 Welcome again to Spruce Up Your Website with Expertise from StoryCorps. My name is Becky Wiegand and I'm an Interactive Events Producer here at TechSoup Global. Today's expert joining us will be Dean Haddock who is the Senior Manager of Information Technology at StoryCorps. You'll also see Ali Bazdikian on this chat helping to answer your questions, help you with any technical issues, and capturing those questions for Q&A for later on in the presentation. Dean is going to walk us through the agenda when we get to his portion but I'm going to go ahead and tell you a little bit about TechSoup before we dive into the meat of the content for today. So who is TechSoup? We are part of TechSoup Global and we are working toward the day when every nonprofit, library, and social benefit organization on the planet has the technology, knowledge, and resources to operate at their full potential. We are a 501c3 nonprofit organization and we serve organizations in more than 56 countries around the world with donations of technology products and resources, online tools like ReadyTalk and installed software from companies like Microsoft, Adobe, Cisco, Symantec, all kinds of them. So if you're not familiar with our product donation program, feel free to visit TechSoup.org to learn how your nonprofit, library, charity, or foundation can access those donations. To get us started with the topic of the day in spursing up your website, we want to understand a little bit more about where you're coming from. So a couple of quick polls. Did you design or build your own website or did a third-party build it? Go ahead and click on which answer most relates to your organization's situation with web building. So take just a moment. We'll give a little bit of time for everybody to chime in here. We have about 200 people on the line right now with us, so we want to make sure everyone gets a chance to weigh in. We have Sharon saying that a bit of both, that sometimes you do in-house, or third-party contractors, a few people don't have a website. I'm going to go ahead and skip to show the results. So about 40% designed and built their own website, 25% used third-party contractors, and about another 33% have done in-house. For those of you who don't have a website, we can probably share some resources today on how you can build one easily. One other quick poll question for you, how big is your web team, including designers? For those of you who use a third-party, this is the same answer essentially as the last one, but for the rest of you we want to understand how many staff you're working with to help you build and manage your website. So just a few more seconds here, and this will help both me and Dean the better understanding of your experience and your staff's capabilities in-house. Let's see, we've gotten a couple of other comments. Kristina says it's part of what I do, but I don't do the website full-time. I imagine many people have that similar experience where it's one piece of a bigger job and not probably full-time, or it's maybe a couple of staff people's part-time work while they manage other tasks as well. It looks like 90 folks, 54%, have one to two full-time staff, and 28% have all volunteer or no staff dedicated to that. So that's a pretty big chunk of people that don't have anybody or have two or fewer people doing it. So that should help give us some perspective on where you're at and what kind of expectations we have around how to do projects like spursing up your website. If you're doing a full web redesign or building a brand new website for the first time, or if you're just able to do smaller tweaks. But that, I'd like to turn it over to our guest for today, Dean Haddock from StoryCorps who we all know and love StoryCorps and their terrific stories on NPR that make us weep while driving a car on Friday mornings, at least they do for me. He's going to give us his story of how StoryCorps recently went through their redesign of their website as well as tips on how to improve your website even if you only have a little bit of time or a little bit of staff or a little bit of money which we know all nonprofits are constantly dealing with those resource limitations. So I'm going to go ahead and say welcome Dean to the program. We're so glad to have you. Thanks Becky. Can you hear me okay? Loud and clear. Oh great. Okay, so first I just want to say thanks to everybody for joining us today. This is a really awesome opportunity to connect with the community. And I can see already that a lot of people are chatting and that's kind of what this whole thing is about. Thanks also to Charlene from ReadyTalk for helping us in the background. Allie, Becky, and hello to Carlos, my good buddy who works there. As Becky said, my name is Dean Haddock. I live in Brooklyn, New York. That's where I'm coming from today. I'm originally from Denton, Texas, a very small town in North Texas near Dallas. I have a master's in political science, mainly focusing on institutional economics. I began working professionally in technology when I was about 15 and got into web shortly thereafter. My experience includes legal, banking, aviation, telecommunications, academic, media, and non-profit. I ran a small online business in the academic publishing industry for about 10 years. And I'm now the head of a 7 person technology team and an independent consultant in my free time. So that is who is Dean Haddock, StoryCorps. Most people know us through our animations on YouTube or from our stories on NPR. We record interviews with everyday people like you and me, archived them at the Library of Congress permanently, and broadcast them through channels like