In 2008, the Bullitt Foundation launched an ambitious new strategic plan through which it will focus on urban issues, business and technology, ecosystem services and planning, and civic engagement, with the bulk of its activity centered in and around metropolitan Anchorage, Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, and Boise.
ONE/Northwest helped Bullitt design and execute a beautiful, functional new website centered around iconic images of its new focus. Combined with Plone's legendary usability, Bullitt now has a web presence that captures its essence, impresses first-time visitors, and speeds grantseekers on their way to action.
]]>Dogwood had a solid Plone site that we built for them back in 2005. Since then, their work has grown and evolved, and their organization has become much more sophisticated about how it communicates and organizes online.
Dogwood wanted an updated site that would have a much more polished visual design. In addition, Plone had evolved a great deal, and Dogwood wanted to be able to harness all of the new capabilities of Plone 3.
Dogwood's vision was ambitious, so we worked through a short "discovery process" designed to help the Dogwood team clarify their objectives and translate them into clear requirements we could use to build a new site. This investment in lightweight, up-front planning paid huge dividends as we moved forward, by allowing us to accurately estimate the costs and to ensure that we were building a system that met Dogwood's communications and organizing needs.
With a plan in hand, we moved forward on design. Our frequent collaborator Taylor Bachrach of Bachrach Communications worked up a design, which we brought to life with some interactive javascript.
The centerpiece of the site is the new "storybox" user interface that allows Dogwood staff to surface up to four stories as interactive, image-rich "panels" on the homepage and each major section of the site. This helps visitors quickly find and engage with what's hot. It's easy for Dogwood staff to quickly create and promote new items across a diverse array of medium-term campaigns and long-term issues.
Dogwood Initiative staff are active bloggers, and the new design surfaces their blog content more prominently, and makes it easy to browse the blogs of various Dogwood staff.
Dogwood was able to take advantage of Plone 3's flexible new portlets system to build and manage many chunks of sidebar content, which change based on which section of the site you're in.
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This action alert is one of the main campaign tools the Coalition uses to engage with the almost 30,000 strong membership base.
]]>ONE/Northwest has been providing support to the EPC since 2004, hosting a coalition website, a handful of internal coalition discussion lists, and managing an action alert email list that ranged from 15,000 – 20,000 email addresses.
In 2008, ONE/Northwest did a major redesign and upgrade of the EPC website, and helped forge a partnership between EPC and Sightline Institute to create RSS news feeds customized for each priority issue. These feeds provide current, valuable content to organizers, lobbyists, activists, legislators and development staff both before and throughout the session.
On the database side, ONE/Northwest played a key role in outreach and follow-up to all coalition organizations to ensure submission of as many activist lists as possible, as well as performing quality control on the data submitted.
ONE/Northwest is also in the process of implementing a Salesforce database which will allow the EPC to track activist involvement in aggregate as well as by organization.
Finally, there is a plan in place for organizations who cannot submit activist data to encourage their members to opt-in to the EPC activist list.
During the 2008 legislative session, the EPC activist list consisted of 17,000 email addresses. For the 2009 legislation session, EPC will be communicating with more than 30,000 activists.
]]>Oregon Rural Action is one of seven grassroots community organizations that are members of the Western Organization of Resource Councils (WORC). WORC is a regional network that has over 10,000 members and 46 local chapters. WORC helps its member groups succeed by providing training and coordination. By working at the grassroots level and joining others throughout the West to address issues that affect us all, we have the power to create the changes we need.