Echo & Co. Blog

Tactics for Making the Most of Photos on Your Website

Maxwell Bennett — Wed, 15 Feb 2017 19:42:33 +0000

Photos are a critical component to the success of your website. They help convey your website’s message and can “really tie the room together” by linking visual elements to your content. But there’s a lot more that goes into it than just browsing photos and finding one you like.

Here are some of the tactics that organizations, regardless of size, can use to make sure their photo use is the most effective:

Select The Right Photo

When it comes to selecting a good photo candidate, you’ll want to keep in mind the layout of your website. Most of the visual elements on a website are going to have a horizontal orientation so you’ll want photos that compliment that.

For example, if you’re looking at adding an image with people to a page hero, you’ll want to avoid using a headshot. Those types of photos are typically using a portrait orientation. Instead, look for a photo with a more horizontal bias. Often times these can be a photo of two people talking, or an “action shot” that allows you to include some of the background.

Pay Special Attention to the Size

Choosing images for your new website can be a difficult task. Not only do you need to find the right photo for the page, you’ll need to make sure that it will display in an attractive manner and that it’s high enough resolution.

Almost half of all website visitors are using screens with resolutions of 1920x1080 or higher and this number is increasing each year so ideally your photo will be at least that large, before editing. It’s also worth mentioning Apple’s Retina displays that are standard on most of their devices now. These high density displays feature four times the number of pixels as non-Retina displays. So for example, a 500x250 (125,000 pixels) banner would need to be at a resolution of 1000x500 (500,000) to have the same clarity on a Retina display.

Double Check on Mobile

Speaking of Retina displays, be sure to review the photo’s use on mobile and tablet layouts. Here at Echo we take a “graceful degradation” approach to design that progressively removes certain non-critical elements from the desktop experience as the screen size shrinks. Ensure that if a photo contains information, that the information displays at all times and on all devices.

Use a Text Overlay the Right Way

When we design an element, like a photo or illustration, that uses text we intentionally build in contrast so that the important copy doesn’t get lost. But it’s impossible to design for every photo or scenario, and in the event your site overlays text on an image (like a caption style) you’ll need to consider a few more things when deciding the copy or photo (or both) you’re using:

Avoid photos with lots of text.
Find photos with high contrast relative to the text. So if the text is white, select photos with darker background and vice versa.
Applying a soft blur, such as Photoshop’s “Gaussian Blur,” can help increase contrast by removing some of the photo’s details.

Finally, Get Some Photo-editing Software

Photo-editing software is really one of the most versatile tools you can have in your toolbox. Default programs, like Microsoft Paint, have come a long way in recent years but if you’re dealing with photos regularly then you’ll still need to find something more powerful. There are many options, but there are two leading image and photo editing applications that stand out under heavy use: Adobe Photoshop and GIMP.

Photoshop is probably the most popular and most powerful photo-editing software on the market. Adobe has gone from a one-time fee to an monthly subscription model, called Creative Cloud, beginning at $10/mo. That subscription gets you the latest version of Photoshop CC as well as Lightroom CC, which is used primarily used in editing photographs. Its widespread adoption means that there’s a wealth of tutorials to assist with the somewhat steep learning curve.

If you’re looking for a free or opensource alternative to Photoshop, then you should check out GIMP. It features many of the same features and functionality. However, it does have a steeper learning curve compared to Photoshop. The community should also be able to provide plenty of training resources.

Tags:

content strategy

photos

design

15 Books That Helped Shaped My Approach to UX

Graziella Jackson — Fri, 23 Dec 2016 16:48:56 +0000

I was enjoying a quiet moment alone on the back patio during Thanksgiving break with my family and came across a WIRED article that referenced the book Bowling Alone in relation to the election results. I was immediately transported to my first year of grad school in 2005, when I was assigned to read the book for a class. Robert Putnam was somewhat of an obscure academic at the time, but in thinking about his work in relation to our contemporary moment, I realized that time has revealed him to be quite sage (as it does many things).

It’s odd to attribute such great influence to a single book, but Bowling Alone had a huge impact on my perspective and professional focus. And as I sat on the patio and reflected on that, I found other books starting to come to mind that were equally influential — surprisingly not design books (though, there are so many to reference that maybe I’ll follow up with another post) but books deeply concerned with the study of technology, society, and human behavior.

As we round out the year, reflecting on the events of the past few months and looking ahead to 2017, I wanted to share this reading list of non-UX books that have influenced my perspective on and approach to all things UX.

Perhaps you’ll find something here that calls out to you for a read over the holiday break:

Rise of the Creative Class by Richard Florida (nonfiction)

This book was pretty popular when it was first published in 2002. Florida, an economist who before publishing this book focused largely on regional economic development, used research to investigate the growing influence of creativity in people’s work and how seeking creativity has shifted the composition of our communities, the way our organizations operate, and how we relate to each other. He suggested then that about 30% of the American workforce saw themselves of members of the "Creative Class," with unique lifestyle factors that value the cultivation of creativity in all facets of life. As a leader of a company focused on creative design and technology, I still find the lessons in *Rise of the Creative Class *useful.

Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace by Lawrence Lessig (nonfiction)

Another book I read in the early 2000s, Lessig’s Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace argues that computer code is as influential a force in regulating our conduct online as legal code is in governing our behavior in the real world. Lessig goes into great deal discussing the laws, the norms, the market, and the architecture of online behavior. This book takes a deep dive into the limitations of our current copyright laws in governing online production, sharing, and replication (copying). Long before Lessig decided to run for President on a platform of campaign finance reform, he was a foremost scholar on modern copyright law and parlayed that into founding the Creative Commons and later writing *Remi*x, which inspired even Stephen Colbert to give remixing a try.

Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan (philosophy)

For a man who once wrote in his diary that he would never become an academic, Marshall McLuhan became one of the world’s foremost scholars and teachers on media analysis. Understanding Media was the result of McLuhan deciding to investigate why, in his early years of university teaching, he felt so distanced from his students experientially, though they were only a generation apart. This book explores McLuhan’s concepts of how media affects the shaping of our perceptions and, therefore, our identities. He was among the first scholars to view media as a technological extension of the body, which is a concept that has gained so much more relevance and attention today. McLuhan looked at our use of our physical senses and the consequences of unconsciously applying them to interactions with media. This book was written in 1964, and McLuhan passed in 1994, but not before leaving a solid legacy in media analysis that still influences me (and many others) today.

Rhythm Science by Paul D Miller (aka DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid) (nonfiction)

I’m not really sure how to describe Rhythm Science, other than to say Paul Miller is a conceptual artist who wrote an odd, wonderful book on the way we see and interpret patterns — cultural ideas and objects — and use technology to manipulate them into new creations. Miller explores how technology is a bridge between creators and their outside world, acting as a tool for finding disparate elements and mixing them into new materials — much like the turntable allows DJs to do with music. When I first read this, about a decade ago, the book came with a pretty cool CD (I know, what!?) of music DJ Spooky created as a companion to the book. And the book itself was created as a design piece, chosen as one of the "50 best books designed" by AIGA. I would definitely put it on my “essential reads for designers” list, and especially “essential reads for designers who also happen to love music.”

