First, a bit of background. Nike has always been a leader in the social change space; Nike employees are some of the most philanthropic and generous people that anyone is likely to meet. But even for them, finding those opportunities to give back to one’s community has always proved to be a bit of a challenge. Nike works with dozens of organizations that provide opportunities to volunteer or donate, but visiting all of their separate websites and using all of their individual search methods just to find some way to volunteer tends to be quite a chore.

The WE Portal breaks down that barrier to entry by presenting giving opportunities from multiple sources in one easily searched and sorted place. Thanks to the WE Portal, Nike employees are now able to find opportunities to volunteer, to make matched donations, and to find advocacy around the topics that they are most passionate about, regardless of the source of that opportunity – even other Nike employees can submit them.

In launching the WE Portal we successfully executed a project that involved every bit of our skillsets – from initial concept to interface design to development to branding to print materials. The WE Portal is currently Nike’s primary internal platform for encouraging employees to get involved with their communities—a platform which we continue to work on and improve daily—and the employees who use it to make the world a better place remain a constant source of inspiration.

By the way, I would be remiss if i didn’t mention how much of the design work on this project was also done by my friend and WTM colleague Todd Quackenbush. He was instrumental especially in the early stages of visual design and the WE Portal wouldn’t look nearly as good as it does now without his involvement.

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After sitting down and tossing out some ideas, we arrived at a pretty radical (but undeniably fun) idea – create an entire Nike-branded twitter platform, with loads of custom functionality for sneaker shops.

That platform eventually became The Hookup, A fully-featured Twitter client that is not only branded to feel premium and polished in the Nike tradition, but also contains a ton of additional functionality aimed at building relationships between sneakerheads and their local sneaker shops.

Once a user is verified as a retailer, they’re given access to a bevy of tools designed to make it easy and fun to create twitter-based missions. In essense, missions are simple mini-contests with rewards. Retailers can easily create their own, or they can choose from a few premade default missions. They can vary in complexity from “first person in the door today gets a t-shirt!” to more complex, labyrinthine objectives.

In addition to creating missions, retailers are given special status on the site so that users are the first to know if their favorite local shop tweets about a new shipment of quickstrike or one-time-only kicks. The Hookup even allows for finding shops near you, so if you don’t have much sneaker game yet, it can help you get there.

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