Web Strategy as Organisational Strategy

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Occasional paper #1

Web Strategy as Organisational Strategy.

Practical tips for small organisations.

About us: Allotment provides affordable strategic consultancy for small and non-profit organisations.

We assist our clients in tackling their big strategic issues by helping them focus online.

We take the position that ideas are only as good as the heads they’re in. That’s why we’re sharing our ideas with everyone thorough these occasional papers.

If you find them useful, please pass them on, and please let us know. We can be found looking after our allotment: allotmentspace.com

What we’re saying: Small organisations can’t afford expensive strategies, even less, expensive strategic consultancy. Web development, well managed, provides many useful and practical opportunities to focus on and manage any organisation’s broader strategic issues.

This paper offers several useful recommendations for small organisations thinking about developing their websites. It contains key principles for using this opportunity to think more strategically about organisational operation and purpose, as well as practical hints and tips on getting the best out of web development. We’ve also included some examples of when we’ve done this for our clients, as its always best to show and tell.

This paper is also useful for web developers themselves, and the advice should be useful for individuals and agencies wishing to focus their offers on more strategic opportunities.

What we know: If we know one thing, it’s this – Your website is the single most powerful external expression of your organisation. However, we all know that. What many people don’t know is: Your website can be used to manage the internal workings of your organisation. This paper outlines some sensible and mainly nontechnical methods for doing this. Going full circle, what this means is:

1. Information architecture as organisational architecture.

Developing the structure of your website is a great opportunity to reflect on how your organisation is structured, and if you’ve designed in the flexibility you’ll need as you grow.

2. Publishing strategy as workflow management.

How and when you publish content to your website is a real opportunity to design rigor into your project management.

The internal workings of your organisation, managed through your website, contribute to the positive and honest expression of your organisation externally.

As this paper explains, the transparent articulation of your organisation online can help you plan for the future, build your project management skills and improve your relationships with third parties.

Or, to put it another way, you can use your web strategy as a major part of your organisational strategy, and you can use the web development process to develop this organisational strategy.

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What you can do: On the following pages we’ve outlined three key principles to help you use web strategy as organisational strategy. We’ve included some examples of clients we’ve worked with that have employed these methods, and concluded each principle with some ‘golden rules’. These principles are:

3. Interactivity as communications strategy.

Your website is an interactive medium. Getting interactive with your communications is an opportunity to get close to your customers and users, which is where you want to be.

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1. Information Architecture as Organisational Architecture Practical tips for small organisations.

The design, or redesign, of your website offers a unique opportunity to reflect on how your organisation is structured, and if you’ve designed-in the flexibility you’ll need as you grow.

We often find that the process of drawing out how an organisation ‘works’ using simple boxes and arrows is a challenge. It’s regularly the case that the people within an organisation can’t clearly articulate how the various activities and people fit together – the web development process can help with this.

A design firm we worked with used the information architecture planning stage of the project to finally get down on paper how they structure their projects. We helped them discover that all their projects followed a similar three step process – although not all projects engaged with every step. This helped them to not only categorise and communicate their previous projects more clearly and effectively, but also enabled them to more easily package up their ‘services’ to prospective clients.

The principle objective of the planning stage of website design and development should be to understand how the organisation works – and if it then needs to change. Be careful though. Although the web development process can be used as a catalyst for organisational change you should never develop a site that doesn’t honestly reflect how you work. You’ll just create problems for yourself as you generate material to publish that doesn’t quite ‘fit’ and third parties who learnt about you through your site discover you’re nothing like the entity presented through your site’s structure.

After winning a very large (and very exciting!) 12 month project, the same design firm we worked with above wanted to revamp their corporate site to completely focus on the specific project’s development. However, we quickly helped them realize that it was unsustainable to mix their organisation’s structure and their organisation’s work. We decided to split off the project site into its own branded domain, but ensured that it featured heavily on their corporate site’s homepage, as one (important) project amongst many.

Honesty is always the best policy. You’ll find it makes your life easier, and your users and customers will thank you for it too.

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Golden rules: 1. Plan well Use the planning stage of website development as a smart way to get some ‘free’ time to reflect on how your organisation is structured. Make sure your developers know you want to spend time considering this, and never let them tell you that one Information Architecture fits all – yes, many sites use similar structures, but you need to decide as an organisation what works for you. You wouldn’t let a recruitment company tell you that one type of employee fits all, so don’t let your web designer do so.

2. Structure your style Modern Content Management Systems (the software you use to easily publish content to a site) help to separate the structure of a website, the Information Architecture, from the content of the site. This makes it easy to reuse, reconfigure and restyle the content in case the structure changes. As an organisation you should always be clear about separating your corporate structure from the work (or content) you produce. This will help to make change, and growth, easier to manage.

