CalCEF & CalSEED

The California Clean Energy Fund supports the ecosystem of entrepreneurs and investors making our clean energy transition a reality.

Barretto-Co. was selected to design and develop the next iteration of calcef.org and to help launch calseed.fund—a funding and professional development program for innovators and entrepreneurs working to bring early-stage clean energy concepts to market.

“We had fixed time and budget goals—not to mention CA state security requirements—that had to be met. None of our challenges prevented Barretto-Co. from delivering upon everything we desired for our next stage of growth and development as an organization.”

Sherri Pittman, Managing Director | CalCEF
Optimizing the Energy Transition

Scope

Website Design & Development
IA, UX & Content Strategy

Objectives

CalCEF will be an online platform connecting entrepreneurs to investors and investors to deal flow. We leverage real world connections, best practice tools and education resources, and the ability to derive finance solutions to make everyone in the sector more successful and spread CA and US learnings globally.

Solution

The CalSEED requirements stated adhering to CA state technology guidelines and standards—our technical director’s response “No problem, we got this.”

A requirement for the CalSEED website was that it be built in a .NET technology environment such as Umbraco. Umbraco is an open source CMS product which Barretto-Co. had good experience with. Umbraco was the perfect fit since it could be stood up quickly, but can also support robust functionality as needed. We recommended extending the Umbraco implementation to support the CalCEF site as well with one CMS managing both sites.

A common challenge we face is working with a limited budget for brand imagery. We help clients identify key concepts and use best practice exercises to gather consensus on the photographic “tone” in order to curate an “own-able” brand visual language.