Communicating service resources

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Over the past few weeks our team have been thinking through how we can communicate our resources more effectively through various channels. The thing is we don’t really have a handle on what works best at the moment so to begin with we’ve settled on using those channels which are already well established across the service and gathering some data on their effectiveness. Those channels comprise of: our mailing list; twitter; and our service blog. On top of this a decision is made as to whether any changes are required for the front of our website and we email relevant stakeholder organisations to inform them of new/updated resources.

The process

When a new resource is produced or significantly updated we produce a launch and dissemination document (the term launch is used loosely throughout). It provides the team with all the necessary information required to promote the resource once ready. At the moment that involves:

  • Resource title
  • URL
  • Expected launch date
  • Additional actions for the website
  • The communications plan i.e. step by step actions
  • Website description (which is also used in a monthly round-up email)
  • Rationale for the resource
  • Internal stakeholder email
  • Target audience – interest, relevant channels and status of communication
  • Blog post
  • Tweet

This level of detail is something new to our planning and as such we’ve been working very hard in trying to adopt it for some of our newest resources i.e. the e-Safety infoKit, online learning topic and MOOCs topic. One of the big differences is our approach to monitoring how well the different communication channels work. To do this we’re using Google’s Custom Campaigns. At the time of writing the e-Safety infoKit has been live for 11 days and has had 716 pageviews. From the channels we’ve communicated links through we’ve had 268 visits (I need to work out how best to match this back to content statistics e.g. pageviews). The graph below highlights which channels are driving traffic to our site. Bear in mind this is still early days and not every communications channel posted messages on the same day — we log these using annotations within Google Analytics.

Visit to the e-Safety infoKit via monitored comms channels 15th April - 26th April 2013

We aim to review the launch of the e-Safety infoKit a month after its launch to think through some of the implications of the data we have but it could be that we don’t have a full understanding until six months down the line when we can also match the e-Safety infoKit data with others. I am surprised that the link from our blog post has resulted in more traffic than twitter.

Lessons learned

  • It’s difficult to coordinate multiple stakeholders. We had one internal stakeholder tweet our launch message early. We’re not sure on how to manage this going forward because it is useful sharing the full launch and dissemination document, we aren’t keen on hiding information
  • It makes the launch so much easier! We scheduled our blog post and tweet to go out automatically at a predetermined time and had contacted the relevant people to amplify our message
  • Remember that your own team is an internal stakeholder – everyone needs to be aware of what’s going on
  • A lot of our recent work in this area has been rushed. In future we expect to start drafting this launch and dissemination material at the start of the project
  • We will be adding a section to log emergent communications activity post-launch. This will help us to clearly think through future approaches to our communications
  • We’re working on making the template clearer so that individuals responsible for certain actions can include relevant updates

Going forward

There’s still lots to do. This process focuses on the dissemination and launch of products. We still want to think more strategically about the types of messages we send out more generally from our communications channels. This will help to inform and educate the team how best to use the various tools we have in place.

If you have any advice or guidance that you’d like to share with us please do so in the comments below or contact the team directly. We’d love to hear from you.

Publish early, publish often

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One of the underlying principles we’ve adopted in managing content on the website is that of ‘publish early, publish often’. This is adopted from agile methods commonly used for software development and project management.

Essentially, this approach allows us to publish our resources as soon as they are ready with the main aim of receiving feedback more quickly and helping us to improve resources more easily.

You might have noticed that a number of our resources are currently marked as ‘under development’. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they are coming soon and are currently being developed; it actually lets people know that they aren’t the finished product, just an early release or a ‘work in progress’.

This approach has helped us to reduce risks, overheads and bottlenecks within the production process and gives us more time to adapt the resource within the lifetime of a given project or programme. It allows for feedback and iteration all aimed at making the resources better tailored to the needs of the sector.

With our recent infoKit releases, adopting this process has allowed us to explore different ways of gathering feedback. For example, with the Business intelligence infoKit, we’ve launched a survey requesting feedback from partner organisations with an interest in the subject.

