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Measuring
I’ve been thinking of how to measure engagement in the digital space for a while now, so I wanted to aggregate my thoughts and put them in one place. This post is intended to be provocative and get people thinking about how the current thinking of measurement of social media should change. It isn’t meant to be a one-size-fits-all solution – more an articulation of things that people should consider more and more when they embark on work in the online social space.
Assessing necessity
Some brands do not need to engage with their customers online, period. Products like bread or socks, for example, are not the kind of things that people want to have a social relationship with anywhere, forget online. It just makes them look silly.
Defining engagement
Defining what engagement means to you as a brand at the outset is important. Is it having a certain number of comments? Getting people to contribute ideas to a wiki? Making sure they spend x amount of time on a site? It is only later that the ‘how’ of engagement should come into play. The answer to ‘how can we measure the impact of our website/community’ can only be given when you answer ‘what exactly am I looking for’ first.
Areas of engagement
If brands do engage online, where they engage is more important than how many places they are active online. I’d rather pick my battles (Facebook, Twitter and Flickr, for example) and fight them well rather than have my social finger in too many pies (all the above plus MySpace, Bebo, YouTube, LinkedIn, Hi5, Friendster, Orkut etc.) and not be able to have meaningful conversations with anyone. Of course this depends on where your audience is. They could well be in Second Life and Vimeo, and if they are, then that’s where you should be – not Facebook. (more after the break)
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Protect The Human – new designs for Campaign pages
Protect The Human is Amnesty’s International UK site. It’s designed to engage people to stand up for humanity and human rights.We’ve recently redesigned and launched new campaign pages on Protect The Human. The aim of the redesign was to improve the user experience and usability, which would lead to the increase in numbers of people getting involved in the campaigns for human rights.
Campaigns play a crucial role on Protect The Human. They are designed to highlight the ongoing problems happening in the world. Each campaign has a range of actions for people to take in order to fight the injustice.
To improve the campaign pages and increase the number of people taking actions, we’ve done some major changes. We started with the campaigns index page.
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Protect The Human’s new Actions pages now live
Following on from my last post about PTH’s Campaigns pages, the new Actions pages are now live as well. Together they make for a much improved user experience, not to mention how much better they look. Our hope is that this inspires more people to campaign for human rights. A huge thank you to Julia, Paul Sims, Oli and our development partners New Bamboo for their work on this.
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Protect The Human’s Campaigns pages get a new look
We’ve been labouring long and hard with the folks at New Bamboo and of course Amnesty UK to deliver some important design changes to the Protect The Human campaigning platform. Our hope is that these changes will make the site easier to use and more compelling to visit, encouraging more people to take actions and champion the cause of human rights. We recently wrote about how we launched the new homepages and Facebook Connect for the site. Now, here’s a look at the new Campaigns pages, which went live this morning. We’re working on similar changes to the Actions pages, which will launch soon. Julia will explain the whole design process when that’s done, but in the meantime, here’s a look at Campaigns:
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Protect The Human, now with Facebook Connect
We’re very excited about today’s launch of Facebook Connect for Protect The Human, Amnesty International UK’s digital campaigning platform. Facebook Connect is great for external websites because of the huge social potential it offers (for those of you that have doubts, look at this presentation), but it is even more important for a site like Protect The Human because of the worthy causes Amnesty International supports. Protect The Human is all about rallying your friends behind human rights causes that you as an individual care a lot about. It is about transforming the power of an individual into the power of many. And, as Barack Obama said,
One voice can change a room, and if one voice can change a room, then it can change a city, and if it can change a city, it can change a state, and if it change a state, it can change a nation, and if it can change a nation, it can change the world. Your voice can change the world.
It’s pretty simple, really – all you need to do is sign in to Protect The Human, connect to Facebook with the Facebook Connect button, and start inviting your friends to join. Also, when you take specific actions on Protect The Human such as sending an email to ensure there is no crackdown on protests in Iran, you can post a notification to Facebook, alerting your friends there and (hopefully) encouraging many of them to do the same.
THIS is why the internet is truly powerful.
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Protect The Human new homepage
Following up on Tim’s recent post on the new Protect The Human homepages, I’m going to write about the process I went through to create the final homepage designs.
1. Sketching
I started with sketches. Sketching ideas on the paper helped me visualize quickly what we wanted to achieve through the new homepages and how we wanted to address current site’s issues.
It was an easy way to present the initial ideas to people involved in the project (client, creative director, developer, etc.), and made it easy to apply any changes required. It was also much quicker than creating the initial visuals in photoshop!
2. Creating ‘grey boxes’ in photoshop
After the sketching session I had a clear idea how to present both logged in and logged out homepage objectives. I knew the content that should go on the pages and I could start playing with it in photoshop.
I started with laying out grey content boxes on the page, creating the grid, and showing the hierarchy.
Logged in homepage
Logged out homepage
3. Designing
The next step was to start the design. I did several versions of the homepage before achieving the final one. However, the previous two steps saved a lot of my time and made the actual design process less frustrating.