America by Jean Baudrillard (philosophy)

Postmodern French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, who died in 2007, was known for his love of America. He* really* loved America. No, he really, really loved America — so much so that he wrote a book about his travels here (I’ll get to that in a minute). If you don’t know Baudrillard, he is one of the most influential postmodernist philosophers of our time. Among his most widely known works, his essay "Simulacra and Simulations" has somewhat of a cult following because it inspired the Wachowski brothers to write The Matrix films. America is one of my favorites books — if you want to journey into the interior of a great philosopher’s mind (one of the most picturesque interior mindscapes out there), while also journeying across our great country through his experiences, then this is the book for you. Be forewarned that you will turn the last page and being disturbed by how constructed our national and cultural identities really are by the material substance of the world around us and how we dutifully enact our own material existence like cogs in the proverbial wheel. This book is heavy, but not long. It is really engrossing and luxurious introspection, which is one of my favorite things. Good pictures, too.

Quiet by Susan Cain (nonfiction)

Here’s the thing about Quiet. This book is about introversion (which I appreciate as an introvert, though I am not a huge fan of oversimplification or introvert memes), but what I liked most about it is an appeal to more listening and independent work. Our near-obsession with "creativity" (except you, Richard Florida!) and “innovation” has risen to almost cult status — and what I have seen, as an unfortunate result, is the turning of this surface kind of creativity into paralyzing group-based processes that actually serve to stifle great ideas and work. How many “creative brainstorm” sessions have we sat in that are totally unstructured and unproductive? Or meetings where we get stuck swirling on ideas with no clear path forward? Many, many, many. Too many. Independent thought, investigation, conceptualization, and problem-solving is perhaps the most important input to creativity — doing the work of bringing fully formed ideas to the table before coming to the table. And that is not just the domain of introverts. So while this book is a lot about interpersonal dynamics, I think there’s a lot to be inspired by in rethinking how we go about structuring our creative relationships and work. (Okay, maybe this one was a stretch, but there you have it).

Utopia by Sir Thomas More (philosophy)

At the time Thomas More wrote Utopia, Europe was experiencing a Renaissance. Fewer than 100 years prior, Gutenberg had invented the printing press and created new avenues for knowledge transfer and the application of that knowledge to invention. The press disrupted education. It changed the fields of law and medicine. It challenged dominant religion and paved the way for humanism. It was the wellspring of a new intellectual life.

When I first read Utopia, it struck me how closely More’s writings and attempt to construct an ideal society was tied with the radical disruption, and shifts in daily life, that were being brought about by the invention of a new information-driven technology. I read it at a time when the internet was just coming into maturity — more than 500 years after the printing press was invented. Even so, I couldn’t help draw parallels between the radical disruption that happened in pre-Renaissance Europe leading to that intellectual and artistic flourishing and the similar disruption which we were experiencing in the first 10 years of the internet’s public life. It felt exciting — and I wanted to play a role in shaping the future of our digital experience.

Before I was a user experience designer, I was a newspaper editor who was caught in the digital tidal wave that all but dismantled local newsrooms across the country. I remember hearing one of my editors say, after a heated debate about the internet and how it would affect our careers: The printing press created journalism and the internet will destroy it. I cite Utopia as an influential work not only because of its content — in many ways, designing a society is the ultimate user experience challenge — but for what that book represented about the historical moment within which it was written. I always borrow from that time period when doing deep thinking about the future of our digital lives as we increase in our connection with and through the web.

I already have spent too much time lingering on Utopia *(the longest time on the shortest book), but I would cheat and say reading *Utopia is best coupled with learning more about the human experience following the invention of the printing press. For that, I’d recommend Jaques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life (if you can get through all 912 pages... or even lift the thing... it weighs an impressive two pounds).

Pattern Recognition by William Gibson (fiction)

I couldn’t create an influential book list without throwing in at least one fiction piece. And, to be honest, for shaping my UX thinking it was a three-way tie between Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, which I think of as brilliantly articulated user experience design through narrative, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, whose virtual world is cited as being the inspiration for Second Life (kudos to you if you remember what it is and that it once was more popular than Facebook), and William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition. Since Pattern Recognition was the first of the three that I read and the one that led me to explore the genre of near future techno-dystopia (yes, I may have made that term up), it takes the win.

Published in 2003 and set in the post 9-11 present, the story takes a hard look at consumer culture and esoteric hipster life, particularly related to niche internet communities. I remember being wholly engrossed by this story, in which a "cool hunter" named Cayce Pollard (who has a physical aversion to consumer brand names and iconography) travels from London to Tokyo to Moscow in search of the anonymous creator of an online video collection called "the footage." There’s more going on in the story and I can’t do a description justice, so you can check it out the synopsis on Amazon or elsewhere on the web. But, I’ll close by saying I loved how much this novel explored our radically shifting digital world through its bizarre twists and turns — and painted a world where culture creators rule everything.

Marginalia by H. J. Jackson (nonfiction)

This book is amazing. It tells the story of how margins appeared in books. The short story is:

Paper used to be expensive. Really expensive. So books were printed all the way to the edges.
Books also were really, really expensive. So most often they were shared among and borrowed from friends, not purchased new.
As friends shared books, they also wanted to share ideas and notes as they passed them along. So they began squeezing notes into the space between printed lines.
Sharing of writing in books also allowed the spreading of unconventional and subversive ideas, without public exposure.
As readers kept writing in books, publishers decided to start allowing for space around the edges of printed pages — conservatively at first, then more so as paper cheapened and printing became less costly.
The more people wrote, the bigger margins got.
And that, my friends, is why we have margins in books and still write in them today.

I can’t express how well this book explores a modern technology of the time (the book) shifting its composition to accommodate the needs of its users. That is UX in its most primitive form, and I love it.

Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam (nonfiction)

What I took away from this book by Robert Putnam was strong evidence for the fact that we are becoming increasingly disconnected from relationships, communities, and civic engagement — not directly tied to, but greatly influenced by the dawn of internet technology. I read the book in 2005, one year after Facebook launched on Harvard’s campus. I was a Georgetown grad student with a .edu account and my younger sister, who was an undergrad at Virginia Tech, sent me an invitation to sign up for an account on the fledgling social platform. During my studies and for years after, social technologies seemed to be lauded as a panacea for the growing disengagement that set off Putnam’s alarm bells. I think we’re still in progress in gaining an understanding of the disrupting influence of social technology in our lives. Though we don’t have the answers — and the rapid pace of change has made some of this book seem antiquated — I think it is still a very relevant read. I revisit this book often and use it as a guiding compass for thinking about how experience-driven technologies can be used to re-engage us with community and civic life.

Battle for God by Karen Armstrong (nonfiction)

I’ll be honest. This book disturbed me. Given the outcome of our election, it disturbs me even more — I have talked more about this book in the last two months than I have since I read it a decade ago.

Battle for God asks a very important question: If we are more secular than ever and have greater access to information and technology than ever, then why has fundamentalism become an overwhelming force in every major world religion? I think you can read this book and apply the question of fundamentalism beyond the frame of religion — extremism in all forms of thinking has grown and been exacerbated by social technologies. I always return to the question about how the expansiveness of our information economy may be contributing to a narrowing of our identities and beliefs. While this book is not directly related to user experience, it brings up a lot of ethical questions for those of us who are the chief craftspeople of the information age.