NPR, PBS, YouTube, SoundCloud, and more. So hopefully everybody has heard of us. And if you haven't, by all means, go check us out at StoryCorps.org, which is the website I am going to talk to you about today. Just a couple more little things. We have about 50,000 interviews and about 90,000 participants comprising over 18 to 20 terabytes of data, which is about 3.5 years of audio if you were to listen to it end to end. So here is what we are going to talk about today. I want to kind of talk about what the Internet means to you. I want to talk about how to design a website around goals and actions. I want to talk about your organization creating the right culture around the web, and then how to think a little bit beyond the web. So from our poll before, let's see if I can go back to it for just a second. Let's see. Most people here designed and built their own site, which is cool. I hope everybody finds this very interesting. We have a few people who don't have a website, so this will be good for them. It's much easier to start with a decent body of knowledge before you leap into an expensive web project, as I'm sure many people on this conference call right now have had that experience as well. At StoryCorps, we have three to five people working on the web at any given time. So that's our situation. And the seven person team that I manage includes myself, includes a couple of interns, and a brilliant data information systems coordinator, help desk, tech support staff, and our web team. So what we are going to talk about today is how we go from this, which is our site. You can visit it on the Internet Archive. Just go to the Wayback Machine and search for StoryCorps, and you can see kind of the evolution of the site over time. It's a really good experiment for any website that you love. One thing you'll notice on this site is there's a lot of information. There are probably about 36 different things that you could click on on this page. And the stories that most people know us from aren't front and center. This is where our featured story lived. There's no animation. You would have to get to our animations by going over here to Animated Shorts. So a lot of this was designed by committee, and the website sort of evolved from something very simple to kind of almost a Wikipedia entry reflecting the different departments and functions of our organization, which makes sense, but it wasn't suiting us. And it's 10th anniversary, so why not do a little read-it-on? And this is where we ended up today. I took this screenshot yesterday. Here is the page we're used to listen to audio. This is what it looks like today. Notice here you can browse by category and search. You can get to more stories. This carousel hid two of the three stories, but you could get other ones. We had two carousels on there originally. But this has a continuous scroll, so it loads with Ajax. And you have a couple of different ways to browse it, which I encourage you to go play with. So it was easy, right? Easy as a fee, not quite. But we did use the golden mean a little bit in designing some of the home pages. This is beyond anyone. Just look up the golden ratio and design, and you can find some very interesting principles about how to lay out a page. We're not going to go into any detail on that. That would be a whole webinar of its own. So the first question that anybody should start with when they're looking at designing a website is you think about what does it mean to you? For me, it's a global brain, and that's how I conceptualize it. Basically, I see a website as a reference point and a way to send and receive information from one part of that global brain to another. And if you think about it, it kind of makes sense because, well, let's not get into that too much. I'll get a little too philosophical for it. My friends though and my family, they see the Internet as a way to connect, a way to look at cute cat pictures and tag each other in photos and things like that. And to some people, a lot of people that ultimately people we have to work with and people that we have to consider in our designs and a lot of our audience, they might conceptualize of the Internet as simply email. The point here is that everyone has a different relationship to the web. And to me, that's influenced by a lot of different things. Someone's socioeconomic background, their gender, their income, their profession, what they're into, where they live, if there's access to broadband, there are a lot of different factors. And really, they're infinite. And so you're designing one static point or place for all these people to come together. So how do we make a website that people like? The answer is simple. We have designed it around them and not us. And this is a place where I think a lot of organizations trip themselves up is because they are designing a website around themselves and reflecting the things that they think are important, and not necessarily reflecting things that the audience or the visitors think are important. And what's important to them may be what's important to you, and that's great. And it may not be. We get a lot of traffic, for instance, to our great questions list. In fact, if you search for great questions on Google, I think we used to show up as number one. We probably still do. And that's for people who are looking for interview questions with family. Those are people who may not even be interested in StoryCorps, but they see our questions as a great resource. So we take a lot of care on that page even though it's not technically someone recording an interview or anything like that. We actually have the great questions up there just to be clear for people to