Last week, (my team and) I had a series of meetings to set our tasks as a CCI-GSU collaborator.
Meeting 1 – Group Meeting
Before setting off, Andrew and I met up to exchange notes on our upcoming meeting. We reviewed potential questions to ask the CCI team (see archives) and took notes on the information already provided via website and email. We noticed that their website was a little messy and lacked direction. Their navigation could use a little work. We began discussing potential fixes. Andrew shared a couple of notes from Dr. Wharton.
Meeting 2 – CCI
At that meeting, we got to understand CCI a little better; they’re a mostly civic-minded group with the desire to promote local Atlanta non-profit work, promote and preserve the culture of Atlanta, and maintain a steady flow of income in order to continue funding their organization. Thus, we were left with a dual identity; CCI has both a nonprofit and marketing sort of face.
Our team got to ask questions (see archives) and got some feedback towards our general duties. Rachel Stanley briefed us on a couple of potential directions we could take; they wanted to edit the website so that it could reflect a better vision of CCI while being more user-friendly, they want potential print deliverables, and they want to figure out a new way to organize their email system. Our team began research on what we could make of our tasks.
(Off Topic – I am ridiculously in love with their space’s interior design. I might post photos later.)
Meeting 3 – Office Hours
I noticed that my website research for CCI was similar to an assignment I had for Dr. Gu’s Digital Publishing course. Thus, I sought both of my professors for permission to make this assignment something I can turn in for both classes; I got approval. Furthermore, Dr. Wharton gave me tips on how to better appraise the website’s rhetoric, in terms of its design and rhetoric. Keeping CCI’s audience and their vision in mind, I started to think about our potential redesign.
Meeting 4 – Impromptu Group Meeting
I ran into Andrew outside of Dr. Wharton’s office. We had an impromptu meeting on how we can better reorganize our redesign. We both agreed to look at navigation and page content, and then compare them to similar websites that generally had better success at what CCI wanted.
Meeting 5 – Pitch Proposal Group Meeting
Our group met in class to discuss how we were going to divide our pitch proposal. We agreed to do them as a team, with separate content. However, we disagreed on how to divide our content because we don’t exactly have a clear direction on how our deliverables were going to proceed. With that intent in mind, we agreed to do more research and come back together to make a decision.
Overall
I think my progress in this collaboration started off very well, but it’s starting to slow down a bit. However, I have confidence that my team will do well. We have defined our purpose and audience; now we intend to develop solutions to best fit the wants of our client.