How We Learn by Benedict Carey (nonfiction)

User experience is about designing interaction and information structures in a way that increases user understanding and system learnability over time. A good user experience is simple to learn and adopt. User experience design is about enabling users to recall repeatable patterns of interactions so that usage becomes familiar and habitual.

At its core, UX is a discipline grounded in behavioral and decision science as much as it is in creative design. So, naturally, a deep dive into the science of our memory, cognition, and how we construct meaning is like an operating manual for designing great human experiences. For me, How We Learn (among other books concerned with human learning, memory, and decision-making) also has become somewhat of a manifesto. In my many years doing UX, I have seen the term "user experience design" co-opted as a newer, more trendy name for graphic design — which only scrapes the surface of the discipline. True UX has deep foundations in understanding human thought and behavior, which this book capably explores.

The Naked Crowd by Jeffrey Rosen (nonfiction)

This book takes a deep look at our individual privacy rights in the age of deep surveillance (or, data collection, if I am to use a softer term). Rosen is very concerned about the ability of power entities — like national governments — to agitate social anxiety to the point that we willingly surrender our privacy rights. The question of data collection and online behavior tracking is central to user experience design and an issue that all ethically minded digital professionals should keep top of mind. Particularly because we are operating in uncharted territory and largely unregulated space, I find consulting experts in individual privacy is helpful in making sure that, as an experience designer, I never fail to consider privacy ethics in my work.

Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud (nonfiction)

If you are in the user experience profession, you have to read this book. If you are in any profession, you have to read this book. Scott McCloud wrote a 215-page comic book on the theory and development of comics as a narrative form, and the foundations of visual communication. It goes into the effects of iconography on perception, how readers participate in bringing closure to content "between the frames", how words and pictures interact, the dynamics of time, the psychology of design treatments like line and color, and more. In fact, this book is so relevant to UX work that I am regretting putting it at the bottom of the list (but please don’t read into that — despite the fact that Scott McCloud would say you definitely will). Don’t think, just read.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery (fiction)

User experience relies on taking the time to do deep, empathetic exploration of our individual users and their needs. To get it right, you have to develop stories and characters. You have to grow to love them and want to see them succeed. It has deep roots in narrative storytelling, so I think fiction — especially heavily character-driven fiction — can be useful to any UX designer in learning to better flex their empathy and storytelling muscles. I’m not making this up, either — research has shown that reading fiction improves empathy (this might be my confirmation bias speaking, but I really do think they’re onto something).

In order to train my empathy muscle, I read fiction whenever I can. I write a little bit of it, too. And I have never read a book that does empathy quite as well as Muriel Barbery’s Elegance of the Hedgehog. So that’s why it’s on this list. And you should read it — because when you do, you’ll know why it made the list.

… and that’s the end of the books-not-about-UX-that-influenced-my-UX-thinking list. Naughty or nice — I think they’re all great gifts. Have a lovely holiday and a very happy New Year. See you in 2017!

Tags:

user experience

books

Preparing Your Content for a Redesign

Stephanie Todd — Thu, 15 Dec 2016 16:40:30 +0000

You’re about to take on a website redesign, and as you look over all blog posts, resources, white papers and other content that has accumulated on your old site over the years you probably ask, “Where do I start?” Many of our client partners just don’t know enough about their website content and knowing what content you have will help you make informed decisions during the website redesign.

We recommend you start looking at your existing site and analyzing the content’s quality, structure, and scope. Having a clear understanding of how much content you and how effective it is will help you scope and budget the content effort of your website redesign.

Content production is very time-consuming so the more up-front planning you do around your content will save you time and resources in the long run. Here we walk you step-by-step through what you need to do before you undergo a website redesign, so you’re better prepared to say what content needs to go, what needs to stay, and what needs improving.

Step 1: Inventory the Content

Preparing your content for a website redesign is just like planning for a big move into a new house. You don’t want to waste time packing and unpacking the stuff you know you no longer need. The same is true for your website’s content. But in order to start identifying the content you can let go, you need to understand exactly what content you have. To know this, you’ll need to do a content inventory.

There are two ways you can do a content inventory — manually clicking on every single page of your website or using a tool that will “crawl” your website automatically. It depends on how much content you have on your site and how much time and resources you have available to do this work.

A manual crawl might sound time consuming, but getting “eyes on” all of your content early in the process is valuable. To start a manual content inventory, use a spreadsheet and record the page title and URL for each web page and content component on your site.

By using an automated inventory tool, you can identify all of your content items such as HTML pages, documents, PDF, images and other files. There are several inventory tools from which you can choose, and some are even free up to a certain amount of pages like tools from Content Insight and Screaming Frog.

Step 2: Clean Up Your Content

Most websites have too much content and having too much content on your website affects the usability of the site and often makes it too difficult to maintain. Knowing exactly how much content you have on your website is just the first step in identifying content for removal.

To your spreadsheet, add another column called “Keep, Update, Delete,” and do a first pass on each page on your site in order to recommend what needs to stay and what needs to go. Reviewing each piece of content can be a huge effort, but content is literally the most important element of your site. This makes planning ahead and starting this effort early a necessity.

Step 3: Assess Your Content

After you’ve completed your content inventory of your current website, now is the time to look that content over to see if what you have is actually any good. It’s difficult to make recommendations for improving a website if you don’t understand the quality, scope, and structure of the content you currently have.

You’ll need to do a content assessment, which we usually record in the same spreadsheet, and include factors such your content’s structure, accuracy, quality, usefulness, and effectiveness.

Add these factors as columns to your existing content inventory and create a rating scale of either 1 to 5 (with 1 being bad and 5 being outstanding) or do rankings of high, medium, or low. You can choose whatever works best for you. I’d recommend adding a "Notes" column as well, to capture your thoughts and comments along the way, such as:

Turn this PDF into an HTML page
To minimize duplicate information, combine these two pages.
Ask Toral in the Finance Department to update the numbers here.

Your findings from your content inventory, cleanup, and assessment will provide you with insights for improving the website before you begin your website redesign, and will give you a sense of how to budget your time and resources for improving the content. Keep in mind that creating content for a single page can take upwards of 8 to 10 hours depending on the complexity and your policy for content review, and that revising an existing page usually takes about half that time.

If you follow these steps above, you will know how much content you have on your site and whether or not that content is working to meet your redesign goals.

Tags:

What Success Looks Like in 2017

Graziella Jackson — Wed, 23 Nov 2016 14:26:19 +0000

If you’re still reeling from the results of this election, you’re not alone. Most of our friends and partners — and millions of others — are feeling the same. Many of us have felt shocked at the outcome and overwhelmed by the deafening post-election clatter. In this week of Thanksgiving, I expect we may collectively experience more reflection (and digestion) than gratitude as we brace for the year ahead.

How do we brace ourselves for what’s to come?

2017 may prove as erratic and confounding as 2016 — who knows? Without getting too deep into the state of the news media, it’s safe to say journalists and analysts and scholars are hot on the case, so I’m hopeful we’ll see more credible and high-quality media output on that question in the forthcoming weeks (and hopefully be more measured in our consumption of it).

Despite the heavy weight of uncertainty, one thing is clear: Next year is sure to bring positive and negative transformation to social sector organizations. This change will force us to develop laser focus on immediate risks that need our defense and, more offensively, what is most important to achieve in the years ahead.