prepare for a StoryCorps interview. Let's see. So who is your audience? When we set out to design our site, we broke down our audience into five basically different types of people. And who it is for us is not who it's going to be for you necessarily. It may be. But for us, these different types included concepts like a newbie, someone who's never heard of StoryCorps before or maybe just heard about us on the radio. We think of our supporters as a community. We think of our participants. And people wanting to make an interview, we think of our funders like foundations and different granting institutions. And by dividing our audience this way, and we actually give these people names, we think of an archetype of this person. And it's a very healthy exercise to kind of talk about, okay, well here's this person whose name is James, and he just heard us on the radio on NPR and checks out our site. So what kind of computer does James have? Is he accessing our site at work or is he accessing at home? When you think of your visitors and you think of them as their story, as a human being and not just a click, creating that kind of compassion with your visitor I think is key in creating a good website. So once we broke down our visitors into these groups, and of course some of them are probably going to be a little bit often. This is a constantly evolving process. The website is no static document. It's constantly changing, constantly moving document. So we took these groups and then we gave them distinct goals. Now this is actually pretty complicated despite the graphic here, but each of these five people, we want to complete one of these five goals in time. And some of them we want them to complete the goals more than once. So obviously headphones represent listening. The second one is storytelling. Three was just to like us and support us. We want them to also connect with us and form partnerships. And this may be a good opportunity to tell you guys that we not only have the broadcast on NPR, I'll back up just a little bit. We have a door-to-door type of service where if you want us to come into your organization and record stories with you, we do that. And we do that with hundreds of organizations a year. So right here actually is where we ended up putting that on the website. The reason I'm telling you that though is because that audience and forming a partnership with us is a very high priority goal of the organization. It's one of the ways that we're able to record thousands and thousands of interviews per year and get our word out and also help organizations tell their own stories. But that's one distinct goal, but that's a very different goal than listening to one of our clips. And moreover, how we present that on the web should fit in hierarchically with where it is as a priority of our organization. And this is where it actually gets very complicated because if we kind of like take a step back, one of the biggest challenges with designing a website isn't necessarily the technology of designing the site itself or using WordPress or using Drupal, a content management system or whether you do it by hand. Those things are technically difficult but how your organization sees the website and how you prioritize around the organization's goals which is going to be different for every organization. But that's challenging and that involves a lot of conversation. So let me go back to this slide. I just want to show you kind of how the different goals are reflected on here. So if you remember the original version of the site, the latest broadcast was over here and now it's front and center with a slider. So you can go back and forth and hear several stories. We also have more stories down here. So on the original version of our homepage you had to click on listen to the story and then it would take you to another page and that's where you listen. We built our own player and that's now embedded several times on one page and you can hear featured and popular stories. We also added a map to tell people about where they can record their interviews. And we now have a featured place for our blog. So totally different approach. Social media here, everything designed around the end user making it very simple for them. And I would still say we could reduce clutter probably 20 more percent and we probably will over time because as I said, the website is not something that's ever complete. And let me add as well, when you scroll down the site the menu stays on top and we now have a much more powerful search feature. None of that was on the homepage before. We also made several different ways to discover content. So instead of just experiencing stuff in a linear way as it's broadcast, we have over 500 stories on our site. And so we wanted to make it easy for people to find it in a way that was fun. There's a saying of like eating one's own cooking or eating one's own dog food. And we really did kind of design the site as well with like, well, how do we want to experience the stories? Because there are people in our organization that match very closely to a lot of people in our audience. We have a very, very diverse group of employees, about 100 of us across the country. And we're diverse across so many dimensions. If we could make something that we liked, we thought that maybe other people would like it too. So one of the funny things about this, over here we have a grid view and a list view. And some people really like seeing a list of the stories. And some people like seeing the grid. So we thought, well, hey, why don't we make it easy for people to do both of those things. So just to interrupt really quickly, we had a question from Minnie