UNANIMA Board meeting

Today I've attended the UN ANIMA Board meeting. Actually I came there during the session where Jessica made a presentation about the new website development.

It was an interesting experience to see real people behind the strange name of the organization. They all are very energetic ladies in their 60-70s. I didn't have a chance talk to them a lot, but it looks they are doing a very interesting work around the world in many fields, like human trafficking, for example. Some of them are definitely more advanced in Internet usage then we thought (three of 15 or 17 even had their laptops and were upset when they couldn't hook up to Internet at the conference room).

They don't have a set vision about the web site they want, but were eagerly engaged in a discussion about the future site. They had some good ideas (see the list below). Jessica handed our questioner asking to fill it out right there, but they asked for more time to think about the answers, because they hadn't answers right away and wanted to think more. They will give them to Catherine tomorrow before the end of the Board meeting.

Catherine is a very nice lady with bright eyes. She can meet with us any time next week. I've suggested her Tuesday and she is fine with that. I've to follow up on that after hearing from the team about the best time for us to meet. She will bring questionnaires to the meeting.

Here are some ideas from Anima ladies:

• To have a member section with the password access.
• They would like to have 4 languages.
• To have news feed on the front page.
• To use Flash Dreamweaver
• One of the Congregations from Kansas has a Wiki page for one of their programs for the secondary school teachers. It would be good to have a link to their Wiki that other UNANIMA communities could participate and to contribute.
• To measure effectiveness of the web site and each page (for example to use Google analytic).
• To think about the new logo and the visual concept for UNANIMA.
• To have a weekly mailing to Board members.

I think we will get more their ideas from questionnaires.

My impression, that UNANIMA will greatly benefit if we will come up with the communication plan which will allow them to make their network communication more efficient. I'd like to talk with Catherine to find out about their communication mechanisms and operational procedures to understand better how their Network functions. That will help us to come up with recommendations how to use web 2.0 tools.

Qs for our Questionnaire with UNANIMA staff and board members

Here are some questions we came up with.

1. Goals of web site
a. What do you believe is the main purpose(s) of the site? (i.e. communications goals)
b. What do you want to achieve through your web site?
c. What are the key functions that your site must provide?
d. What overall shape would you like the web site to take?
(note: are questions 1c and 1d be redundant??)
e. What are your favorite and least favorite aspects of the web site?
f. What are some of your favorite web sites? (What sites do you visit most often)
g. If you could choose one or two web sites, which web sites would you like UNANIMA's web site modeled after?
h. Is there a staff member from your field network that is enthusiastic about the idea of blogging on UNANIMA’s web site? If yes, would this person have the time to maintain a blog

2. Audience
a. Who is the site’s current and main audience? (i.e. Who is a typical person that visits your site?)
b. Who would you like to reach as an aspiration audience?
i. Activists__________________YES ___________NO
ii. Press____________________YES ___________NO
iii. Donors___________________YES ___________NO
iv. Other(s)____________________________(Please specify)

c. What goals or tasks do your audience need to achieve when visiting your site?
d. What information does your audience need from your site?
e. What skills does a typical user of your web site have? (How web savvy are they? How much time does a typical user spend on Internet daily/ weekly?")
f. What languages do your audience members use on your site?
g. Where are your audience members located? Are there issues with Internet connection speed?

We welcome any thoughts, suggestions, and advice on which questions are the most salient.

Web Developer for UNANIMA

It's great that our non-profit is hiring a web developer. Revamping their website is clearly a top priority. But it does raise a few questions in my mind as to what the distinction will be between our group's work, the web developer's vision and the web manager's vision. UNANIMA has been accepting proposals from potential developers who pitched how they imagine the new site to look and function. An internal staff member is in charge of redeveloping the front end of the site. It seems our job is to combine the two, and offer an overall communications strategy. It will be interesting, though, to see how we might potentially overlap/contribute/diverge from the web developer's plan. It could create confusion, or it could facilitate an even more effective web plan for our final project.

Plans for UNANIMA

Today our team met with Jessica Chen, who oversees UNANIMA's website. It was great to put a face to the organization and very helpful to hear her perspective on UNANIMA and her vision for the site. UNANIMA seems to serve several different communities and has many aspects to its organizational mission. Hopefully we'll be able to help them streamline a bit. We'll be presenting our initial thoughts on Thursday, so more details to come.