Among the forthcoming policy setbacks, programmatic shifts, and surges in support and revenue that we can expect, digital changemakers will play an important role helping their organizations be more nimble and effective in response. Constituents will engage in new ways online and — like Clay Shirky outlined in his book "Here Comes Everybody" — that will give people the power to organize at will, which will challenge institutions to go beyond the normal state of affairs and uncover new ways to channel participation into durable attention and engagement. Our founder Nicco Mele, now director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, also wrote about this cultural phenomenon in his book, “End of Big” (if you’d like a copy, you can find it on Amazon or another online retailer of your choice).

Digital media also will continue to play a powerful role in influencing public perception and behavior. Owners of digital content will have to satisfy increasing demands from constituents who want clear answers and pathways to action on critical issues, especially where they may lack direct knowledge or experience about those issues. It is going to be a frenetic year for those faced with the challenge of balancing urgent, tactical responses to threats with long-term strategies that are designed to turn new or intermittent supporters into dedicated brand loyalists.

Our job will be to make engagement less volatile and design initiatives to be sustainable. It’s important to focus on this, so that when the fervor of this election fall-out subsides, the relationships you built with your users will have strong ties that last well into the future.

How should you go about planning for 2017?

There will be a lot to cover in 2017, but our focus is on setting you up to channel next year’s rapid response and short-term leads into longer-term gains. To get you started, we’ve put together this priority list that you can use to create a plan that aligns your activities, stakeholders, processes, and resources:

1. Draft a vision and roadmap.

There is always a risk when our attention turns to defense that our tactical needs crowd out our longer-term focus. This tension is especially present when critical programs and policies are at risk and we must use our full attention and resources to respond.

It is important to remain highly responsive to needs that emerge daily. It is equally important to remember that you are building constituencies that have high potential to remain loyal supporters in the long term if you manage your engagement with them strategically and well. You really only have one shot at making a good impression, so it’s important to get it right.

There are two traps I often see social impact organizations and their digital teams fall into in times of great mission urgency and when resource availability shifts:

Scaling digital too rapidly or aggressively.
In times like these, many organizations see upticks in supporter engagement. This often brings new revenue growth that can be channeled into new digital initiatives, which can be very exciting for digital changemakers. There is a dark side to this excitement, however — it often leads to making decisions that are short-term in nature and to spending on initiatives that cannot be sustained into the future (when, in years ahead, revenue slows). This leads to an increase in depreciation and waste over time resulting from resources being applied to launching products without any plan for maintenance or growth.

A roadmap can help you prevent this by making smarter, more strategic decisions to govern your work, thus avoiding falling into the well-known trap of "haste makes waste."

Losing sight of users.
When organizations are in defense mode, they’re focusing most of their attention and efforts on fighting immediate threats — preventing policy setbacks, taking legal action, organizing for change, developing new research and analysis — and less on longer-term mission outcomes. Quite often, the end-user is lost in this work.

It is important to not lose sight that you are in service to your constituents no matter what your organization is experiencing programmatically and that you need to look beyond their role as just inputs to your advocacy and fundraising goals and see them as co-creators of the work that you are doing.

You don’t want to turn your relationship with your constituents into one that is extractive and feels draining to them — causing fatigue and, eventually, abandonment. A vision and roadmap will force you to protect your audiences. It will help you define core personas and set user experience rules that will keep you applying your supporter base in the right way — one that is empathetic and designed to meet their needs.

A good vision and roadmap for your digital work will allow you to respond to urgent threats while bolstering your theory of change and preserving a value-based relationship with your constituents. It will help you to identify digital priorities that intersect with those demands and create prototypes that you can release and test in the short-term, then mature and sustain in the long-term. Ultimately, this will help you focus on sustainability in decision-making, so you can make more informed decisions about how to apply your resources to what matters most.

2. Create a cross-channel donor experience.

One thing that research has shown is that it is difficult to fully know whether your donors’ motivations are purely altruistic, or based on some perception of reciprocity or gain — especially when gifts are made in times of crisis.

There is research to support that self-interest often plays as much a role in giving as generosity does, especially among new and infrequent donors. Being aware of the two modes of giving and their interplay is important in transforming occasional donors — particularly those first-time donors who come in heightened times of crisis — from giving purely for self-interest (I gave to make myself feel better) to giving as an essential part of the mission (I gave because the mission is critical).

In other words, no two donations are alike. To turn happenstance donors who have weaker ties to your mission into committed donors who understand your work and are strongly engaged with helping you succeed in the long term, you need to create a donor experience that is meaningful and immersive. This means using your content and user experience efforts to develop continuous, interrelated interactions across all channels and touchpoints that stem from your users’ unique interests and needs.

This is a challenge for most organizations — and rarely achieved. Different donor segments have very different behaviors that require unique and specific transactional use cases. Fundraising cycles are used to short-term timeframes for cultivation and conversation and therefore also have independent goals. Donors are often segmented into their demographics (who they are) for reporting purposes, ignoring their more qualitative psychographic traits that motivate how they want to engage with you (personality and lifestyle factors).

When you handle donors purely transactionally, you lose focus on how you are going to engage with a single donor across multiple campaigns and channels over time.

If this sounds at all familiar to you, then I am sure you’ve asked these questions a few times:

How do we know whether we’re providing good service to direct mail donors who prefer to go online to give?
How to we grow our online donor base and turn them into repeat, sustaining donors?
How do each of our digital channels function together to attract and cultivate new donors?
How do we use our digital channels to cultivate existing donors in a way that increases their giving and support over time?

The answer is simple, though implementation is not and may require revising your processes. You need to develop a cross-channel user experience strategy that considers your core user personas, their engagement with you across touchpoints, and what central through-line is appropriate to carry them from interaction to interaction while strengthening their relationship with you over time.

Some examples of cross-channel engagement:

If a direct mail donor receives a packet and, preferring to give online, bypasses any custom URL going instead to your main website to give, the creative (copy, artwork) from that packet should be very exposed wherever they land.
If your donors gave to a single campaign, then they should receive regular updates on the progress of that campaign. If you communicate with the donor about something different (related or unrelated advocacy campaign, for example), that communication also should include a description of how it relates back to the original campaign they engaged with.
If the website works as a channel for acquisition to attract new users and convert them to email subscribers, then your email and social media strategies need to be designed to turn those new subscribers into first-time donors, then repeat donors, through highly predictive and tailored interactions sustained over time.

All of these are fundamental to a cross-channel donor experience. Heading into 2017, you want to be positioned to work across communication, marketing, advocacy, programs, and fundraising to define a cross-channel user experience that improves your chances at successfully capturing new supporters and uses immersion to turn them into long-term donors and brand advocates.

3. Make user research a priority.

When we’re busy producing products and campaigns, we’re not always leaving space to listen to our users and understand who they are. We tend to see our end-users as the targets of our outputs, without asking for their advice on how we can better use our channels to serve and engage them. It’s odd that research is so often overlooked, because talking with users is the very best way to get a precise understanding of what they need and want. It replaces guesswork with a plan. It creates a culture of respect for the user.

