Anne Dougherty

Online Communications Manager, Clean Water Action

Project: Establish Information Architecture and Standards Compliant Design

When I came to Clean Water Action in October 2006 it was clear from the organization's hodge-podge site design and lack of any coherent information architecture that the site had grown entirely organically.

My first step was to create an information architecture and standards compliant site design.

It was also clear that a significant amount of work would need to be done with staff to create buy-in for the idea that if Clean Water wished to use its web site as a tool to educate and recruit supporters its primary focus should be on the needs of an external audience rather than on the needs of staff.

Online Communications Manager, Clean Water Action

This design created a consistent information architecture, a universal navigation, and secondary navigation which was lacking from the organic version of the site that existed when I was hired.

While still flat HTML, this design was also W3C standards complaint for both HTML and CSS as well as being WCAG-AA compliant for accessibility.

Online Communications Manager, Clean Water Action

Social Media, Visitor Tools, and Activism

Over the life of this design I also added a variety of tools, such as site search and social media sharing, via third party applications. This design was in place from January 2007 through September 2008.

In March 2007 I also established Clean Water Action's relationship with Democracy In Action as the organization's vendor partner for blast e-mail, take action and online donation functionality.

Online Communications Manager, Clean Water Action

Project: Site Redesign and Migration to Content Management System

As I worked to develop the organization's online communications strategy and promote the tools we now had available to Clean Water's organizers, our use of these tools and our sophistication with them rapidly out paced what could be offered by a tapestry of third party applications and a flat HTML site. In March 2008 I embarked on a total site and logo redesign and a migration to a content management system.

After an assessment of then current and planned future needs, and after establishing the organization's commitment to open source technology, Drupal was chosen as the platform for Clean Water's new site.

Online Communications Manager, Clean Water Action

Project: Site Redesign and Migration to Content Management System

Because of internal business requirements it was necessary that this project proceed on the development and design tracks simultaneously.

For the development track, I worked with Trellon specify and test certain custom code and views inside Drupal that allow the site to present information for fourteen separate state offices without using multiple templates and while providing site visitors with consistent section pages across the site. Another custom modification allows this installation of Drupal to power two sites with different templates while using the same database and provide easy, one-click publishing in the admin interface thereby reducing the need to cross-post materials.

Free Range Studios was our design partner for this project creating both Clean Water Action's new logo and two site complimentary homepage designs, one for Clean Water Action and one for Clean Water Fund, the 501(c)3 organization.

Online Communications Manager, Clean Water Action

Project: Conform External Blog's Design

Because the blog written by Clean Water's President is meant to represent his views and not necessarily the views of the organization, I made the decision not to incorporate his blog into Drupal but to instead maintain a previously installed Wordpress blog as a separate entity.

Once the design for the site was finalized, I took the HTML and created a Wordpress theme that matches the main site's look and feel. I am also responsible for the continuing maintenance of the blog's primary software and plugins.

Online Communications Manager, Clean Water Action

Project: Democracy In Action Tools and Templates

The conversion to the new design also required new templates to support the organization's use of Democracy In Action's Salsa platform as well as some adjustment of styles specific to content generated by DIA's system.

This example shows one such style in which the content of a petition has been floated to the right of the fields requesting the supporter's information. In the normal course without any specific styling the fields for the supporter's information would appear under the petition content which would spread across the entire screen.

Online Communications Manager, Clean Water Action

The new design also required two sets of new e-mail templates, a regular newsletter template and a take action template, for each state where Clean Water had an office at the time of launch.

Special issues with cross compatibility of e-mail clients and lack of support for CSS properties necessitated that these templates be constructed with tables but look similar enough to the web site that the coding change would not be obvious to supporters.

Online Communications Manager, Clean Water Action

Project: Social Media and Democracy In Action

While ramping up Clean Water's social media strategy I noticed that Democracy in Action did not have any functionality to make social media sharing easier.

Because of the nature of the templates, both Facebook and Tweetmeme, which Clean Water choose to track the retweet statistics, information in the template's title tag was being passed yielding ineffective postings on social media sites all with the title "Clean Water Action."

At my request, one of DIA's programmers implemented a solution to this problem applying it across their entire "Actions 2.0" tool which allows admins to create a template with no html <title> tag. The programming change then picks up the action's title from the Salsa title field yielding relevant Facebook postings and retweets via Tweetmeme.