangrove, we identified the following cultural standards as hallmarks of white supremacy: perfectionism, power hoarding, and a sense of urgency.
You can find much more information, including a longer description of the Hella Intensive, in our Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Justice Statement.
We are especially proud that we far exceeded our goal of achieving at least 50% of revenue from values-aligned businesses. In 2021, 74.8% of revenue came from purpose-driven or woman- or minority-owned businesses.
*In past years, our team heavily prioritized working with female-owned organizations, partners and clients, partly because the B Corp certification standards require our team to assess the % of our revenue that comes from "Purpose-driven, Women or Minority-Owned Businesses, or Non-Profits". However, this categorization struck us as too broad at times, as we noticed that many of the women-owned businesses we worked with were predominantly white, from privileged social backgrounds, and not explicitly purpose-driven. While woman-owned businesses are certainly a minority in the world and important to us, we began pondering if this definition from the BIA was giving us enough specific data and accountability in aligning with what really mattered to us. We realized we need to ensure we are prioritizing working with teams and leadership that represent other minorities, including individuals that identify as queer, gender non-conforming, disabled, and BIPOC or NBPOC.
In 2022 we hope to further refine our metrics to make sure our data around values-aligned clients considers more than a binary gender lens. With this more specific measurement, we can prioritize and increase our engagement with clients and partners who are more deeply values aligned.
In year 2 of the pandemic, we plugged into our Mangrove community with even greater intention. We immersed ourselves in both light-hearted and intense team bonding activities. We tried out Summer Vacation Fridays, did group learning about website sustainability, implemented Coffee + Tequila Thursdays, and started monthly all-team DEI meetings. We started two new Slack channels for our team to stay connected: “Kudos” and “Name Notice Dismantle.”
As a regular practice, we also defy the “minimize meeting time” mantra by spending the first 30 minutes on team calls just hanging out and answering the Question of the Week.
Some of our favorites include:
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20 new sites and rebuilds for 2020, 7 retainer clients supported throughout the year
Educating activists to create a better financial system for all
We worked with trusted partners to bring the new CivicMakers brand to life in a playful and concise website. CivicMakers was founded from a desire to build community around the intersection between the civic space and technology. The team has grown from an events and community based organization to a consulting practice that offers workshops and provides thought leadership to the greater civic tech community.
We are very lucky to have found an incredible partner in Mangrove Web. They helped us translate our new brand into a delightful, engaging representation of our team and our work. We couldn't be happier, and are so excited to see where it takes us.
Educating activists to create a better financial system for all
We built an online interactive questionnaire to support user learning around the unfair foundations of the modern American economy. "Is Our Economy Fair" is a project of the Take on Wall Street campaign. TOWS was created in 2016 to address the predatory economic power of big banks and billionaires, and to build a financial system that works for everyone. Today, their organization is a coalition of over 50 groups hosted by Americans for Financial Reform.
"Bring whatever ideas, visions, or dreams you have, and see what’s possible; the Mangrove team can do a lot. Be transparent and don’t hold back. Expect them to deliver good quality — hire them."
Creating equitable, environmentally sustainable homes
We designed and developed a multilingual site in Webflow that evokes the brand's values of calm, home and healing. Supportive Housing Community Land Alliance (SHCLA) provides environmentally sustainable and affordable housing for people living with serious mental health challenges in Alameda County, CA.
SEE IT LIVE
Mangrove has never tried to be a “Jack (or Jill) of all trades.” While we have a range of services, our specialty is in building websites. Our clients are usually seeking more than website development, however, and so we maintain thriving partnerships with other businesses that specialize in complementary design and marketing services. These partners allow us to expand our capacity – and they keep us on our toes, doing our best work, every time. Instead of listing out our partners, we are simply using this space to say thank you for the joyful, insightful collaborations we have engaged in over the year. We will be elaborating more on our partners on our own website in 2022. Stay tuned.
This annual report serves an accountability function for us. Up above, we summarized our performance against the goals in our 2021 annual report. For 2022, we will track our progress against the following benchmarks.
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