Ultimately, your digital channels are responsible for attracting users, capturing their attention, and converting them so they can be cultivated over time. It is rare, without a significant trigger event (like a natural disaster or political crisis), that you’ll get an uninitiated visitor to your site who has no prior relationship with you to make a donation. To convert a casual visitor into a donor takes time and requires defining a specific user journey anchored to research-based user personas. And for those users who come to you based on trigger events, it can be difficult to keep them around.

Your first objective with your website, email, and social channels is to habituate your users to them — to get users used to coming to you when they have needs. In response, you have to anticipate your users’ needs and deliver a highly valuable experience each time they engage with you, so they feel rewarded in their choice to engage. You’re not going to know what these preferences are without spending time conducting research.

There are four primary types of user research that we consider critical to the lifecycle of a digital products, drawn from the Practical Handbook of Usability Testing:

Exploratory or Formative Study
An exploratory study is conducted when a product or campaign is in the initial stages of conception and is used to define early models. This can be done through focus groups, contextual interviews, and surveying.

Assessment Testing
Assessment testing is the most typical type of usability testing conducted and is usually tested when a high-level prototype or design of the product or campaign has been established. This test typically takes place in the middle of an active or ongoing design cycle.

Validation Testing
Validation testing is usually conducted late in the development cycle and is intended to measure the usability of a product or campaign against standards of performance prior to the release. It helps you to test the ability of the product in helping users to perform their desired tasks.

Comparison Testing
Comparison testing, also known as A/B testing, is not associated with a specific point in the in product or campaign development but is used at different phases to test concepts, elements, or how approaches stack up against other approaches.

In 2017 and beyond, we recommend adding to your regular metrics reporting a plan to conduct user research at least quarterly, which will give you qualitative and quantitative insights to help shape your user experience and content strategy approaches. When conducting research, you want to consider:

Your user’s relationship with your industry or sector,
Your user’s relationship with your organization within that context, and
Your user’s relationship with your channels.

This will help you go beyond demographics to define how your constituents want to engage with you over time.

4. Favor activation over innovation.

In the past few years, we’ve seen and encouraged a movement away from big spending for one-off digital initiatives, like website redesigns, toward a greater investment in ongoing product planning and development, process design, and performance management. Time and again we see digital teams exhaust their resources on large, "innovation"-driven projects without defining how the important work of implementation and maintenance will be structured to sustain those projects in the future. This almost always leads to cycles of depreciation and waste.

Oftentimes, innovation projects are anchored to promises of transformation that fail to look beyond the moment of launch. Innovation certainly can unlock great ideas and creativity. But when given too much emphasis, it ignores the tough and equally critical work of maintenance and iterative evolution — where you can apply insights and testing to prioritize decisions and make the greatest gains.

As you frame your work in 2017, we encourage you to look beyond the lure of innovation toward an approach based on activation. Framing your work as "activation" means that you create a practice of motion across all phases — always focusing on:

Generating and prioritizing highly qualified and refined ideas,
Moving them quickly into prototypes, then
Testing and refining them so you can mature the best approaches and replicate them across your organization.

With this approach, you’ll ensure that you’re thinking through resource, process, and governance models needed to make sure your efforts succeed.

Many of the clients we have worked with have successfully transitioned to activation practices and have seen improved ability to:

Define strategic priorities and plans,
Make cases with boards and funders for increased support, and
Adopt a culture of seeking, testing, and learning that leads to smart, continuous improvement.

This work is best done iteratively — starting small and conserving resources until you are able to test concepts and gain insights that help you decide how to invest your resources. It also requires an ongoing commitment of funds to your product maintenance and evolution.

One question I am often asked is how much to invest in your website’s maintenance apart from other digital spending. In our work, we’ve seen the most successful results among teams that reserve roughy 30% of the cost of any redesign or major platform upgrade as an annual website budget. This means that minimally you should be planning $25,000-$75,000 per year on basic website management and maintenance (more if your site has extensive interactivity or transactional functionality).

In addition to this maintenance budget, we recommend planning a separate budget for site research and enhancements, set at 18-20% of your maintenance budget each year. Underfunding growth and maintenance can lead to depreciation, waste, and loss of support for future resources.

As you head into 2017, you can use this model to make sure your organization is conserving the right amount of budget for your website maintenance and growth, separate from any email, social media, search, or other digital spending.

While I have focused heavily on the concept of activation and evolution over innovation, there are some cases where a major redesign or overhaul is necessary. Most software applications go through major version releases every few years and have ongoing updates between those releases — content management systems (CMS) are the same.

You should be making improvements to your digital platforms quarterly and looking ahead to major shifts in technology to help drive your planning and funding for major upgrades. In late 2015, for example, Drupal announced that Drupal 6 was moving into end-of-life and Drupal 8 was being released. A major CMS upgrade is a reason to overhaul your website, and can be used as a way to determine timeframes for requesting major releases.

Note: If you’re on Drupal 6, we recommend moving to Drupal 8 in the next year. If you’re on Drupal 7 and your site is responsive and effective, we recommend looking ahead to 2018-2020 for your next major redesign and CMS upgrade.

Similarly, rolling out a major feature set to serve a particular user group — customer portals, data visualizations, peer networks, learning platforms, etc., — require their own resources and funding separate from your core website.

5. Fine-tune your digital team.

Once your roadmap, cross-channel strategy, user research, and activation plans are in place, you need to establish the right team to maintain them.

In 2017, as you begin to roll out the above practices, you will want to make sure your digital team is functionally staffed to cover product management, data management and analysis, community management, content and editorial strategy and production (see my latest blog on how to approach content strategy), and creative design and development. This may be a team of internal staff or a blended team of internal staff and external consultants.

When advising clients on what skills to bring in-house and how to structure digital teams, we encourage them to first identify what functional roles would require deep insight and expertise into organizational operations and governance and prioritize those as the most critical internal roles. Functions like data analysis, product management, community management, for example, are often suited to internal roles.

After those internal roles are defined and covered, we recommend augmenting that team with internal or external expertise in areas such as user experience, content strategy and production, interaction design, and technical development. In cases where expertise is better gained from working across many diverse contexts and remaining abreast of industry standards, practices, and innovations, then it often is beneficial to partner with external subject matter experts, in order for them to bring broad external exposure and expertise to solutions to bear on finding solutions to internal problems. This also is the case for practices like user research which require specific academic and professional training.

Even if you have a well-established team, we recommend drafting a staffing model and plan with clearly defined functional roles that you revisit annually and also review with your full team (staff and contractors) quarterly, in order to discuss how you are performing against the model, make any improvements necessary, and anticipate any shifts you may need to make in the longer term.

I covered quite a bit of ground for your 2017 planning. If this seems daunting, we recommend picking one priority to start with, so you get started without feeling overwhelmed. Eventually, you want to be managing against all these priorities each year.

And while these priorities are not exhaustive (they don’t include extensive fundraising or advocacy planning, for example), they should be the foundation of your digital strategy and practices in 2017. In addition to the above, all your digital work should be centered on these guiding principles:

That your brand and content strategy should be disciplined and goal-oriented,
That your digital user experience should be cross-channel, insights-driven, and highly motivating,
That your product development should be high-quality, scalable, and extensible,
And that your practices should be repeatable, flexible, and mature.

At Echo, we’re obviously big evangelists for all of the above and love to support organizations in adopting and succeeding with these practices. If you’d like to pick our brains or learn more about bringing this work to your organization, drop us a line.

