Integrated communications for Brighton and Hove Labour

Damian Semple, 12/09/2011

How to get from here

+
to here

What follows is an explanation of how we can create a responsive, city-wide communication platform and the required technology. This includes a new campaigning website with mobile-friendly pages, Facebook page, city-wide newspaper, and way of storing and re-using information. Its an informal roadmap for how I would go about it. There will be alternatives so its worth everybody throwing in ideas. Its also limited by my time and is far from comprehensive. Sorry, some of it is a bit techie, but dont let that put you off .

Heres the structure of the existing BrightonHoveLabour.org Wordpress website (hereafter known as BHL.org). Its heavy on information and not goals orientated.

Compare this to a typical campaigning site

Now take a look at these: a. b. c. d. e. f. g. http://www.conservative.org/ http://www.conservatives.com/default.aspx http://www.democrats.org/ http://www.labour.org.uk/ http://www.brightonhovegreens.org/localsites/bh.html http://robinhoodtax.org/ http://www.itgetsbetter.org/

The structure is built around campaigns, donations and various types of participation from Liking on Facebook to getting involved in the actual running of the organisation. Theres a wide definition of participation. We should be aiming for something similar, or better! I suggest we take the following 10 steps. 1. Decide to re-design the existing website. We could hack about with the existing content and design but I think it will be more effective to re-invent the whole site around campaigns and participation. As shown, the existing site doesnt effectively urge people to take up the fight. 2. Decide whats important for the new site. Define the navigation structure, content areas and features. Aim for the fewest number of sections and ensure all content is logical and well sign-posted. It should be immediately apparent and intuitive. A typical navigation structure might include the following: a. News i. Image slideshow ii. Latest news (could be broken down by CLP) iii. Neighbourhood blogs iv. Local campaigns b. Involvement i. Help us ii. Donate iii. Join Labour iv. Follow us on Twitter v. Join the mailing list c. Your views i. Latest social activity Facebook / Twitter ii. Latest polls d. About us i. Meet the parlimentary candidates ii. Meet the Councillors iii. Find us on socials FB, Twitter, YouTube, etc e. Contact us Theres other sections we may need to include. Each one must have a purpose within the overall navigation and promotional structure and must lead people to take action.

3. During this process we should think about the sections of the Facebook page, newspaper and e-Newsletter. We want consistency and strong local branding wherever possible. A section called Meet the candidates on the website ought to be the same in the newspaper. Each step we take to rationalise and standardise content will make it easier to quickly, efficiently produce new materials in the future. Taxonomy is important. Every post on the website should be categorised, e.g. school closure, council tax, NHS cuts. We should define the common ones. They will help in the organisation and searching of the website, and creating the newspaper later on. 4. Create design drafts for the website homepage, Facebook home page, e-newsletter, and the printed newspaper masthead. We should first review existing literature and do some brainstorming. 5. Find a Wordpress theme which comes close to satisfying the design brief. a. Two options: free theme and do a ground up redesign or premium (paid for) theme with built-in options for pre-formatted styles and templates. i. Free themes: 1. Suffusion - http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/suffusion 2. News - http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/profile/devpress ii. Premium themes 1. Elegant themes: http://www.elegantthemes.com 2. Woo themes: http://www.woothemes.com/ 3. Page lines: http://www.pagelines.com/ 4. http://themeforest.net/category/wordpress/nonprofit I favour buying a theme theyre mostly between $35 and $70, come supported and documented, and will enable us to speed up the design and implementation process. Some tweaks will be necessary based on the final design brief but Im reasonably confident we can find a premium template with a 70-80% match. 6. Develop a multimedia style sheet for all the communications materials. This should be minimal to start with fonts, colours, image sizes, etc. Sam made some suggestions about this which we can include. 7. Tweak the website theme for mobiles. Many phones have large screens and fully-fledged browsers so I favour having a fully featured, rich content website with options to see pages in a mobile-friendly way. Use a plug-in to view content on mobiles, either WPTouch or WPTap. i. WPTouch: Pro version is $39. Probably money well spent. ii. WPTap is free but less well used, although this doesnt mean its any worse.

8. Establish a simple production workflow and approval process. Questions to be answered (for me at least!) include: Who decides the city-wide campaigns we support? The ones we initiate? Goals? Who writes copy? Is there an approval process? Where can we store the draft texts? And the pictures? Etc Over time we should aim to build a media database of articles, press releases, photos, leaflets, layouts and any other document that we might want to re-use. This will improve our reaction times and allow us to respond more comprehensively while the issue is live. 9. Create a style sheet for the website that lets us import some of the content into Facebook. 10. Establish a system for exporting the website posts to inDesign for the newspaper / newsletter. Look at plug-ins to do this. Test this plug-in: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/dirty-suds-export-to-indesign/ Other ways to do this here: http://vimeo.com/23106409

This is where I have to end the document. Time permitting Ill add other ideas before the next meeting on September 20th. Ill upload an editable version to Facebook or Google docs.