IT Team Strategic Priorities

Transcription

1 The IT team s mission is three-fold: IT Team Strategic Priorities 1. to build and enhance EWB s online community, keeping our members connected across the country (and beyond); 2. to provide strategic and technical support to the rest of the organization around online campaigns, communications, and activism; and 3. to respond to technical questions and requests, and provide technical support to the organization. Within this, we have six priorities identified for the year: myewb redefinition Knowledge & Resource Management and M&E Distributed Team Building Salesforce and stakeholder tracking Continued project support Help Desk

2 myewb redefinition In the coming year, we will re-define the way EWBers interact online. We need to find our niche among the various social networks that now exist, and both reflect and support our offline community in an online space. myewb has stagnated over the past year (in both design and features), and it is time to play catch-up. Goals strategy outlining vision for myewb: how it fits into both EWB and the broader online space new front page and navigation that focuses on myewb's core features section-by-section overhaul with a focus on user experience define and build new features in line with the goals of myewb Metrics myewb activity increase average monthly visits from 15,000 to 20,000 increase number of active users (at least 1 login per two weeks) from 650 to 1,000 increase number of discussions/posts from 550 per month to 750 (return to levels) myewb audience increase in number of new users engaging increase in number of alumni engaging

3 Knowledge & Resource Management and M&E We need a better way to retain knowledge in the organization, a better way to link resources (workshops, documents, etc) to our activities and to iterate on them, and a better way to do monitoring and evaluation. A solution will likely involve elements of all three areas, and affect both chapters.ewb.ca and CHAMP... but a more detailed analysis and plan need ot be done. The early theories: CHAMP is metrics in, but with no concrete value to chapter members hence few (non-top-down) incentives to enter CHAMP activities. It does not do the qualitative evaluation piece well, and is not often used to feed into future events. Resources on chapters.ewb.ca are good, but not alive. There is no way to collectively iterate on resources, comment on them, improve on them. One possibility is to combine our resource library with our M&E tool, and put it in the overall framework of a projectplanning tool. This makes our resources/knowledge more immediately relevant, and can lead to improved M&E if it is all in one consolidated system. On the other hand, that is a very chapters and Canada-centric view; similar challenges exist in our African Programs, and need to be addressed. Additional analysis, thinking, and planning needs to happen before goals and metrics can be attached to this project, but it is a priority.

4 Distributed Team Building As the need for IT & online strategy support increase, we need ways of meeting the demand. One large part of this is strengthening the distributed team (the IT Ninja Squad). A model that I want to pilot and experiment with is the embedded expert model: where a team (ie, the Advocacy distributed team, the Youth Engagement team...) has an IT expert apart of the team: attending meetings, helping craft strategy, etc... for all intents and purposes, a full member of the team. This IT expert would be responsible for supporting the team, as well as helping craft their online strategy. These IT experts would also come together as a national IT Team to support each other, share ideas, and coordinate the organization's online presence. This is on top of building the chapter Webmasters' community, which has a similar goal but with respect to individual chapters. There is a clear opportunity to engage this community more, and to shift thinking beyond website-maintenance to online strategy, online presence, and online collaboration. Goals shift thinking from providing IT support to online strategy or online presence start open IT Team calls, inviting all webmasters, embedded IT experts, and anyone interested in the organization's online presence, to share ideas and progress pilot embedded expert model Metrics IT Team calls happen bi-weekly, with at least 5 participants engaging in discussion about the organization's online strategy and plans at least two teams have an embedded IT person chapter Webmaster community is active, with at least one discussion per month

5 Salesforce and stakeholder tracking We are switching to Salesforce as our donor database, and the Salesforce platform provides many new opportunities to track our interactions with all our stakeholders (not just donors). This lets us improve our segmenting and targeting, ensuring that we are always sending relevant content to the right people, and gives us a much better picture of the overall EWB community. Goals all donor information migrated into Salesforce Salesforce used for high net worth donor tracking mailing list information integrated into Salesforce myewb member information integrated into Salesforce Metrics see above

6 Project support This section is included as a reminder that this plan only includes projects that are driven by the IT team. We also provide support for a number of other teams, usually on a per-project or per-campaign basis... for example, Perspectives holiday campaign conference registration EWB Day Admitting Failures strategy advice farn.ca / yourvoice.ewb.ca advocacy tools The goal is to move away from direct support on all projects/campaigns, to the embedded expert model as described above under Distributed Team Building. For major projects, extra resources would be available to help the embedded expert as needed. Help Desk support The team also plays a help-desk role, providing day-to-day support across the organization. No concrete metrics associated with this role, apart from ensuring that the organization's needs are met (and finding the right balance between investing enough time that support is good enough, while not allowing the help desk role to become a time sink).

7 Timelines myewb redefinition Knowledge / Resource Management, M&E Distributed Team Building Salesforce and stakeholder tracking Project Support Help Desk Sept Oct Nov Dec Jan Feb Mar Apr May Front-page rebuild (ongoing) Perspectives