And, thank you for all the work you are doing and and the very intense and important work you will do during these critical times. We are so grateful for you!

Tags:

planning

2017

How We Approach Content—and What You Can Do to Grab More Attention

Graziella Jackson — Mon, 07 Nov 2016 16:57:18 +0000

It's highly likely I've already lost you. A widely cited 2015 study that is still circulating the web caused a stir last year by claiming humans now have shorter attention spans than goldfish, dropping from an average of 12 to eight seconds between 2000 and 2015. Digital technology, of course, is named as a root cause.

Today, attention is the currency of online exchange. For a producer of digital content, it's how your users signal that they like what you have to offer and want to experience more. Attention is the first step in cultivation. It is measured through on-site time and behavior. And while attention is a rare and precious commodity in online engagement, it often is ignored by producers of digital content.

Think for a moment about what really grabs your attention online. For me, I like my content to:

Explore issues in social psychology and human behavior,
Cover topics related to culture, technology, and process,
Balance expert analysis with human interest storytelling,
Engage with social justice themes,
Teach me something new that is applicable to my life and work, and
Have a distinctive style.

This report microsite from the Knight Foundation is a good example of my preferred content* *(I visit this site several times a month). This Aeon article is another good one. With some thought, most everyone could diagnose what kind of preferred content readily grabs and holds their attention.

In addition to preferred content, we also regularly seek trigger content. Trigger content tends to respond to our everyday preoccupations, usually dealing with health, relationships, home and housing, education, employment, and personal finance related subjects or real-world events. Being trigger-driven means that when we seek this type of content, we are responding to a specific stimulus, be it a question, event, or need.

Trigger content performs best when it is designed to help us make decisions and solve problems. WebMD, Investopedia, and Quora are good examples. Shopping, social, and entertainment content, where users spend much of their online time, can be both triggered and preferred content. And regardless the type of content we seek, one thing is certain: We are always on and therefore want high-quality content available to us on demand.

This is why being unintentional with content is deadly. The reality is — the thousands of nibbles of content that cross our paths each day seeking our attention make about 40% of us feel overwhelmed. The internet is a very capable illusionist — it gives us strong confidence that the content we need and want in our everyday lives is always accessible, anytime, anywhere and that its availability makes our lives easier. But our true experience is quite the opposite. The more variety and choice we have, the more paralyzed we feel in being able to make the right decision about what will work best for us.

Look at it this way: The amount of data produced via the internet each day is roughly equivalent to 250,000 Libraries of Congress.

250,000 Libraries of Congress! How do we even begin to sort through it all!?

What's concerning is that producers of much of our online content aren't typically aware of this volume problem or concerned with their content's value or utility to us. Many digital teams still tackle digital content as design- or technology-first exercises:

"It would be so cool if we could have a video for that article."
"We really need an interactive map."
"This campaign would be better if it had its own site and design."
"We need a post about my project on the site."

We've all heard these phrases before. And framed this way, you can easily see what's missing:

There is no sense of the user or why they would want to interact with this content (purpose).
There is no sense of what the content will help the user accomplish or how the content will reward them for sharing their attention (value).
There is no sense of what serving the user with this content will accomplish for the organization (outcome).

Without an intended outcome and a user-driven purpose and value definition, content is just bloat. It kind of makes me think of the internet as similar to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — just an unsightly and potentially damaging collection of debris floating around on the currents of the web. This purposeless and user-less content approach has long been proven to contribute to cycles of waste and rework.

There is no style without substance. I've always liked how Victor Hugo put it: "Style is the substance of the subject called unceasingly to the surface." Design is not content, it is a mode of delivering content in a way that is attractive, stimulating, and novel. You need to have substance that is called forth through user-centered design in order to have an effective content product.

There is good news — content doesn't have to be this bad. By bringing structure to your content decision-making, you can create a content strategy that is designed to capture your user's attention and channel that attention into meaningful engagement. And there are some basic steps to getting there:

1. Research your users and develop meaningful user personas

The role of user experience-driven content strategy is to understand users' exclusive triggers and motivations and create tailored content products that serve them. A great content strategist understands that the difference between an active, motivating content experience and a passive one and knows how to captivate users so they increase the time they're willing to spend engaging with your mission and brand.

The first step in achieving this is researching your audience — through focus groups, user interviews, web surveys, usability testing, market research, etc. — and defining core demographic and psychographic personas.

Demographic personas define "who" the primary users of your content are. They are based on web analytics and user data and used to create use cases for driving traffic, conversion, and adoption among target audiences.
Psychographic personas define "why" the primary users of your content are motivated to engage. They are based on demographic data and qualitative research and used to define users' lifestyles, behaviors, and habits. They will help you refine your messaging and positioning strategy and content user experience.

One additional thing to note is that your research should be continuous and ongoing. You should review and refine your personas quarterly. You should have a culture of constantly testing and iterating your approaches. This allows you to pilot new approaches with content, test and refine them, remove the ones that do not perform well, and mature the ones that do so that you can replicate them as part of your go-to content playbook. This requires an ongoing investment in research and insights-driven decision making that is important (and not too difficult to pursue).

2. Map your content to your user needs and organizational conversion goals

Without targeted content, your user has nowhere to anchor and no journey to take. Once you have personas defined for these users, you can begin to draft use cases that represent their specific needs and motivations. A use case is a list of actions or steps that a user will take, using your content, to reach his or her goal. Once use cases are complete, you will have a very clear picture of the types of content assets and structures that will best serve your users needs via your various channels — website, email, social, search marketing, third-party placements, etc. You will be able to create content models and plans based on the primary content types needed for your user experience.

In addition to serving user needs, content also has to serve your business and conversion goals. As you draft use cases, you also want to draft business goals and intended outcomes. Mapping use cases to these outcomes will help you prioritize content that is best aligned to both. This ensures that you are putting resources — staff time, content budget, etc. — to the most efficient use.

3. Create a content performance and governance model

Focusing on content governance and performance is an essential foundation to ensuring any content experience is cohesive, accessible, responsive, widely adopted by users, and supportive of user engagement and conversion across content channels.

A content performance model will help you manage the productivity and efficiency of your content work. The model helps content leaders and teams define:

How much content will produced.
How much effort will go into the production of that content.
What individual contributions will be to those efforts.
How to focus efforts on the most high value activities in support of overall goals.
What is the process for continual improvement.

Creating this model will help you to increase your ability to deliver on your user needs and business goals over time — so you're always improving your focus and effectiveness. It also will help your content team remain aligned to your ultimate desired outcomes, while immersed in the day-to-day work of content production.

The purpose of a governance model is to define the structures, processes, and policies that you will need to have more effective content decision making among your team and within your organization. This is the tool you use to:

Communicate with stakeholders and manage their expectations
Maintain consistency in your approaches
Handle the distribution of resources toward work, products, and initiatives.

4. Align your content operations and infrastructure to this model

One assumption we often observe organizations make is limiting their content thinking to brand and storytelling strategies — just the brand and marketing aspects of content. These are very important; they are the emotional and intellectual core of how constituents engage with your brand.

However, the operational aspects of content are as important as brand aspects. Organizations that limit content strategy to just thinking about brand communications and storytelling fail to tackle the operational and technological challenges that can be major barriers to success.