Here are the final designs:
Logged out homepage
Logged in homepage
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On the logged in homepage, for users who have only just registered and are new to Protect The Human, there is a set of 3 automatic, time-based actions suggested for them to take:
Once user starts taking actions this panel changes to suggest personalized actions:
‘Recent highlights’ panel becomes also personalized (Highlights for you) once user has specified interests. It displays the content based on user’s chosen tags and campaigns.
I’ve also created two templates for the feature area so that Amnesty has the flexibility to choose the type of content they want to show. They highlight crucial events, campaigns, etc., and urge the user to take action.
Video template
Image Gallery template
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Overall, I did truly enjoy the whole design process. Simple things like sketching can make the whole design process so much easier.
More improvements to the site will follow as we’re currently working on them.
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News: new release of Amnesty’s ProtectTheHuman.com
We’ve made a new release of ProtectTheHuman.com, the social media campaigning platform and activism community we launched for Amnesty UK in August 2008.
This latest release introduces:
- a new logged-out home page designed to optimise sign-up
- a souped-up logged-in home page that provides more personalised content and better signposting to activity throughout the site
- a new global ‘eyebrows and beard’ navigation set at the top and bottom of the page – designed to make it easier for users to move between Amnesty’s network of sites
- closer integration with the Protect The Human blog, to reflect its growing role as the ‘voice’ at the heart of the community
- Twitter to the home page, as a link at this stage, but reflecting the ever-increasing importance of Amnesty UK’s Twitter network as a campaigning platform woven through just about all activity on and off-site at Protect The Human
The combined effect of these changes is to create a more joined-up experience, and to make it easier for site users to discover and carry out online actions in support of Amnesty’s campaigns.
But that’s not all. Another push in the next couple of weeks will see the deployment of Facebook Connect integration that will make it even easier to sign up, and take campaigning at Protect The Human inside Facebook. And Julia and Paul have started working on some changes to tighten up and optimise the Campaigns and Actions sections of the site and the way these interactions work.
Well done to Julia and Oli for their design and front-end skills, as well as to our dev partners New Bamboo. Big shout to Amnesty’s Web team as well (especially Sara, Fiona, Sam, Aggie, Ben and Vero). We’ve all worked as one team on this project. I know Julia wants to write a post about the process we followed.
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New release of Amnesty’s ProtectTheHuman.com
We’ve made a new release of ProtectTheHuman.com, the social media campaigning platform and activism community we launched for Amnesty UK in August 2008.
This latest release introduces:
- a new logged-out home page designed to optimise sign-up
- a souped-up logged-in home page that provides more personalised content and better signposting to activity throughout the site
- a new global ‘eyebrows and beard’ navigation set at the top and bottom of the page – designed to make it easier for users to move between Amnesty’s network of sites
- closer integration with the Protect The Human blog, to reflect its growing role as the ‘voice’ at the heart of the community
- Twitter to the home page, as a link at this stage, but reflecting the ever-increasing importance of Amnesty UK’s Twitter network as a campaigning platform woven through just about all activity on and off-site at Protect The Human
The combined effect of these changes is to create a more joined-up experience, and to make it easier for site users to discover and carry out online actions in support of Amnesty’s campaigns.
But that’s not all. Another push in the next couple of weeks will see the deployment of Facebook Connect integration that will make it even easier to sign up, and take campaigning at Protect The Human inside Facebook. And Julia and Paul have started working on some changes to tighten up and optimise the Campaigns and Actions sections of the site and the way these interactions work.
Well done to Julia and Oli for their design and front-end skills, as well as to our dev partners New Bamboo. Big shout to Amnesty’s Web team as well (especially Sara, Fiona, Sam, Aggie, Ben and Vero). We’ve all worked as one team on this project. I know Julia wants to write a post about the process we followed.
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A nice note from Amnesty UK
Last week we received a nice email from Amnesty UK, one of our clients, about the work we’re doing on Protect The Human.
I mentioned to William some feedback on PTH our Head of IT, Kamesh received at an IT conference last week. Please pass on to all involved. As part of a panel discussion on best practise websites he submitted PTH.com to be reviewed as one of 5 sites. It came out on top. It was referred to time and time again by the panel as an excellent example of user engagement that worked on many levels and incentivised users. It was also held up as a leading example of good user experience and best practise in terms of site usability and accessibility.
What can we say, it’s always nice to hear good things! We still have some distance to go with it, but Protect The Human is especially important to us because of the causes that it aims to garner public support for. If you’re not on it yet, then you should be – and please pass the word along to everyone you know.
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Protect The Human success re ‘No’ to 42 days
Great news for civil liberties in our green and pleasant land: MPs have dropped their plans to extend detention without trial to 42 days.
This is in no small part due to the relentless efforts of Amnesty International UK and its supporters to highlight the issue with a national petition, and to encourage voters in 20 constituencies whose MPs were undecided on the issue that this is not something the British people want.
Protect The Human garnered a staggering 9,503 signatures for the “Say ‘No’ to 42 days!” petition. Online campaigning in action. If you haven’t seen the video produced by Dark Fibre with music from the Orb and voiceover by Christopher Eccleston (erstwhile Dr Who), go and take a look.
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