Feeling like Eloise holed up in a nice hotel for this long. Due to scheduling conflicts & miscellaneous foils, two of today’s interviews (eHealth comms pioneer & architect of major NGO’s digital strategy/re-weblaunch) were over the phone. Produced very enlightening conversations nonetheless (made for easier note taking/furious non-eye-contact-typing, too). Wrapped the day chatting in SoHo, visiting a collaborate social network for artists that’s taking community management/user engagement to the next level, growing exponentially & moving forward with innovative & useful (not just bright’n’shiny) tools for their ‘uber-users’ to beta test before full rollout.
One theme tied these very diverse chats together - know your user. SurprisingEx. Mobile platform adaptation/adoption was not a huge concern for 2/3 interviewees because: 1) they’ve got bigger fish to fry; 2) their pool of users aren’t online via mobile devices & 3) it doesn’t serve the fundamental goals of the org.
All three organizations invested time tracking metrics, studying demographics and soliciting feedback to develop a very good sense of who they were/needed to reach.
The three organizations varied in size, scope & shape bigtime. The largest, a more advocacy-focused NGO that’s registered over 300K members in its 70 years, is challenged by numerous offices mounting different campaigns & de-bureaucratizing/un-siloing an old-school site. Engaging staff at all levels to adopt/accept a new web philosophy is a work in progress. Shared colleague Collin’s phrase ‘Return on Intention’ to echo the interviewee’s explaining to colleagues that “the ‘front page’ is not nearly as important as you think it is in terms of findability or navigation.” No doubt it’ll take many eAdvocates awhile, especially if they’re in older organizations with massive press-release-filled sites, to successfully proselytize the virtues of caring about the other ROI.
Will be publishing a white-paper-style presentation after the meetings this month, leaning against developing one-post write ups for each interview, too, it already lives in GoogleDocs, couldn’t hurt to publish mini vignettes, I just don’t want to create a siloed monolitic brutal web1.0 site of my own…
Hm. What do you think I should do?
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