It is important to also evaluate and put structure around:

How resources are spent on content production
How teams are structured to support the work
What tools and processes are in place to support the work.

When you align these to the content performance and governance models, you identify ways that you can restructure to increase the value and output of your work while reducing the resources and effort to produce that work. It's simply quality over quantity. And, ultimately, this will help you improve your outcomes.

I've been with Echo for a few years now, and it's been exciting to see how effective the above practices have been with our clients who have adopted them. In many cases, they've:

Increased the value of their content and their users' interest in engaging with it.
Made their content more clear, efficient, dependable, attractive, motivating, and creative.
Created processes to guide the analysis, categorizing, construction, placement, evaluation, and governance of content both on and offline.
Lowered the cost of doing work and seen upticks in revenue due to increased user conversions and new commitments from funders and sponsors.
Developed agile methodologies and replaced guesswork-based production, redesigns, and rework with insights-based iterative evolution.
Put in place structures that allow for growth and prevent depreciation of assets over time.

This is the kind of transformation that a sophisticated content strategy can bring to your organization. If you'd like to explore this more, we'd love to talk with you. We really enjoy leading and coaching our clients through this process and are looking for our next great collaboration.

Tags:

content

content strategy

attention

How to Get the Most Out of Drupal 8's New Content Tools

Stephanie Todd — Tue, 04 Oct 2016 15:41:47 +0000

For more on Drupal 8, see 3 Major Reasons Drupal 8 is Worth the Investment and What to Know Before You Host a Drupal 8 Site

Drupal 8 has dropped a ton of new features, including vast improvements to the experience for developers building new sites and system administrators maintaining existing ones. But what about the experience for the folks like us that are going to use Drupal 8 everyday? What about us content editors?

I have good news for you. Drupal 8 includes a handful of improvements that will make your regular day-to-day tasks a little easier and more efficient. But not all of them are immediately noticeable, so here’s how you can get the most out of Drupal 8’s new content tools:

Leave Quick Edit turned on

One of the highly marketed features in Drupal 8 is Quick Edit, a tool that allows you to edit content directly on the page, without having to switch to the administrator panel. It’s a pretty straightforward and handy tool when you use it, but it does need to be toggled on at first, and can be easy to miss. In the upper right corner of the administrator toolbar, there is an “Edit” button that once clicked, will show a small pencil icon next to any editable content area on the page.

Note, the pencil icons can be a little hard to see as they are a light gray color by default.

And once you’ve turned on Quick Edit, it remains active as you navigate the site (as long as you’re logged in). If you find the already subtle pencil icons distracting, then don’t forget you have the ability to turn this feature on and off from the administrator toolbar that appears at the top of every page.

Don’t be afraid to use it on your phone

Typos are just reality. We all know it still happens with annoying regularity no matter how many rounds of review you do. Now you don’t need to be tethered to your laptop to fix any silly mistakes thanks to two big improvements.

The first is the very noticeable responsive design. In addition to giving you an interface that adapts to the size of your screen, the menus have eschewed the drop down menus that appeared on hover and that made mobile editing painful (since there’s no mouse to “hover” on a mobile device). The new menu also features larger touch targets to make tapping with your fingers a whole lot easier.

The second is a big under the hood improvement that, long story short, improves caching for users that are logged in (i.e., all us administrators and content editors). This means improved performance and faster load times when using the site, an especially useful improvement when using the site on slower connections, like 3G cellular for example.

Embrace the Shortcuts

Shortcuts are not a new feature in Drupal 8, but with the simplified administrator toolbar these quick actions get more prominent placement. And if you’re used to hovering over top-level menu items to see the links contained therein, you may be a little disappointed that with these new mobile friendly menus, you’ll now need to do a few more clicks or taps before you get to writing that new blog post or press release. But with Shortcuts available from the top-level administrator toolbar, you can add quick links to create specific types of content, jump to the most used sections of your site, and much more. It takes just a moment to add a new Shortcut, but it will save you some repeated (and annoying) clicking in the long run.

Drupal has made significant updates in the content administrator area in their latest major release, which reflects how much thought and effort went into improving and smoothing out the content authoring experience. We are content authors too, so we know how much time and effort it takes publishing and managing content on your website. Based on our experience building and launching several Drupal 8 projects recently, we’re confident you’ll enjoy the efficiency and utility of these changes.

Tags:

drupal

drupal 8

content strategy

What to Know Before You Host a Drupal 8 Site

Olumide Adebo — Wed, 14 Sep 2016 15:55:39 +0000

We’ve really been enjoying working with Drupal 8 so far, and as Peter wrote about previously, there are some big improvements that make the investment worthwhile. But your beautiful design and carefully crafted content doesn’t mean a thing if your website doesn’t perform well — especially when we know that improving page load times by just a second has a meaningful impact on bounce rates and attention from visitors.

So while hosting a Drupal 8 site is not entirely different than Drupal 7, there are a few differences and we thought it would be helpful to share a few of the lessons we’ve learned about hosting Drupal 8 websites so far.

Be prepared to update Drupal 8’s core more frequently

The reality for any major software release is that not everything gets done in version 1.0. Or, in this case, 8.0. There are bugs to fix, occasional features to add, compatibility with other systems, etc. That’s why after any major software release you can expect updates—especially on the bug front—to come more frequently than for software that’s matured over years.

These issues are exacerbated on a system like Drupal 8 where the architecture has been rebuilt and there exists a large number of modules provided by such a large community. Although we expect the pace of updates will gradually slow down to where Drupal 7 is today, you should expect that Drupal 8 core will receive frequent updates at least over the next year. If you do your own updates or pay hourly for the service, you should expect to budget a little more, either in time or money, to perform this maintenance.

Note: If you host your site with Echo, have no fear. At Echo, we offer concierge hosting which, in addition to standard hosting services like backups and monitoring, includes security updates to Drupal core as well as your modules.

Look beyond the basic system requirements

As with any piece of software, Drupal 8 has some basic system requirements. But, if you want to make sure you’ve set your site up to run as smoothly as possible and to cause as few issues as possible when it comes to fixing things, we have a little advice: use PHP 5.6.

There are a few reasons. First, PHP 5.5 has already reached its end of life. Then, there’s the boost to performance and stability your Drupal 8 site will have. Lastly, paired with the requirement to use DRUSH 8, when managing a Drupal 8 site, PHP 5.6 provides the best cross support between the two.

What’s next?

As with the versions before it, Drupal 8 will continue to evolve over the coming years, and as it does we’ll be here to guide you through it. If you have any questions about Drupal 8, get in touch and we may just cover it here.

Tags:

3 Major Reasons Drupal 8 is Worth the Investment

Peter Sax — Fri, 26 Aug 2016 15:42:59 +0000

Saying a modern nonprofit or business needs a website is like saying the tires on your car need air. Deny it and you’re going to have a bad time. Given the significant tasks required of your website, from fundraising and ecommerce to PR and campaigning, the tools you use to power it and the interface through which your team will interact with the site should be given important consideration.

Lucky for you, one of the most widely used content management systems (CMS), just got a major update. Drupal 8 brings too many new features to discuss fully here, but you’ll be happy to know the end product is one that’s worth the investment.

