Planning. Strategically.

Since I've decided to stay on another year, my work these days hasn't been about wrapping up. Instead, it's been about moving forward!

We spent a week at a beautiful retreat center in Virginia on a grant from EMC Arts/Dorris Duke to strategize the implementation of a new innovation in the project. We're going to be spending the next eight months developing and launching phase two of our website. It will be a highly interactive advocacy space on which people can 1. hear a story, 2. share a story, 3. take action. We're going to use advocacy tools (looking at possibly using Salsa) and are now in the process of working with a great consultant to help us develop a plan for a designer. An example of how this will work:
We got a call into our StoryLine from a woman whose husband used to be a marine, and since coming home has gotten locked up. (Listen to the call here) We want to design a campaign around the issue of veterans being incarcerated. But right now we don't really have the capacity for that to happen. So this new web platform will allow us to kickstart that campaign and get people to take action.

To make that all happen, I'm doing a few big things right now:

1) developing a work plan that will help our staff clarify job descriptions and our roles in the project, and give us guidance in the coming months. I'm using a google spreadsheet to do this, so that we can edit together.

2) Continuing migrating our former FileMakerPro database to our new SalesForce database. Does anyone know of a good consultant to bring in to help us think about SalesForce? We need to customize it to best suit our needs, and know that we can't do that alone...

3) Working with our audio database to find good content to help kickstart the new web platform. Also working with the artists in our network to produce new artistic content for the new site.

We sent out a survey to a couple thousand of our closest friends (mostly grassroots criminal justice folks) about the kind of communications methods they're using to help inform our development of this platform. I was able to analyze the results of the survey to help us understand what kinds of tools people are using.

Twitter has been a hit. I'm glad we're using it. Not only has it brought people to our website (one of my main goals for it), but I'm starting to have conversations with folks on it about criminal justice and technology. I also think that it's an organizing tool. Espeically when we're looking at how to spread messages/stories through the web, it seems like it's a productive way to reach a certain constituency.

And we're in the process of hiring another VISTA, which is exciting.