Another approach we adopted was for Relationship management, in that by releasing the resource early, the authors were able to see how the infoKit looked on the website as opposed to the offline draft, and then iterate on the content and structure as required. At all times, the resources were live on the site and publicly available to anyone. Recent resources on e-safety and virtual research environments are following the same approach.

The principles of getting feedback and publishing early and often are something we want to build on with a view to making our content more open to meet the needs of our users and allow them to shape the content at an early stage.

You’re all flippin’ MaD!

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The environment in which you operate, whether that’s as an organisation or an individual, is changing. No matter what sector you’re from, what level in an organisation you work at, or how successful your organisation is, you simply can’t escape it. You can, however, approach change proactively, or as ‘The SUMO Guy’ summarises, “Carpe Diem” (seize the day).

At Jisc, we’re constantly grappling with the concept of change. It’s inherent in implementing/adopting technology. Ultimately it’s about people and that’s certainly the focus of our advice in trying to manage change. We focus less on strategies for individuals dealing/coping with change which is why a recent free SUMO workshop, taking place nearby, caught our attention.

SUMO has two meanings. Shut Up and Move On, which I actually think gives off quite negative connotations because it doesn’t translate literally to the thinking behind the model. I much prefer the second meaning, which is Stop, Understand, Move On. In my mind I broke those up into two stages:

  1. Stop, Understand—get off autopilot and take your head from out of the sand. Try to understand the environment in which you’re working, consider whether or not you need to change anything and work out what your options are

  2. Move On—decide how you will respond to changes in the environment and remember you have a choice

It would be wrong of me to try and write up Paul McGee’s (The SUMO Guy) full talk because I simply wouldn’t do it justice but I’m certainly going to read his book(s) and would urge others to do the same. I suspect there are some very practical hints and tips for dealing with change and life in general. Just remember one thing, “you’re all flippin’ MaD… Making a Difference!”

Data Visualisation

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Here at Jisc infoNet we’re always striving to improve our data visualisation design.  It’s something that very much came to the forefront of our consciousness a couple of years ago.   We received feedback on the quality of the data visualisations we had been using to report on the annual Information Legislation and Management Survey and realised that we needed to reconsider and update our approach and make improvements.  My colleague Teresa Tocewicz blogged about the experience and the steps taken to improve things, and we’ve just published the results of the 2012 Survey – complete with newer, shinier, and hopefully more useful, data visualisations.  On a related note, we will shortly be revamping our Business Intelligence infoKit to accommodate the experiences of 11 Jisc-funded projects, many of which addressed various aspects of visualisation.  We are also actively considering creating a Flickr resource of examples of visualisation to go alongside this and will be encouraging submissions from the sector to add to it – so watch this space!

Last week I was lucky enough to attend a half day session on Data Visualisation that was a continuation of an event called Dashboarding for Peak University Performance held at East Midlands Conference Centre at the University of Nottingham.  The session was led by Andy Kirk, a Data Visualisation Architect.

Andy led participants through an entertaining and engaging session that was crammed full of interesting examples of good practice in data visualisation design.  There was also some discussion around, and examples of, not so good practice too.

Participants were provided with a fair amount of useful food for thought and some great tips on using data visualisation.  The 5 main tips featured were:

Tips

  1. The real craft behind data visualisation design is being able to rationalise choices for the given context
  2. A perfect solution never exists
  3. Having a strategy allows you to fail faster and recover quickly
    • keep notes of what you’re doing and how you’re doing it – to refer back
    • sketch your ideas, get them down on paper
  4. Try to ignore the voice in your head…
    • Embrace early ideas and sparks of creativity but always maintain an open mind
  5. Know when to stop
    • “Overload, clutter, and confusion are not attributes of information, they are failures of design”.  Edward Tufte

There is a wide range of sources of advice and information available on the subject; many of which were touched on during the session.

