If you live in DC, you might know already about Artomatic. In short: 1,300+ artists and performers take over an 11-story building, filling it with art, performances and activities for five weeks. It’s completely volunteer-run, and a pretty mind-blowing experience of unfiltered creative endeavors.

I’m part of the marketing team, and I also contributed an installation, called “Click to Print.”

Why? Browsing through the iPad app for The New Yorker, I found myself wondering what it would look like if I cut up an actual magazine and arranged the pages the way the app does. What happens if you take things from the digital world and try to bring them back into the physical world? Do they make any sense?

If you can’t give that a try at Artomatic, I don’t know where you could!

The installation has three parts:

New Yorker for iPad. This is both the app that sparked the idea and the gold standard for magazines on the iPad. I love reading the print edition of the magazine and wanted to work with it somehow. (In fact, I also have a blog about reading the New Yorker…)

However, the original cutting-up-a-magazine idea didn’t work. The issues I wanted to try it with are not available anymore, no matter how nicely I begged the woman in charge of selling back issues, and when I calculated how much space I’d need to display a whole magazine, iPad-style, it was way too long for even my giant 20-foot wall space.

So instead, I picked my favorite articles about the online world and printed out the actual iPad screens for them. It turned out better this way.

Washington Post on Twitter. My first job was at the Washington Post, helping to launch their first web site. I liked the idea of un-digitizing something that I helped seed online.

I chose the Twitter feed because it seemed an appropriate answer to the worst fears of the people who ran the paper back then: “You thought college-kid editors would subvert the news judgment of a venerable paper with real-time updates to the web site? Well, look at this!”

The big surprise as I worked on this one: The pieces I cut out of the paper looked really bland compared to the online-only features I printed. So few images, nothing embedded or related, just 450 words of plain newsprint.

Facebook “What I do” meme. I also wanted to take something that had no offline equivalent and see what it looked like in the real world. This was a late inspiration and the most fun (making an intentionally awful painting is extremely liberating!).

Since I saw a ton of these ones and it was even written up on one of the Post’s blogs, I figured it would be recognizable to lots of people. And it seemed like an natural to make into collages, since “What I do” collections are essentially digital collages. I wanted a topic that would make sense to the majority of Artomatic visitors,  so I bent the meme a little and featured Artomatic itself.

Happy moment as I was finishing the installation: An artist whose 2008 postcard I had incorporated into one of the collages came by for a look. She’s not on Facebook, so I wasn’t sure if it would work for her. She pointed and looked for a bit, and then asked, “Can I like it??” I told her of course she could, and she flipped the “like” counter under the collages, becoming th third “like.” User testing success!

If you’re in the DC area (or can get here between now and June 23), please come by! You shouldn’t miss Artomatic in any case, and I would love for you leave comments in my comment book.

At EDF, we’re fortunate not to have many old Facebook pages hanging on, but the few we do have are awkward baggage. One goes back to the early days of Facebook when we were still working out our strategy for what gets its own page. Another was for a campaign that we thought would continue, but didn’t.

These pages have a few thousand likes each, and still get a little activity. We can’t message the fans, as we could with a group. And there’s no direct successor to these pages that we can point people to, so it doesn’t seem worth posting announcements.

We quietly redirect or replace web pages all the time. But something about hitting the “delete” button on a page with 3,000 fans seems like much more of a waste! What if we have a reason to communicate with them someday?

On the other hand, letting the pages sit there moldering away doesn’t seem like a great representation of our brand, either.

How have you solved this challenge? If you have a graceful strategy for retiring old pages, I’d love to hear!

Do we really need yet another piece about storytelling and fundraising? Yes, we do.

The tests they’ve run call into question the effectiveness of the usual “Let me tell you about this 10-year-old who needs your help” stories. (Uh oh. Over at Project Create, we just finished our annual appeal letter, and it features this kind of story…) I thought these didn’t work on me because I’m hard-hearted, but the results show that I’m not alone.

