Role: Lead Digital Strategist
House Our Neighbors! is a coalition of homeless service providers and people with lived experience with homelessness calling on Seattle Voters to vote no on Charter Amendment 29. The coalition holds that this charter amendment does not address root causes of homelessness and codifies the right for the city to conduct violent sweeps of homeless encampments. A judge recently struck CA29 from the ballot, putting the campaign gladly on haitus.
I organized and lead web and social strategy for the House Our Neighbors campaign, starting as a volunteer and quickly stepping into paid work. I did a quick revision of the website and had begun recruiting for user testing before the campaign went on a hiatus. I also created a content calendar for our social media efforts and helped guide volunteers on content, cadence, and posting. With these new strategies, post engagement quadrupled on Facebook and Twitter and new follows and volunteer sign-ups were trending sharply upwards.
This project needed to be turned around very quickly, so I did minimal discovery and grabbed the low-hanging fruit for the first round of design revisions.
I went through the pages to create consistency in the hierarchy and treatment of headers and text.
The media and endorsement pages were just one long list of text when I came on. I added more imagery to the media page, made it clear where to start, and embedded a video highlight to engage people on the page.
On the Endorsement page, I put the list into columns to use the space more efficiently and bring more content up before the fold.
The next steps here would have been to add images of featured endorsers, suggest that we cut down the intro text, and do user testing to determine what else people would expect to see on these pages.
The original volunteer sign-up function had been set up before the organization invested in Nation Builder and was fractured as a result. The “Volunteer” link led to a nation builder form where people could select which volunteer activities they were interested in. The Events page had volunteer opportunities as well, each specific type of opportunity had its own embedded form. Submissions from these forms went to separate google docs that organizers checked manually.
To streamline this, I created a new “Volunteer page” with a link to the general volunteer form. I also added image cards and descriptions for each of the core volunteer activities and linked those to the general form as well, where people could select that activity from a checklist. Ideally, there would be shorter forms for each activity, but Nationbuilder does not have form embed or progressive form functionality.
The next steps here would have been to build specific form pages in Nation Builder for each of the core volunteer activities. These forms could drill down into more specific preferences and would give us the ability to set up tailored automated follow-ups.