Useful links

Slideshare collection of Andy Kirk of Visualising Data’s presentations on the subject.
Visualisation Tools and Resources recommended by Andy Kirk

Visualisation websites

Some interesting examples of data visualisation

http://www.chrisjordan.com/gallery/rtn2/#gyre2 – Running the Numbers II: Portraits of global mass culture by Chris Jordan.  This is a fascinating example of something that at first looks like something very familiar (a painting by Van Gogh) but actually when you look closer (click on it)  it’s something completely different… (it actually ‘Depicts 50,000 cigarette lighters, equal to the estimated number of pieces of floating plastic in every square mile in the world’s oceans’).

http://hint.fm/wind/ – Wind map – very visual image of wind patterns in US by Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg

http://oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/united-kingdom/ – OECD Better Life Index – by Moritz Stefaner

Recommended Reading around the subject:

‘The Visual Display of Quantitative Information’ by Edward Tufte
‘Beautiful Visualization’ by Noah Iliinsky & Julie Steele
‘The Functional Art’ by Alberto Cairo
‘Now You See It’ by Stephen Few
‘Visualize This’ by Nathan Yau
‘Data Visualization: a successful design process’ by Andy Kirk

Future-friendly content

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You can’t make assumptions about how people will access your content; the device and platform they use, the context of use, the task they’re actually completing.

You have to make sure your content is available everywhere, so you can service the increasing diversity of how people access it.

Trying to embrace this flexibility has been one of our biggest challenges and has meant we’ve had to take a new look at our processes, workflows and strategies; all with the goal of making our content as future-friendly as possible.

Karen McGrane, in her recently published book Content Strategy for Mobile, sums it up succinctly:

It is your mission to get your content out, on whichever platform, in whichever format your audience wants to consume it. Your users get to decide how, when, and where they want to read your content. It is your challenge and your responsibility to deliver a good experience to them.

Preparing for the future

This isn’t just about making our website work on a mobile, it’s about making our content as accessible and structured as possible, and about getting it ready for a future of unpredictability and complexity.

The biggest challenges we faced as a team was not design- or development-related, but all around content.

We suffered from a lack of consistency and organisation, with content grouped together in structures that were sometimes far from clear.

Bottlenecks within our production workflows and a content management system that was fragmented all contributed to a lack of a clear content strategy.
An opportunity to improve on that became one of the defining principles of this process, one that is still continuing and doesn’t just end with a new website.

Get organised

Taking time to examine and evaluate your content is one of the best bits of advice we can give. If you take the time to put the structure in place, content creation becomes so much easier.

We took it as an opportunity to rethink our processes and workflows for how we produce content. As we’ve outlined previously we took a mix and match approach to align our content to its most appropriate technology.

We took a product-based approach to the core website that meant every resource is now grouped together by content-type. We introduced topics, created a case study repository, and moved our tools and templates into Google Drive.

It’s helped us to prioritise content – having our key resources on our core website and having supplementary content hosted somewhere that best suits their purpose.

Our CMS (WordPress) was carefully considered so that we could not only manage content, but customise it around content-types and taxonomies to make our content meaningful to our end-users.

Discussing this last week within the team, we talked about embracing constraints and making our content more consistent. This wasn’t just about overall consistency but was at a micro-level as well; in terms of navigation, titling, meta data, images, sections, asides and quotes.

Start now

This process is ongoing and will develop as we react to the ever-changing nature of the web. However, by taking the time to think about it now, we’ve put a roadmap in place for producing content that’s flexible and focused on the long-term.

I think the content strategist Sara Wachter-Boettcher puts it best when she says:

Technology will change. Standards will evolve. But the need for understanding our content—its purpose, meaning, structure, relationships, and value—will remain. When we can embrace this thinking, we will unshackle our content—confident it will live on, heart intact, as it travels into the great future unknown.

Start thinking about your content strategy, your workflows and your processes to ensure your content is ready to embrace this challenge.