that's related to these slides that asks, are the goals that you set, are our goals as an organization or the goal of the audience when they come to the site? So when you're setting those goals and talking about your audience, are you setting the goals for what you want your audience to do or are the goals based on what the audience wants to do? Does that make sense? Totally. Well, and really it's both. If this were a for-profit organization, it might be a little bit easier to explain, well, we want to sell widgets and we want to present them to people who are looking for widgets. And we want to connect the buyer and the seller for that experience. Here, we really just want people to enjoy our content. And it's part of our mission to celebrate listening and celebrate and honor each other's lives that we want to present the content. So it's a goal for us to have as many shares and listens and that kind of quantitative metric. We also want people to have a qualitative experience. And the goal from the user perspective or from the visitor perspective is to have some engaging content. And then many people like to connect and share these stories and relate to their friends with them. So it's a little bit of both. And the trick is to, or it's not really a trick, I guess in my opinion, in my experience, the best way to approach that is in a way that ultimately focuses on the visitor because if there's no visitor, what's the point in having a website? So ultimately, I guess the easy way to look at that question is it's really both. And you have to understand both. Most people, I think most organizations, many organizations rather I'll say, focus probably more on their own goals, which is why we have so many questionable websites out there. Contacting us for instance, this used to be, we had several pages. You had to click three or four times in order to get to a contact form or a phone number or an email address. And so now when you click contact us, you go straight to contact us. So for those people who are trying to get in touch with us, we made it simpler for them to accomplish that goal. So contacting us would be an example of a goal. And we made it much simpler. So I'll talk about that next. So I want to talk a little bit about core concepts. Very simple. Remove unnecessary barriers to actions for any visitor type. So I mentioned with the contact us goal, we had three different steps and a lot of text that people had to read to know how to contact us. We assume now that people already know how to use a form for instance, and that when they're ready to contact us they've already done their homework or they have a question or they want to get in touch with us very easily. And then we want to streamline and simplify the actions people want to take. So for example, when people come to storypoor.org we assume that, and maybe we're wrong about this but we have to test, we assume that people want to listen to the content or they want to hear stories or they want to get in touch with us or they want to support us. We made it easier. And for every one of our goals and for every one of our user groups or visitor types we tried to remove the barriers to anything they wanted to do or that we could help them do like listen to one of our stories. And then we simplified it. So big play button starts playing right there for instance. And the reason we did this is because the research suggests there's a little bit of literature on this that you must communicate your value in under 10 seconds and that most people aren't going to read. So this graph here shows the probability of somebody leaving the page. It increases rapidly after just a few seconds. And again, the source of this article is here. So if you get the slide deck after this talk you'll be able to go back and check out some of these resources. The question to ask ourselves is what does the visitor expect to see? They need to have a large probability of being correct when they click a link in their expectations of what they're going to see on the other side. So for instance, you're not going to get a lot of click-through if on the other side of your contact us link you have a bunch of text that's explaining to you a lot of things. You expect to see a form. You expect to see a phone number, an email address. So these are just kind of some concepts of site design and designing around user goals and designing around kind of archetypes for your visitor which if you run a theater or about a company or you're at a library you can think about your visitors. Look back at your email list if you have an email list. I'm sure most every organization has some kind of contact list for their community and go out there and talk to them, ask them questions, ask them what they like. What is it that you like about our website? What is it that you wish we did that we don't do? You can also put a survey up on your website which we'll be doing very shortly as well. So design around them, provide for them what you can provide. And all this kind of boils down to the culture of your website. When I started at StoryCorps five years ago our culture was very different around the web. People would send in requests to a web developer who would sort of like crunch those requests and implement whatever was asked but there was no central philosophy around the site. I mean there was a little bit. There were some obvious things like we knew we were going to have our broadcasts on there. We knew that we were going to have a link to our podcast and these sorts of things. But programs and initiatives, we have an array of programs to record the voices of the country. And also an array of initiatives. So we serve