An extensive and detailed report from our strategic planning survey has been completed. It provides a breakdown of each survey question with their outcomes analysed through a thorough reading of the data, in text, graphs and compiles of recommendations and anecdotal comments.
Here’s a preliminary reading our survey… we’d love to hear from you.
Add your thoughts as a comment to this post, but first, grab a copy of the Report.
Improve usability
Response to the site and related questions throughout the survey point to a need to improve the site’s usability. This can stem from both its public interface and back-end, its CMS components. Getting content online can be said to be as user-unfriendly as some aspects of the public interface. Some responses suggest that features that do exist aren’t clearly visible, or not entirely intuitive.
PROPOSED ACTIONS
- Promote the use of existing features
- Review the current interface and seek to improve short-term usability whilst building responses into design specification/interaction design for the next build/upgrade of EM.org.
Increase profile
In spite of the organisation’s significant support and the goodwill it generates, there is a general trend towards encouraging it to raise its profile. There is little media coverage of its activities either during or after events. Promotion and marketing have remained low, focusing in recent times on posters, postcards and stickers that are posted to groups and/or made available freely at its events.
PROPOSED ACTIONS
- Marketing/promotion as standard deliverables in each project plan.
- Frequent in-house blogging of projects prior to, during and post-events.
- Develop a marketing/outreach plan in concert with the Strategic Plan.
Increase opportunities for networking
Clearly one of the features of EM’s work has been the networking amongst peers as a consequence of camps, workshops and sprints. People want more, but in doing so, new connections made need to be sustained and not only nurtured.
Increase opportunities for skills building
More training and development in both distribution and production with Camp Sambel style workshops mirrored in other countries in the Asia Pacific (e.g. New Zealand, Singapore) and beyond (e.g. South Africa). (Refer p. 39 Survey report)
PROPOSED ACTIONS
- Immediate – prepare / collate reviewed list of online production support guides to be available from EM.org.
- Immediate – prepare / collate reviewed distro strategies, most likely from various EM workshops.
- Review pros and cons of curriculum development.
- Pros and cons of strengthening Skills Building Program.
Develop partnerships and strategies with grassroots groups and large NGOs
A significant outcome of this kind of ongoing endeavour is to ensure or rather embed EM.org as the platform of choice for social justice and environment video in the Asia Pacific. (Refer p. 28, 34, 36 Survey report)
This also links to off-line approaches, including more than likely, increased opportunities for Local Archives and Burnstation (neither of which were specifically referred to in the survey questionnaire).
PROPOSED ACTIONS
- Ensure all partner and peers are on the newsletter.
- Follow-up partners and peers, keep them in the loop of other activities and information.
- Seek partners and peers input into site content, profile in the newsletter when such content available on EM.org.
- Encourage more use of EM.org content, links to site and / or feeds.
- Investigate the pros and cons of replicating partner efforts and resources in New Zealand and South Africa where groups we can work with are active.
