Interview with Chas Offutt on American Rivers' Redesign Strategy

Thanks Andrew, it's great to be here.

Hi, my name is Chas Offutt and I'm the director of internet strategy at American Rivers.

Over the last year, my organization went through a major website transformation from largely a PDF repository to a people-focus effort that produces smaller, more digestible chunks.

During the summer of 2006, our team (Leslie Beck, Lindsay Martin & myself) devised an online strategy that supported the organization’s larger community-centric mission of getting people involved with river protection. Though we knew the conversation was happening online (blogs, videos and photos), it was simply occurring without our involvement.

Our plan to “sit at the table” began with our website redesign. To sharpen our audience focus as well as sell the plan internally, we launched a six-month redesign blog, online surveys and individual interviews. All of this data, helped us to prepare – and test – various engagement tools to better position ourselves within the conversation.

To date, we have 30+ videos uploaded to YouTube, more than 600 user-submitted photos on Flickr (+ 1,000 of our own), hundreds of press hits on Del.icio.us and nearly 350 total blog posts from program & outreach staff.

Though a consistent voice is key, we didn’t have the staff resources to dedicate to an organization blog. We strive to have a consistent *tone* comprised of 10-12 unique voices that together help tell (and link together) our story.

This by design helps to take the pressure off one person to write/maintain a blog and creates more of a community of storytellers. Although I read everything that is posted and I’m able to keep an eye out to help facilitate the process, there is no moderator or reviewer of posts before they go live.

Our blog effort is less of a traditional blog and more of an engine to our site. The 40-page science-based PDF publications are great, and serve a much needed purpose to our mission, but now we also offer our readers/visitors smaller, more digestible bites of our work—on a daily basis!

No, I didn’t seek approval as I saw this project as a separate assignment and done on my own time. Would I recommend that to you? No, b/c no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t keep them apart.

About 3 weeks in, I knew I had to keep this going as it was a great vetting process for me and our work so I informed my supervisor as it was sure to get out (it always does), his response, “I don’t get it, but okay by me.” Shortly thereafter, I was fortunate that the organization embraced the concept.

Honestly, I was inspired by Robert Scoble and Chris Anderson (see my first blog post) to walk the talk, bring smarter/more experienced folks in to the conversation and begin testing out some of our redesign ideas/feedback on an unofficial focus group.

Ha, that would have been great! The redesign blog was a sounding board for ideas, if someone wanted to run with one, more power to them. I was in it to learn and share our experiences—and jump-start the conversation internally.

Change is difficult as this is a completely new approach to our work, but staff have been great. We have 6 day posts one day and nothing the next so the challenge has been to keep it up with consistent chatter and insight in to our work on a daily basis. Like all work online, it does require constant training, nudging and encouragement. But it's exciting to see staff talk about their work in conversational terms.

The conversation online was already happening, we just didn’t have a seat at the table. Who likes to be talked about in third person!

You can’t, but you can provide the tools to help better shape the conversation. This is a difficult one for all organizations: the harder you try to *push* the message, the greater the potential for it to backfire—online audiences want to be involved in the process or at least feel they were involved. Some of the tools popular today to help influence the conversation are video, widgets, peer-to-peer sites, etc.

Wow, we did quite a bit for our branding work! What we did for the redesign was pretty informal. During our “discovery phase” we broke up our users in to groups by the types of responses we received from an online survey: activists, partners, prospects, etc.

Our findings from the survey, info that filtered down from the branding work, comments from the redesign blog, and member calls/emails for the most part defined our information architecture.

This information is so vital to the overall process; I really wish we could have spent more time—gaining the perspective outside of your organization/company is the website redesign holy grail.

Well, we’re striving for both with content on Treehugger, but currently it’s a little more weighted to our blog. Our goal with the blog was to 1) personalize our efforts by connecting people to people, not organization to people, 2) blog provides dynamic content for the whole site, and 3) increase our key words SEO ranking.

Yes, our work revolves around community participation, and our online efforts are beginning to catch up and support the larger org’s objective to get more individuals engaged with river protection.

Opening the doors online to greater engagement strengthens the efforts on a local level too. What you do online is only as strong as what you do off; offline and online efforts should not be mutually exclusive.

Tough question, but important. Basically, we pay a good deal of attention to metrics. Metrics are extremely important, but it’s so easy to get lost in analysis paralysis too. We look out for “engagement trends” online, such as email conversions, blog readership, actions taken, money raised, etc. And it’s got to be fun, so creativity to engage our audience is a must.

Nag? Nope, more of a gentle nudge:)

Folks have been great, but posts have gone in waves so we have to keep on top of suggesting ideas, pointing writers to other blog posts that mention them/their work and encouraging them to rethink the outward comm process.

And then there the continuing ed, next month we're planning on an in house blogging panel...

One the bigger challenges was working with so many cooks in the kitchen during the redesign; we had designers, developers project mgrs and convio folks to guide the process since we use them for our cms.

The best solution we came up with was regular check ins(weekly), clear responsibilities and a strict production schedule.

YES, all the time! It's a good question and we're still exploring options, but I think it's about finding the common denominators.

Basically, I think it's about answering the quesiton: what's in it for me (indiv users)? That's what we're working on. What can we provide that speaks to those niche water groups who are already on board with river conservation...hmmm

We actually use Convio, but I guess same thing now (Convio acquired GA not long ago). Convio is a great tool, but it had its quarks (like most). Fortunately, we had two great team members from Convio that were helping us translate the do’s and don’ts with our production team.

We use Convio for everything: CRM, CMS (well, their version), fundraising and advocacy. Everything we do on the national site is through Convio.

As for the other software, we use wordpress for our blog and mediawiki for our river glossary. We’re also running Act for Healthy River and Flushie’s Summer Vacation on Drupal. National River Cleanup Week was built by hand by a one-person php team.

Not necessarily software, but we do use Del.icio.us to push the Daily River News links out as a feed to subscribers as well as various pages on our site (I really like this and stole shamelessly from EchoDitto—they find the best links!).

Wow, so many metrics to choose from...but my favorite (or one I check most often) is referrals. I want to know who's talking and linking to us so that we can respond appropriately with a comment or question...to be proactive I guess.

By putting people first, we’re betting on the fact that since people give to people, people will support people and become more involved on a local level to clean rivers.

Focusing on community involvement, we want our users/audience to think of the people at American Rivers and then the organization. Example, when you think of wild and scenice, we want you to think of Quinn, or rain gardens, Gary. That kind of thing, the org is great, but it's b/c our staff (yes, shameless plug).

Well, we began officially last October and launched in April, which was pretty fast. I've heard of other orgs' discovery process lasting up to 2 years! From Oct-Jan we focused on strategy, content/IA (we cut our site down in half) and look we were after.

Scheduling glitch? Well, ideally I'd wished we could have launched a few weeks earlier to the biggest traffic day of the year, Am's most endangered rivers. Though we were live, we had major hiccups over those first few days/weeks...but there gets to be a pt when you just have to flip the switch.

Organizational dynamics probably. For the last few years there was a certain mind set of how we did things online; the website was largely an after thought.

To address this, we conducted happy hours, brown bag lunches and internal focus groups to get staff excited about the redesign as well as begin exploring tools that could help tell their story.

This in the end opened up the conversation internally and made the overall process extremely transparent to the staff.

Well, actually a lot of spam. I'm a big fan of the wiki, but the daily mgt of it has gotten to be too great. We're still working on it though, but I love it. It has such great link potential on search engines too...I'm not giving up on it yet.

Great, thank you Andrew.