Here’s why:

One – The content authoring experience is more efficient

Drupal’s admin interface has evolved over the years, and we’re happy to see it continue here. For starters, the new interface is streamlined, mobile-friendly, and by emphasizing simplicity, it makes the process of creating content and managing your site more efficient. Then comes Quick Edit, a tool which allows you to edit content directly on the page, without having to switch to the admin panel. Lastly, some under-the-hood improvements to how Drupal 8 caches portions of your site, means that logged-in users — whether they login just to access a community or special resources, or it's your staff managing the site and adding content — will likely see a significant boost to performance. These improvements just underscore how the experience for content authors and editors means your team takes less time, and less clicks, to update content on Drupal 8.

Two – The improvements for developers means easier maintenance

A number of new features in Drupal 8 are developer focused. There’s Twig, a new templating engine, some commonly used modules are now included by default in Drupal 8, and there’s better support for things like accessibility and multilingual support. Unless you’re a developer, you’re not likely to ever see these changes first hand, but you will experience them.

These improvements for developers mean maintenance tasks will largely be much easier (and occasionally faster) for developers to complete. This saves you money on regular support, and allows you to devote that time and resources into other areas, like digital strategy or building new features.

Three – Migrating is easier than it's ever been

If you’ve been through a redesign of a website, you know that one of the most daunting tasks is getting all of the content you want to keep migrated and configured properly inside your new website. In this area, Drupal 8 has seen a major leap forward.

Drupal 8 can read the database from a Drupal 6 or 7 site, and pull in configurations and other settings in addition to the actual content. Practically speaking, this removes what was previously a major task for content migrations: writing all of the code that retrieves and assembles the existing site’s content. Now, Drupal 8 assembles it for you. In some cases, this could cut the time to do a content migration in half.

We’ve been enjoying building new projects in Drupal 8, some of which we will be able to share with you soon. Until then, if you have questions about Drupal 8 that you’d like us to touch upon, or if you’re wondering if Drupal 8 can work for you, get in touch.

Tags:

drupal

drupal 8

Highlights from this year's Social Innovation Summit

Chad Van Lier — Wed, 15 Jun 2016 14:11:57 +0000

Last Wednesday I joined a diverse group of luminaries, changemakers, and professionals gathered at the Ronald Reagan Trade Center in Washington, DC for the 2016 Social Innovation Summit (SIS16). The Summit is an annual event whose goal is to create a forum where a global network of leaders can connect to discuss the key strategies and business innovations creating social transformation across the corporate, investment, government and nonprofit sectors.

SIS16 provided an excellent forum for connecting with Echo’s current and prospective partners and an opportunity to gain the latest insight into a variety of social impact issues and initiatives. What struck me most was the passion of the attendees and their eagerness to learn from and collaborate with their peers. The Summit isn’t your standard business conference where you’re confronted by canned marketing messages and suppliers stalking wary corporate managers. The urgency to find real, actionable solutions to our underlying social issues is ever-present, breaks down networking barriers and brings the diverse group of attendees together.

Having been completely unable to solve the challenge of being in two places at once, I focused on workshops relevant to the social impact organizations we partner with: Building Effective Women’s Economic Empowerment Strategies; Building Ecosystems for More Resilient Communities; and Evolution of Environmentalism in the Digital Age.

There was so much good information and insight packed into two days, it’s really difficult to pinpoint the highlights. Here are four that stood out to me.

Daniel Lubetzky, the CEO and Founder of KIND, led a session about social entrepreneurship and the power of business and markets to address social ills. He had just returned from the Jordanian desert where he visited a sustainable desert farm that employs cutting-edge Israeli technology to make the desert bloom. Former orthodox jewish settlers are cooperating with Jordanian Bedouins and providing over 100 jobs, including employing 40 Syrian refugees. The initiative has been so successful that the farm now generates revenue through the export of kosher vegetables.

Take a minute and watch Daniel Lubetzky’s talk here:

In the workshop Building Effective Women’s Economic Empowerment Strategies, Courtney Harvey of Women Moving Millions and Ruth DeGolia of Mercado Global led a discussion about the significant ROI for development investments in women. Citing several real-world examples, they stressed the importance of a holistic approach that integrates economic rights, sourcing, access to the supply chain, education, and legal advocacy.

Terry Whelan, Director of Sustainable Business for NYU Stern School of Business led a session on Building Ecosystems for More Resilient Communities that included the NYC Housing Authority and Sister Cities International. The big take-away is the importance of empowering local leaders and changemakers by giving them access to the right information and tools to enact change at the community level.

An example of the fine line between the social responsibility and commercial interests was provided by Jennifer Hunter, Altria’s Senior Vice President of Communications & Corporate Citizenship. She spoke about balancing the company’s responsibility to reduce the harm caused by tobacco products with the fact that Altria manufactures a legal product used by 40 million adult consumers.

Echo Named “Official Webby Honoree” for Greenpeace USA

Graziella Jackson — Mon, 02 May 2016 15:58:52 +0000

We’re excited to share that the 20th Annual Webby Awards has recognized our work with Greenpeace USA as an Official Webby Honoree. The Greenpeace USA website was recognized as among the best work from nearly 13,000 entries submitted to the awards this year.

Meeting and collaborating with the Greenpeace USA team was our favorite part of this work. Congratulations and thank you Nicole, Ben, and team — it has been a joy to work with such a remarkably smart and driven group of colleagues looking to change our world for the better. We’re humbled to share this honor with you.

At Echo, we’re privileged to partner with great organizations like Greenpeace to create digital products that put users first, motivate with content, make technology human, and support our clients’ ambitious goals—truly important goals like creating a green and peaceful future, providing hungry families with food, cleaning our oceans of debris, and educating our young people. Ultimately helping organizations reach these high marks is our measure for success.

When we first started working with Greenpeace USA on the vision for their new website, we knew we had amazing content — stories, photos, videos — that deserved attention and could be used to build relationships with users and motivate them to action. We also knew the experience needed a stronger narrative through-line and more focused attention on putting the user at the heart of Greenpeace USA’s story. Working together, our teams determined users’ needs, their unique motivations, and their behavioral pathways through the site. We used metrics and insights from Greenpeace research to create a messaging architecture and experience narrative for the site that aligned to key performance indicators and conversion goals.

The project was light and lean. We conceived of and launched the site in four months, using a week-long ideation and product design session to dive into the mindset of users, to ideate feature sets and content, and to define the user experience. After we wrapped up that work, we moved quickly into prototyping and in-browser design, enabling us to push further as we moved from static ideas into to dynamic production. This represents the web product development at its best — launching well researched and conceived products quickly to market where they can be shaped in the hands of real end-users through a cycle of build-test-learn. At Echo, we always recommend this adaptive, iterative approach to product design and development.

Thank you again to the amazing team at Greenpeace USA for inviting us to partner on this great work. And thank you to our friends at Teal Media for joining us in this work and bringing wonderful creativity to shaping the visual direction of the experience.

About the Webby Awards: Hailed as the “Internet’s highest honor” by The New York Times, The Webby Awards is the leading international award honoring excellence on the Internet, including Websites, Advertising & Media, Online Film & Video, Mobile Sites & Apps and Social. Established in 1996, The Webby Awards received nearly 13,000 entries from all 50 states and over 70 countries worldwide this year. The Webby Awards is presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (IADAS).