Instead, the authors draw our attention to using storytelling in different ways. Stories can help illuminate statistics, make your work real and show how your donors’ support matters. Like this:

When children are thirsty, it doesn’t matter if a river is clouded and polluted, they’ll drink from it. UNICEF’s simple solutions like clean water tablets make it easy for children to access clean water anywhere, anytime.

This is changing my thinking about some slide shows and landing pages we’re working on right now at EDF. The full white paper includes lots more examples. Enjoy!

Lessons learned about Tableau Public:

It’s all about the underlying data. I wanted to demo show some of the controls you can give viewers access to. But given the few datasets I had to work with, I couldn’t explore everything I wanted to. If we’re going to use this tool to advance EDF’s communication goals, we’ll have to work hard to get the right data combinations.

Tableau Public is powerful, but not for everything. It offers extensive tools for filtering number- and time-based data, but mostly I had location-based data. And while it’s a great basic mapping tool, it lacks options that I wanted. Given this, it’ll be worth exploring other mapping tools, too.

The Tableau Public displays are beautiful but clunky. I thought at first I was asking it to handle too many data points, but even this simple map and this chart respond slowly. You can’t pan on maps, and it’s easy to accidentally select data points (but not to un-select them.)

And here’s my final map (pardon the horizontal scroll…didn’t have a chance to eliminate that).

It doesn’t tell a story, since the data on the two tabs isn’t even from the same time period. But that wasn’t the point. I did figure out what the tool is good for and how we might use it. Successful Lab Day!

Today is my first Lab Day, and I decide to recreate (or create) some maps we’ve worked with using Tableau Public, which I learned about at a really good data visualization session at last year’s NTEN Conference.

And here’s my first map!

It uses the same data that our membership crew used to create this map of polluting coal plants near you. This Tableau map doesn’t allow to to type in an address to search for it, which is one of the things we wanted to do, but I think it’s easy enough to identify a location that it’s fine. I am, however, finding the map manipulation kind of clunky. It might be that there are just too many points for it to handle gracefully.

Next step for me: Seeing if I can figure out how to make this more interactive, or maybe looking at some straight charts that won’t have the navigation issues that a map does.

And our design firm, Headscape, added a twist that none of us had seen before. Our home page responds to both the width and height of your browser window.  Here’s why we did it this way.

We wanted to feature larger images than we had on our old site, but as we reviewed the site internally, it proved painful for anyone not using a fairly new desktop monitor. On smaller screens, including laptops, the dominant image was just too big. It pushed everything else off the page.

We checked the usage data and found that this would be an issue for some site visitors, too. No one wanted to sacrifice the larger images, so designer Ed Merritt came up with a neat solution.

• If you’re using a big screen, you see the main image in all its glory.
• If you’re on a screen that’s wide but not very tall (like my laptop), the main image gets smaller. Then, taking advantage of the extra width, we slide a few key elements up next to it.
• And if you’re on a small screen (including iOS and Android), the image and text containers are all smaller so that they fit comfortably on your screen.

See it in action — if you’re on one of the larger screens, go to our home page and re-size your browser. It’s no Angry Birds, but it’s strangely fun! (Other main pages resize, too, but the home page is the only one that adapts to three sizes.)

Update: See a broader and more technical explanation from Paul Boag of Headscape, including a nifty video of the site responding to screen size changes.

Is it time to redesign your web site?
How to tell and how to fix it

This is an idea that Farra Trompeter and I hatched last year, and I’m looking forward to working with her on it. Farra is a top-notch session facilitator. The last time we presented together, she structured the session thoughtfully and coached us into being the most well-prepared panel I’ve ever been part of. You are in excellent hands with her, and you will learn exactly what she says you will.

Content strategy: A case study of creating content with a purpose

This is a continuation of the all the learning I’ve done about content strategy over the past year. We’ve gotten through the build and launch of our new site with a new content strategy to guide us. Now we’re figuring out what it means to live with one, day in and day out.  I don’t know exactly what lessons we’ll have to share with you by April, but that just makes it more exciting, right? It’s likely to be a mix of straight-up results and organizational lessons.

Thanks for checking them out and for voting for them — you wouldn’t want to miss out on a chance to make me do more work, would you?