various different populations. Last year we launched a military voices initiative for instance which serves veterans and their families. And so when we would launch one of these new initiatives or programs the way it was described would evolve from one to another. But there was no coalescing sort of theme or approach to the web that really said, hey this needs to be uniform and it needs to be simple and clear for the most possible people which is what we really try to do in the redesign. And we'll continue to try to do it. Now our culture is a little bit different but still a little bit the same. We do still fulfill requests from different departments. But we have in the course of the last couple of years sat down together, had project teams working on discrete components of the site and having conversations across departmental boundaries and across silos to kind of get everyone on the same page of understanding of what's important for your program or for your department. Okay cool, well here's how it fits in with what we're trying to do over here for this department. And IT's role is not just to take a piece of paper, a mock-up from our communications department and crunch the site and program it. What we do is we also play a central role in how people talk about and relate to our website. So we bring people to the table, we have interdepartmental meetings and there's a lot of collaboration and a lot of Q&A. We call this the consultant mentality. And I hope that everyone out there with the web department has the type of web department and has the type of technological infrastructure built around service because ultimately this is a service function of the organization. And I always encourage my staff to operate in such a way as if they are an independent consultant working with a department or working with the organization to try to solve a problem. And that mentality, I think that mindset makes for the best communication because the other thing, I mean the big elephant in the room is a lot of us. I mean graphic design and web design can be a very emotional thing for people. And people tend to get attached to certain design elements. And also as I mentioned before we talked about how everyone has a different relationship to the web. Well somebody who only sends email might be the head of your organization or the head of the division where your web design sits. And they say, oh well I want the weather on the home page because everybody wants the weather. And that's how I attended an SEO talk and someone said put the weather on the site. And you can't, if you push back on that emotionally or you are unclear in how you communicate to that person why it may or may not be the best idea ever. I mean it could be, it could be a great idea. But how you communicate with that person if you don't have compassion from where they are coming from. If they lived in a remote village somewhere with no broadband access until three months ago then the way that they see the web is going to be very different than somebody who has been building websites since they were 18. Being able to communicate with all these different people and at all levels of the organization is critical especially for a web team because there is a lot of faith and trust that people have to put into your work. So I talked a little bit about how we meet together. We create project teams. So we have a web project team where our marketing communications and even bring in other people from time to time where we meet called buy-in. And the neat thing about project teams is that they create automatic buy-in. So I would recommend if you have a large organization with many departments having a liaison from each one of those departments work together and kind of form like a Congress of have those people help you figure out the story of your audience and give you anecdotes from those communities and the people that they serve, then when they are communicating back to their department everybody is on the same page. And without this, without buy-in, your web project is not going to make it. I mean it may make. I mean sometimes by brute force a website will get through but people I think have career ending confrontations during this process and with buy-in and establishing clear communication channels one is much more likely to succeed. And who do you pick for your project team? Anyone and everyone. Don't just pick the savvy person who uses Twitter. Pick someone who has an old Motorola flip phone. Pick someone who is really savvy with the web diversity. And we call this keeping everyone on the bus in my department. So one little tip, I know that we are, I think we are okay on time but we are getting a little close so I'm going to have to speed up a little bit. One needs to consider front of house and back of house when they are designing and conceptualizing their website as well. We have as I mentioned 100 people at the organization and a substantial amount of web traffic and people trying to get in touch with us. So in that process of making it easier for our visitors to do what they came to the website to do, we had to also think about how that was going to appear on the other side of the screen. So when an email came through, when 50 emails came through, how are we going to manage that? And so we use a customer relationship management tool on the back end that connects but that's not what I'm here to talk about. The important point is here that when we built the website we also were communicating with these different departments so I was like, okay well, this form is going to come in. You are going to have these important key data points which are important to you. They