Tuesday, August 2nd, 2011
When we were first approached by the folks at Bright Futures about working with them on the Rebuild Joplin website, we knew it was going to be a very unique project, and an even more unique opportunity for us. Very rarely does an idea come along that will so directly reach to the heart of people's immediate needs. The fact that the idea that was proposed hinged on the web made it that much more appealing to us. We knew that if the project had clear objectives that were set forth and respected from the get go, the site would become a very effective tool in the hands of the people of Joplin who were effected by the Tornado that hit town on Sunday, May 22nd.
We are strong believers in the idea that your objectives can make or break a project. We fight hard for the belief that websites are successful when the objectives you are attempting to accomplish are clear. Even the artistic side of a project can--and needs to be--driven by clear objectives. Fortunately, despite a quick timeline, the team who initiated the Rebuild project knew exactly what they were attempting to accomplish.
There were a few scenarios they were trying to prevent in the wake of the Tornado. These would eventually become our top objectives for the project and our two primary audiences.
Some secondary objectives we had were:
The last secondary objective was particularly important to the different stakeholders in the project. Countless local websites and organization were attempting to house any relevant informant regarding tornado recovery, but because of the fluid nature of the situation, information quickly became inaccurate and out of date. The site needed to be easily maintained and information needed to be easily updated.
SPI does not normally take on identity projects. However, the quick timeline that the Rebuild project was on did not afford us the opportunity to try and bring in an outside designer to help use get something put together. Taking one of the objectives of the project to note, which was making the site feel official and legitimate, we knew the identity needed to have a certain characteristic to it made it feel official. A simple seal helped us accomplish that objective.
Since a majority of the content that was going to be housed within the site was geared for either of the two main audiences, it lead to an incredibly simple design. As a user of the site, you were either looking to give, or you had a need. All the content was going to be oriented around those two main categories. This led to a really simple design that funneled users of the site in one of two directions.
In the immediate days following the tornado a majority of communication that was happening within the city occurred almost entirely through social media. This was a partiuclrly fascinating aspect of the relief effort. Joplin isn't an incredibly web savvy community so to see such a vast portion of the community embrace it and use it was pretty inspiring. It was easier to post to Facebook and Twitter than to try and make a phone call or send an SMS. This was a very obvious sign to us that we needed to have a mobile version of the site ready to go within he first phase of the project.
We used some basic responsive techniques to deliver a fully functional version of the site. It was a fun challenge to undertake. We have been wanting to do add some responsive work in to our bag of tricks.
The project was set up in Expression Engine, a cms that acts more like a platform in our opinion. We knew we were going to need to use its ability to relate entries to one another. We had three main channels in the system:
So why not just make organization needs and community resources fields within the organization channel? There was potential for a given organization to be offering more than one community resource and have more than one need at any given time. Instead of contantly having to go back and ad new fields to an channel, it made much more sense to allow entries to relate bac to one another. This allowed for a many two one relationship all centered around the organization. This also allowed the most important information that was related to the relief efforts to be organized and searchable independant of what organization was offering it.
The site's immediate impact has already come and gone and in the coming month we are going to be a doing a pretty big realign of the site. The number of individuals needing immediate help is waning and more of the sites traffic is focused toward giving to the relief effort. Rebuild Joplin, if it is going to remain effective needs to adjust to focus more on specific opportunities and organizations to give to.
You can view the live site at www.rebuildjoplin.org
