After having had some time to mull over the status report that Group 2 gave us last week, I'd like to express some concerns:
Try not to get hung up on specific technologies like RSS feeds, CMS, etc. At this point in the process, you should be thinking in broad terms about their communications goals and the scale of their operation. The first problem you need to solve, after figuring out the above and their audience questions, is what overall shape the site will be able to take. If the org has a very limited staff to work on the site, and that's likely to continue, then the site should be modest in complexity, and pose less of a content management problem. Start to think about what the key functions are that it must provide, and based on those, start mapping out the sections of the proposed site and the hierarchy of elements on the home page (not the visual hierarchy -- we haven't talked about that much yet -- but the literal hierarchy).
I'm kind of regretting that we set up the "explore possibilities for new media" stuff in the middle of the semester. It's important work to consider because it can amplify the organization's web outreach to have a YouTube page (for example), and blogs are a very very important outreach and audience-building tool, but they're also kind of tangential to the development of key functions for the central web site (the web 1.0 part). So I would encourage you to actually defer incorporating this element into your overall plan (or addressing it -- it's perfectly OK to recommend that the organization not have a blog because it's not the right audience or because they don't have adequate staff to do it well) until you have a better idea of the big picture. Mary-Lea might disagree with me on this.
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I agree and disagree.
ReplyDeleteI agree that big picture is important before going into the advantages and disadvantages of blogging, etc.
On the other hand, social media will always be the elephant in the room because it's so prevalent these days. I was just now lurking at a discussion about social media and nonprofits on LinkedIn. I followed a couple of their links to slideshare presentations:
http://www.primalmedia.com/blog/social-media-non-profits?goback=.hom
http://www.slideshare.net/mzkagan/what-the-fk-social-media
They provide some powerful stats about why "dot orgs" (or any group for that matter) ought to have a social media strategy nowadays.
I must say, I'm looking forward to hearing Devin's views on Thursday...
Can you put up links to all of the class projects? I can't seem to find the Endeavor team's blog, but I've been trying to keep up with Lend-A-Hand Indian and Unanima. I think the reason I am not "following" Endeavor's blog is because it's on the word press format, and it might not have been an option to follow that blog using my blogspot/google profile.
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