gave us the information and we built the system around their specifications but the idea was though that it was a holistic approach to building the website and not just thinking of like a homepage redesign. So lastly, the last little topic here is beyond the website. And we've talked a lot, or I've talked a lot and I hope you're getting something out of it out there. But we've talked about what people do on your website but really the way to see a website, we talked about finding back of health too but even beyond that is how people find your website. And that may be or may not be because they heard you on the radio or one of their friends recommended your service or your product but it may be from searching and optimization or seeing a tweet and seeing Facebook. And we have to think about the way that people enter your site. So sometimes it's very simple, things like making sure open graph tags are set up correctly so that when somebody posts one of your blog entries or a link to your website on Facebook it shows up well. It could also be a little bit more complex like Google AdSense or even a QR code or something like that. The simple formula for I would say generating web traffic or at least a popular philosophy right now is that you first have this brand awareness hurdle to get over. So people have to hear about you. And the marketing wizards will tell you that they need to hear you probably five or six times before you register in their consciousness. And then there has to be an affinity that emerges around your brand. So first I become aware of your brand and your product or your service. And then I decide whether it's for me or whether it will serve me or whether I want to wear that t-shirt or listen to that type of music or whether I relate to it. And then once I relate to it I begin relating to your organization. And at that point I may start also relating with other people and creating a community around your brand. And I have my friends who like your good or your service. And we talk about your good or your service, or we talk about what your good or your service is doing, what your organization is up to, what kind of scandal you are in, or what grant you received, or what great project you are doing. And social media is that medium where all of that takes place. And so everyone knows that you should have a Facebook button if you have a Facebook page. But more than that you must encourage people also to take the action of sharing and conversing around something. You need to let them know that they have that opportunity and make it very easy for them. And that's ultimately how to make your website a place where people congregate. And one of the very interesting things about StoryCorps is that what we produce, the broadcast clip is a really great digestible piece of media to go on social networks. It's not a big ask for an hour-long engagement with a visitor to listen to one of our clips. It's three to five minutes usually, and you can listen to as many as you want. I think our podcast runs five to ten minutes currently, although that may change in the future. We not only think about how the content appears on the website when people go there after hearing our clip, or just because it's Friday and they want to see what the latest broadcast is, we also think about that there's a player in Facebook and we want to make it look good. And we know that a lot of people like to listen to us on SoundCloud. And we think about these sorts of things as well and make sure that people can experience our content in the context that they want to experience it in, and without losing touch with them as well. So they're always one click away back to our website, two clicks away from contacting us and for donating, supporting our mission for sharing our content, etc. So conclusions, just really quickly, design around your visitors, not your organization. Make it easy for them. Create a culture around this experience and bring people to the table. It creates buy-in, so everybody feels like they have a sense of ownership in the project and you're going to get better ideas because seriously some of the best ideas about your website that you'll get will come from people that know the least about the Internet. And some of the needs of your audience, one person cannot possibly think about. You know, someone needs to raise their hand and say, oh, my cousin is blind and how is he or she going to experience this site? It's critical. Also then visualizing your website, your online presence beyond just your website and taking a holistic approach to your design and implementation. Last, I always just tell people to be patient and to let their ego go about the website because the website is not about the developer. It's not about the designer. It's about the mission of the organization. It's about the community that you serve, whether it's for-profit or non-profit. And setting up a deadline for a website I think is sometimes a bad decision. I mean you want to have a launch date and that's important for certain milestones obviously. But never think of your website as complete. Don't say that the website is finished on September 1. Say that the website in its new form is just beginning because when you change over to a website you're really just at that point of starting. You're not finished with anything. I mean maybe there are some designers out there who really nail it or there are products or services or concepts that are so simple that things really are complete. But for most organizations I find that isn't the case. And organizations themselves are also very dynamic things. Thanks very much. I hope I gave us enough time for some