3. Be honest Don’t let your web designers create you a website structure that doesn’t reflect how you are actually structured. You’ll regret it when you have content that doesn’t fit anywhere practical, and when clients come to see you expecting something completely different.

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2. Publishing Strategy as Workflow Management Practical tips for small organisations.

Once you’ve got a website that accurately and honestly reflects your organisation and its goals (see above), you’ll need to publish content to it. For many organisations this is real opportunity to design rigor into your project management. Publishing news of a project launch, updating readers with blog posts and writing a considered case study are a great way to publicise, analyse and reflect on your own processes – As long as the tools you’ve got are easy and convenient to use.

One company we worked with now uses the publishing of a monthly newsletter as a vehicle to not only develop relationships with their audience, but also as an internal opportunity to pause and pull their current thinking together from across their organisation.

It’s often easy to get lost in the day to day running of a small organisation. The processes involved in publishing case studies of projects enable small organisations to reflect on the lessons learned, and share their learnings with each other prior to publication.

Publishing strategy can also be used to micro manage some processes - An artist we worked with used the development of his website as a catalyst to incrementally manage the daunting task of scanning in hundreds of music posters for an exhibition. Publishing the scans at the end of each week was the reward for the hard work.

Good time and project management is essential for any organisation, big or small. However, the limited resources available to small organisations make it hard work - your website can make it easier.

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Golden rules: 1. White space Whenever possible deliberately plan in time at the end of projects to write and publish a case study. We call this time white space.

It’s an opportunity to reflect on the lessons learned, and its great if you can share your learnings with the team prior to publishing them on your website.

2. Keep it simple, clever The cleverest thing you can do when developing your website is to make the publishing tools you use as simple as possible. This doesn’t mean you should use a Content Management System (CMS) that lacks power, far from it, but you should insist that the fields and forms you have to fill out are as simple as possible. The more ‘bits’ you have to create for each ‘thing’ you publish, the less likely you are to do it. We generally suggest that people try to get every ‘thing’ down to a title, a short paragraph summary, the main content and one separate picture.

3. Change a little a lot Publishing isn’t like riding a bike. If you don’t do it long enough you’ll forget how to. It’s far better to publish three small things a month than one long thing. Users expect websites to change, especially if there’s a ‘news’ or ‘latest’ section. If you’ve managed both of the above – giving yourself the time to publish and ensuring your developers design the CMS to make it easy to do so – you’ll find this easy.

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3. Interactivity as Communications Strategy Practical tips for small organisations.

Once you have a website that honestly and accurately reflects your organisation (see above), and you’re successfully managing the process of publishing material on to it (also above), you need to consider what and why you publish.

Whatever your sector, whatever your size, whenever you publish content to your site you should have one thing in mind: interactivity.

The more interactive you make your communications, the less work you’ll have to do in promoting them, the less money you’ll have to spend, and the more your audience will enjoy the experience.

We worked with a government agency to help promote their website at a large event for small creative studios. Instead of simply presenting the website to the (potential) users, we enlisted their help in building a new micro-site then and there to record the event.

People gave us photos and recordings of things happening in the space, and made suggestion for how to organise and categorise their studios and exhibits. The micro-site become an interactive living record of the event, involving users and building community – all the while promoting the service of the agency’s existing site.

Building interactivity into your communications means thinking carefully about the type of relationship you want to have with your audiences, and what type of relationship they want with you – which means really understanding who they are.

We often help our clients to develop ‘personas’, or examples of typical audiences, for their websites to help them evaluate decisions from their users perspective about the design of the site and the positioning of the content. The personas always become useful later, after the web development is finished, to help them evaluate any other decisions that will involve users or customers.

Getting interactive with your communications means getting close to your customers and users – which, after all, is where you want to be.

Golden rules: 1. Get involved If you’re going to talk with your users instead of just talking at them you’ll need to get involved with what they’re doing. Developing a website is a great opportunity to conduct some informal research. Invite your best (and worst) customer in for a chat and find out what really makes them tick, what they love, what they hate, and what you can do to make their lives easier.

2. Get personal Interactivity means different things to different people. Fortunately the flexibility provided by your website enables you to offer something unique to many different people.

Some people may want Pdfs to download, others may want audio, some may want a quick summary, others a lengthy read. Make sure your developers understand the different needs of your audiences, and that they provide you with the tools to easily deliver the appropriate content to them.

3. Get on with it The great thing about being interactive on the web is that you don’t have to hang around for developers. You can set up a free website in a matter of minutes and there’s a universe free tools available to help you spread the word, so what are you waiting for – get going!

Allotment assists small organisations in tackling their big strategic issues by helping them focus online. We hope you’ve found these ideas useful, and we hope you agree with us that web development is a simple and cost effective way to help your organisation with some of its strategic questions. If you’d like to work with us, you can find us looking after our allotment at: www.allotmentspace.com

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