How do you create a website that's not just beautiful but built for action? That's the focus of our Architect Spotlight Series, featuring insights from certified NationBuilder Architects. This week we hear from Mosaic Strategies of New Jersey.
1) What are the most important elements of an awesome digital campaign?
This is a hard one! It boils down to three things for me: direct messaging, vibrant visuals and authenticity. These are definitely not special to digital campaigns, they are the same for on-the-ground work too. What's special about digital is that you can improve your success by using analytics to know when to switch out creative and build better, targeted referral networks. Take advantage of how flexible digital is!
2) What is one question you ask your clients when starting a new project that everyone should think about?
Our favorite last question to ask is: What are your main goals and what are you willing to give up to achieve them?
This helps frame the project, the client's involvement, and priorities. If you want to collect emails from more people through your nation, are you willing to leave off a few of the demographic fields or have a staged sign-up? Is having more photography more important than staying on budget? It's especially helpful when our client's decision making team includes multiple people.
3) What are three tips for promoting digital engagement?
1. Make the ask. I suggest starting with our Dear Santa model.
Dear Santa, (connect with a name)
I've been nice this year. (what you're doing & why it's great)
Here are a few things I'm wishing for... (what you need)
Love, Francesca
p.s. enjoy the milk and cookies! (offer a thank you incentive)
2. Stop like hunting. It's great to have a lot of followers and page likes. However, if you go for the easy likes and they aren't in your target market, you end up with less engagement and spending resources on an uninterested audience. Instead, spend time meeting REAL people and engaging with them one-on-one. When you have too many people to engage with one-on-one, you have a great problem.
3. Just do it. There's a lot of strategy you can talk about and a lot of places you can spend money. If we want to get anything done, we need content and we need to write it. Build a library of content to draw upon. We find the easiest way to do this is to start with a stump speech. Pull from it for every post and match it with hot topic news and images.
4) Share a site you’re proud of. What was your approach and how is it incentivizing action?
Commit2Respond is a fantastic coalition of organizations working towards climate justice. They had this great idea to encourage people to complete actions in 3 areas: SHIFT to a low carbon future, ADVANCE human rights, and GROW the climate justice movement.
We designed and built an infrastructure that displays the actions, allows people or organizations to "take an action", and then triggers a badge on their public profiles. In theory, it's pretty simple. In application, it required handling a lot of scenarios (like people versus organizations) while also making it possible for the coalition to update and edit themselves. They have done a great job matching the site with email marketing to engage their supporters. We are excited to watch this project fly!
5) Is there any “inspiration” your team uses to stimulate creativity? Music, environment, art, etc.?
Oh yes! There are a lot of images, gifs, videos, links, etc that go around on the office chat (please don't ask for our chat history!). The phrase, "Hey, does anyone have a project where we can try [ ]?" is heard frequently. We look at everything. We find the best results come when we way share something "sweet" then go back to it weeks later.
For me, our office sits right above this sneaker store with shoes that are waaaay cooler than I could ever dream to be. I will definitely take a walk through there when looking for a new color palette.
As a team, our best group inspiration comes when we're relaxed. Dance breaks, lunching, and fetch-on-demand with our office dog Milo definitely help get us to that place. Our most inspired projects come from working with awesome, passionate clients that are open to the process and ready to take steps (even baby steps) outside their comfort zone which triggers another part of our brains.