questions. I saw there were a lot of them. And this is my first webinar so I hope you enjoyed it. And thanks so much to everyone for being here and for listening to me. Thanks so much, Dean. Terrific presentation. And we do have quite a few questions from people. So I'll jump right in with Suzanne asked what CMS did you use for the StoryCorps site, or did you build it yourself? Yes, we use WordPress. I try to be technologically agnostic, but I will tell you that there's not one thing that we've needed to do with WordPress that we weren't able to do. And we have some pretty sophisticated things going on. I've also built a handful of WordPress sites for a lot of other organizations. The advantage here is you're not going to be locked in to a developer or a particular design. You can, excuse me, you can, hold on I got a little interruption in my phone there. If you need to change developers you can put an ad on Craigslist and you'll get 50 responses in a couple of days because a lot of people know WordPress. You can also have staff who are not experts with HTML or the web update your site. So CMS is a great way to go. WordPress is fantastic and you won't be dependent upon anyone or any technology with that approach. I would agree with that. I've built WordPress websites as well for prior organizations. And some people had asked about tools in general and some others that were mentioned by commenters were Weebly, Homestead, WordPress, Drupal, Joomla. So we can include links to some of those as tools. Some are more complicated than others and we have articles on our website on TechSoup's website that compare some of those tools. So if you're looking for a CMS to use or Content Management System, that's what CMS stands for. Those are some good options. And I would second that I think WordPress is a really great option particularly if you don't have much in-house staff because it's something that you can sort of out of the box pick a template and have a website within a couple of hours even if it's a really basic simple website. We have some questions, quite a few questions from people about how to work with your internal staff, how to get that buy-in. Like Wendy asks, in our organization most of the departments don't care about the website. I've never even been to it. So they don't care what's on it and don't contribute to the ideas for the site even when it's pages that pertain to their department. I've tried to get them involved and take ownership but I'm always met with no interest. How can I engage them? Any ideas for her? Yeah. Will you run that by me again? Sure. Like that she's just met with teams in her organization and departments that really don't care about the website and they don't see how it's useful for them. So how do you engage them in the process of making the site better for the people that they serve? Do something really, really bad with the site and then see if they care. No I'm just kidding. Don't do that at all. Ask them what they're into. Are they people who don't use the Internet at all? I would be very surprised if that were the case. It's very, very similar to sales. Get to know your customer. And then maybe they say I'm just not interested because I have more things to do or because I hate design or it's boring or too complicated. One of my coworkers just chimed in saying offer them snacks which I think is funny but can actually work. Get people to show up to the meetings. That's good. And then I would also say if someone's not interested in it, do they need to be and is it okay to just let them be not interested in it? There's a saying we have in Texas, don't try to teach a pig to sing. You won't like the results and you'll just annoy the pig. That's a good point. So when you spend that time to define your audience it's also spending the time to define who the real stakeholders internally need to be. Whether that's a staff person from another team or the ED or people on the board or your volunteers, that's a good process of defining. And if you find that resistance I would say maybe look for somebody else that might have a similar perspective that is willing to participate. Dandy asks, our org has a stark line between web developers, the tech folks, and content creators mostly non-tech. Any suggestions on how to erase that line because there's such this divide between the tech and the content folks and a big learning curve for time strap staff? Yes, that's a very good question. Well, it's always good to have overlap in departments. So cross-training people as a necessity for continuation of business or some kind of if one of the departments has to work on some big project for like six months is there no content created for your site or is there a way to cross-train the other departments for the purposes of hey, this is important. We need to make sure that we have some overlap on processes here in case anybody leaves or that kind of thing. I find that can bring people together and it's also a great opportunity to kind of create some compassion and empathy for the people that we have to work with. So overlap I think is important. Another approach I've heard recently that one of my colleagues, his organization does is they have a project manager that specifically liaises with the different departments for a discrete project. And if the organization, Sandy's organization has the resources, having an external project manager can help the organization bridge those lines. It's not necessarily the goal to change the people, but if we can create a structure that can work despite the people then that's another approach as well. Because people I find tend to change when they want to and when they're motivated