• Bolder look, with more engaging colors and larger photos
• Clearer navigation, refined through a few rounds of user testing
• More about the people who work here and what they do (check out the much-expanded Our people page)

But there’s a lot under that colorful surface, too.

We were working from newly clarified goals. For the first time, we were able to clearly prioritize among our many audiences. You’ll see material for a general audience and EDF’s supporters front and center now, with the more technical  material still accessible, but not as prominent.

We have a new content strategy, guiding what content we create and how we measure its performance. In a past post, I looked at why we made content such a key part of the redesign. We dropped about 80% of the content on the old site, and created a bunch of new material, with the help of the in-house writing and design team.

And finally, we switched to Drupal, leaving behind a proprietary ColdFusion-based content management system. We are happy to finally be in the modern age of publishing platforms.

There’s a lot of work ahead, to be sure — we now have to live up to our ambitious content strategy, transfer our other web properties to Drupal, and start testing and optimizing the site’s performance.

But this afternoon, we’re enjoying the new site and congratulating the whole team on a smooth, perfectly on-schedule conclusion to months of planning and work. Thanks everyone!!

I didn’t have to think too hard about this one — it’s Don’t Make Me Think, by Steve Krug.

Why this book? It’s ostensibly a book about web design, but Krug exposes a fundamental truth for any communicator: If you are trying to implant an idea in someone’s brain or get them to do something, you have to understand what they experience, and make it as easy as possible for them do what you want.

And when you look hard at what they experience, you find:

• They are busy and distracted and don’t care about you nearly as much as you do.
• They don’t read much.
• You can learn a lot from honestly observing people.

These are underlying principles that good communicators and marketers know like they know breathing, but for me, this book stands out for two reasons.

First, if you need a refresher, it’s really refreshing! It’s fun and easy to read, partly because Krug follows his own advice throughout the book. And I love his optimism in the face of constraints: If people blow by your lovingly crafted home page like they would speed past a billboard, his solution is, “Design a great billboard!”

Second, because of those qualities, it’s a great book to recommend to others — I’m responsible for at least a dozen copies being bought (you’re welcome, Steve!). It’s accessible and painless and a good way to get people thinking about user-centered anything.

So if it’s not on your shelf, do add it, and I’d love to hear thoughts from anyone who has already read it.

Update: Eve over at Beaconfire picked this as her book to write about, too! Brilliant.

1. Content Strategy for the Web, by Kristina Halvorson. This is the book I used most while thinking through our strategy. It provides a broad intellectual framework for the whole idea of content strategy. I found the sections on connecting content back to key messages particularly helpful. It’s nicely designed, too.

2. The Big Book of Key Performance Indicators, by Eric T. Peterson (free download). A content strategy rests on clear, measurable goals. The introductory chapters were particularly helpful, as they discuss what kinds of numbers make meaningful metrics. The actual compendium of indicators is exhaustive and more worth skimming than reading.

3. Letting Go of the Words, by Janice Reddish. This is a more nuts-and-bolts book, and I turned to it a lot for the sections of our content guide that address how to structure text and arrange content on pages. I highly recommend it for anyone actually creating content.

These three resources were the ones I kept on my desk and flipped through constantly as I worked on the strategy. A few other resources cropped up frequently, too:

The Nielson Norman Group’s nonprofit usability study (I’ve posted about it before) supplied a lot of good insight on what people expect from nonprofit web sites in general. If we hadn’t already incorporated its findings into our goal-setting and persona-building phases, I’m sure I would have turned to it a lot more while working on our content strategy.

Yahoo’s writing style guide is an excellent source of simple and wise writing advice. Useit.com, the Nielsen Norman Group’s site, also has a bunch of great tidbits, both in their (expensive) reports and their (poorly organized) Alertbox columns.

Finally, it can be daunting to start on the actual content inventory and content-making process. These blog posts from Connection Cafe helped make the whole endeavor a little more bite-sized. They offer quick checklists for evaluating basic messaging, taking an inventory for a redesign, and tips for assessing your content.

Did I miss any good resources? Let me know!