The finish line was finally crossed in the 22nd hour of the 5th day in the 2016th year of our Lord.
As I reflect on this project, I can’t help but feel a sense of pride at what we as a team were able to accomplish. I believe our deliverables in our final packet presented a cohesive vision of how we hoped to help and change how The Center for Civic Innovation interacts with the public.
Before this project, I had never worked with a group of people on a project this size making this a true learning experience for me in more ways than one. Every team member had a job and a specific part of the project to create and manage. While I took on the role of Content Manager, I also became the Project Manager of this project which added a few more wrinkles (for me) into our otherwise successful project.
An insight that I learned quickly was that everyone else in my group had not only this project and classwork, but 3-5 other classes to worry about as well, while I only had the one. Understanding this, I gladly took on the role of facilitator to make this project easier for my teammates and thus a better chance of an outstanding final product. A big part of that was research. Since I was a history major in my undergrad, I love research. The feeling of finding an insight that can bust a prospectus paper wide open is still just as exhilarating now as it was in 2009. So, from the start and before we even met with our client, I began researching our client, their company and their history. While I’ll admit, I may have gone overboard (we never used my doc detailing every member of the staff, their professional specialties and educational histories), the research became quite valuable when figuring out how we wanted to tackle our set of deliverables.
One the first insights we had as a group was that the website wasn’t as user friendly as it could be. It is clunky, dark and filled with walls of thin text. We all agreed this was something we could definitely help them with even before our first client meeting. After our interview with the client, Rachel, we were given direction on what exactly our deliverables would be for CCI: a website redesign, newsletter redesign and flyer redesign. After this I was excited to get started and we were off to the races.
Out of my own curiosity and in preparation for our Pitch Presentation I took I keen interest in the newsletter deliverable. Rachel had stated that she wanted the newsletter to be shorter and connect better between their website and their Mailchimp account. After researching the previous newsletters and taking a Writing for The Web tutorial on Lynda.com I noticed that their links could be a part of the actual text descriptions and not separated. The descriptions for calendar events were very lengthy, so combined with linking actual bits of usable text, I recommended that we condense the text and then provide the full descriptions of the events in their actual calendar. This would and did remove quite a bit of length from the newsletter and improved functionality. I provided my research in preparation for our Pitch Eryn and she ran with it from there.
For our Pitch Presentation, I had never used Google Slides and so to add some more software under my belt I created our presentation with it. The initial presentation was originally meant just for my own grade and extra points, but my team realized that I had also created very professional looking presentation template. So, for our presentation each team member added their specific deliverables and a Pitch Presentation was born. Afterwards we received feedback from Rachel agreeing on our directions and recommendations for our deliverables. During this time, I also took over most client communication to make sure emails were being sent to the client in a timely manner.
Following our presentation, I created the Memorandum of Understanding by following the template provided in the previous Service Learning Project packet. Once this was complete I met (due to scheduling group could not meet at the same time) with Rachel for a follow up meeting in which she signed off on our scope of work. Also in this meeting, she mentioned that she did not want to change the front side of the current Flyer but was interested in what we could come up with on the back sides of Quivana’s different types of flyers.
After our meeting with Rachel I spoke with the team member at CCI who is in charge of handing out and transporting the flyers. He let me know the drawbacks of the current flyer and what specifically he wanted in a new flyer. I provided this information to Quivana and the group as well. While Quivana provided a few versions, the feedback we received from Rachel did not seem clear and Quivana struggled to create a draft of the flyer that was closer to what we believed Rachel was looking for (still unsure). But in the end Quivana left CCI with a great path to create 3 different versions of their current flyers. At the very least they did agree with our recommendation to create smaller flyers that could target specific audiences and events that were also easier to transport.
The website redesign deliverable was actually fun for me since I knew this experience would be great to recall during an interview. Per our discussions with Rachel we began redesigning the site by creating a trial account with Square Space. This was great since it allowed me to login and play around get a feel for how it works. In my opinion, Kris did a great job with the redesign. Her style guide was comprehensive and impressive as well. My specific end of the project was Content Management of the redesign. At first, I was unsure how this would happen. Rachel informed us that she was not interested in us re-writing the copy as much as finding ways to condense or make the information more user friendly.
After digging through their site, one aspect of the design we could change easily was the reorganization of the content and site navigation. By reorganizing these subpages and navigation into a more intuitive and logical order I believe it increased the efficiency of how their information could be accessed. While the Programs and Initiatives pages were well written and designed, About, Cowork and Membership were not. These pages are opportunities for CCI to show their personality and display what makes them unique and they seemed like an afterthought. I believe that the work we did in our redesign in these three areas will help them generate more traffic to their office space thus generating more income which will help them expand the mission of CCI.
While reading and writing my annotations about hierarchy, I had the bright idea to highlight or embolden certain passages of the site to make the important information on each page easier to read without deleting any content. I tried this technique on the About page and realized that I could read the key information much quicker, but also that the large bodies of text were now broken up and less intimidating to read. With this insight, I then went page by page highlighting certain words and passages that I thought would improve understanding without removing any content that could be accessed at later date if necessary. This turned into more work than I thought it would be since their website is quite text heavy, but I am pleased with the final product. I hope they are too!
My only regret is Rachel did not want us to incorporate more images of their office space since we all believe that would help immensely in recruiting new members and coworkers. Their location is not easy to get to and with out great images of the office spaces or conference rooms, the casual visitor has no idea whether the trip down there is worth their time. But hopefully they will add those soon.
In conclusion, this was an awesome class and I’m really glad that I was able to take it. Especially since I began the process to enroll two weeks before the semester started! This project was also a great experience. Working for CCI was a great client for me since I’m looking to transfer immediately into the real world of tech writing as soon as possible and the work was more closely aligned with what I may end up doing soon. For the project, I had to learn to work with a team with different work and communication styles. This part of the project was great as well since this more closely mirrors the professional world.
As for my team? They did great too. I know they all had a lot on their plates and everyone came through with what was asked of them. Artwork is never truly done, so there are parts of our project we could work on a little more, but it is done. At times I felt as though I was performing a larger share of the work, which at times I was, but I would gladly do it again since it aided our group in creating the best set of deliverables we could. I also didn’t have 4 other classes to worry about either, so I was glad to be in a position to help out more and make this project easier for my teammates. They also taught me patience since many times they turned their work in at the last minute. But to their credit, they always came through. All good things.