to, not just because there's an outside pressure put on them. That can actually make things feel a little bit worse. Great. We have a question from Sarah asking, we want our website to be helpful to people who want our services and also to people who want to provide their services. Is this too much in one website? And kind of related to that there was a question asking how many audiences, like is there a number that you should be defining? Like if you say we've got six audiences we want to serve with our website, is that too much? Or is there a sweet spot like really targeting regroups of people? What do you think is the right spot for that? And is it too much to ask that the website can support the people who want the services as well as people who want to provide them? No, I mean let me answer the easy one first, which is there's no sweet number or magical number for it. I find it's easy to conceptualize things at least in my brain in groups of like three or five. I think after that it starts getting a little bit complex. I think you need more than one, probably not 10 or 20. But the way to look at that is to kind of see which are the biggest ones. And obviously if part of your audience is only 2% and another part makes up 98% then you'd probably want to focus on the larger chunk. The other question about services, getting your services versus selling my own services without knowing more specific details, I totally encourage you to send me an email and I'll look at the site. I also consult on the outside and moreover just love to talk to people about what they're doing and hear about what they're doing. But without knowing the specifics it's hard for me to say, but I will say that the beautiful thing about the Internet is that it's such a dynamic and fluid medium. And I would say there is a way. One way or another to accomplish both of those goals if that's what your organization does. And there's a way to communicate it to the audience clearly and easily. And you may have to try 10 different times before you nail it, but each time you change you'll do something a little bit better. And so it's probably more important to keep moving on that goal than to overthink it. And then I would just say ask people. Put an extra question on a contact form or ask them what they think of your website or what could make it easier. They might end up doing all the work for you. Great. We are just about out of time. I'm just going to ask a technology related question. So Bill asked sort of what the technology is behind the website. You mentioned that it was WordPress, but is there specific programming language that you'd recommend for creating your site? Anything that speaks a little bit to the technology that you're working with? Yes. And I'll tell you that before working at a nonprofit I worked in a bank and financial institution consulting agency or consulting firm really. And it was all Microsoft and closed source.net. I also did mostly server building and administration network management, more technical backup house stuff. At StoryCorps we use a lot of open source work, so WordPress is built on PHP and we use a lot of JavaScript and jQuery. I don't want to go into too much detail beyond that, but I will say that we're fortunate enough to have some really sharp coders and developers. We also work with interns and help them learn these technologies. So I've given a class to my staff that went over the course of like three months with maybe like six different lessons about MySQL for instance. So we not only look for expertise out in the field to help us, but we will also train internally. The JavaScript, PHP, open source, and the advantage to that is open source is community supported. So we're not dependent upon the whims of one corporation, but actually the culture or the movement of an open source community. So to me it's a little bit more like building a house on stone versus sand. I think we all know as well, like Love or Hate, Google, Facebook, et cetera, both of those sites, both of those services really change unilaterally. They don't ask us what we want or maybe they have focus groups, but every time you log into your Facebook account something is different and the same with Gmail. So we don't want to subject ourselves to the same thing when it comes to like a web technology. Terrific. Well, we are at the top of the hour, so I just want to thank you for your time. And sorry for folks we didn't get to answer all the questions. There was one question about accessible technologies for visually impaired and I'll include a link in the follow-up email that links to one of our prior webinars that's just about accessible web technologies for that one. But thank you so much Dean for this great resource that you've given us. And for everybody listening you'll receive this webinar and all the resources discussed including links to the sites like WordPress and Drupal and Joomla and Weebly and all the different tools that we've mentioned today in that follow-up email shortly after this afternoon. So keep an eye out for that. And I'd like to thank Ali on the back end for helping to field questions. And again thank you so much Dean and StoryCorps for your participation in today's event. Your new website looks great. So hopefully we can take some of these tips and strategies that you've shared with us to go back and improve our own websites. Lastly I'd like to thank our webinar sponsor ReadyTalk that makes their platform for offering web conferences like this available to us so that we can offer webinars to you on a weekly basis. Thank you so much everyone and have a terrific afternoon. We hope you'll join us again soon. Bye-bye.