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!

Plan, by Flickr user Tintern

We didn’t pick graphic design, or information architecture, or even our aging publishing platform. We thought the best way to improve key metrics was to re-think the site’s content. To us, that meant not only the text of the articles, but the use of images, videos, micro-copy, interactive graphics and features — all the material on the site that helps convey ideas.

That led us off in search of a different kind of redesign. Along the way, we learned a new phrase, “content strategy,” and met a few “content strategists.” This approach has become a powerful tool for us, so I thought I’d share how we got here.

Tired of the same old problems?

The reason we picked content as our top priority is that my team has built a lot of sites for EDF, and we’ve redesigned the main site a few times, too. As much as we’ve learned, these problems persisted. We were determined to find a better way!

• Wait, how do we update that content? This could be the photo spot sized weirdly so only the designer’s sample photo looks good in it, the news slot that requires a photo that you don’t have, or the text block that’s always too long (or short) for what you have to say.

• What do I do with this content? Sometimes, perfectly good pieces of content don’t really fit anywhere. Over the years, we’ve tacked on material where it sort of fits, and our information architecture has sprawled. With the new site, we wanted to better accommodate and organize new material.

• We can’t put that content there!! This is about the technical report that only three people in the world need to see, but that still has to go on the home page, or any number of other well-intentioned but illogical requests. EDF staff have learned well what we can do where, but the new design could stir up new confusion. So we wanted to explain up front what areas would be used for what purposes.

• We need this content! Who can make it? One of the times this can happen is when news breaks — typically, we don’t assign someone to write specifically for the web site. We can draw from a press release, email announcement or the like, but then the content isn’t tailored to meet the site’s goals.

In the context of site redesigns, Jeff MacIntyre describes all these as the “Day Two Problem.” You just launched a shiny new web site. It looks lovely, but all the designers and coders are gone and you can’t use Latin text anymore. Now what?

So what’s in a content strategy?

We didn’t know exactly what content strategy was, and but it sure sounded like it would help. Or, as Kristina Halvorson wrote, “A content strategist sounds like just the sort of person to save the day, even if no one’s clear about what exactly that person will do.” She wrote the book on content strategy, and her post on A List Apart gives a good conceptual overview of content strategy.

As you might expect for an emerging field, there are many definitions of content strategy. After months of wrestling with this, I’m thinking of content strategy in three chunks:

1. Plan what content you need to meet your goals. This seems obvious, but it’s harder than you would think! First, this requires you to articulate your goals and metrics really clearly. Then, you have to know your audiences well enough to figure out how to lead them to your goals.
   

2. Figure out how to get the content you need. Again, this sounds straightforward, but many teams aren’t staffed to create content specifically to meet the site’s goals. How can you line up your needs and resources better?
   

3. Be ruthless about keeping content aligned with your goals. For most, this means a deep re-evaluation of how content is updated, added and measured. For example, we’re developing a comprehensive site testing plan and a new metrics dashboard. This also means having a way to say “no” to good content ideas that don’t fit the goals.
   

That sounds pretty plain, but none of it’s actually easy. That’s why we’ve never quite gotten rid of all the same old problems I listed above. But now that we have a strategy outlined, I’m optimistic that at the very least, we’ll have a new set of content-related challenges to work on! We’re already feeling relief at the sense of focus, and the sheer number of unimportant pages we’ll be able to jettison when we build the new site.

We ended up doing a lot of this content work in-house, so in my next post I’ll share some of the resources we found helpful.

by Flickr user kmiller799

A year ago, we pulled together a team at EDF to create our social media guidelines. The all-time most popular post on this blog tells how and why we did it, so I thought I’d share an update.

The best news is that it they seem to be working. They’re part of our new employee and intern orientation materials. Since we released them, we have not had any social media disasters big enough that I’ve heard about them!

Last week, spurred by conversations at the NTEN conference, we revisited the guidelines. While we did make a few small updates, I’m happy to report that overall they have aged well. And they should continue to — we made them not specific to particular tools, and grounded them in EDF’s general guidelines for conduct and communications.

In talking with people about the guidelines at the conference, Lauren Guite, who worked on the guidelines with me, heard lots of questions about mixing personal and professional presences. Here are her thoughts:

For a 30-something who has been involved in social media for over a decade, defining the very thin, fuzzy line between work and personal use on social networks is common sense. But for others, it’s a big enough concern to keep them off (and sometimes skeptical) of the social web.

You might also be dealing with the other extreme. Those who’ve grown up with social media and mobile phones are used to overexposure. For these people, the line might not exist.

When we wrote our guidelines, navigating these issues was a top concerns, so we tackled the personal-professional split head-on:

• Our first section addresses the professional side — representing EDF in social media. Key points include what approvals are needed before posting (not many) and how to identify yourself as an EDF employee.
• The second section addresses the personal side. It gives suggestions on how and how not to mingle your social and work worlds.
• Throughout,  we point out that the split that’s clear in our staff’s minds is not clear in anyone else’s minds. We can be perceived as representing EDF even on our personal accounts, particularly if we talk about our work.

If you’re starting this journey yourself, in addition to looking at how we approached it, see Lauren’s tips for writing your own guidelines, and nice thoughts on getting over fear of Facebook on Kivi’s Nonprofit Communications blog (via Duck Call).