Skip to content

Projects

Jump to bottom
Michael Morisy edited this page Aug 17, 2015 · 11 revisions

Problem

Currently, we have no way to explain or present the issues, themes, and goals that unify our work. MuckRock publishes articles and shares links to request pages. But much of our work goes beyond individual articles or requests. Our work confronts issues and problems of national importance and scope. Our work also dives deep into specific incidents and examples to better understand a complicated, multifaceted problems. By providing a more abstract overview of the totality of the work, we can better present the abstract goals, questions, and principles that drive our work and make it unique.

We are also missing a way to focus attention and support onto these research areas. When readers share a link to an article or a request, it is often missing the context that informs its reading. When a crowdfund is started for a request, it helps support that individual request but has a minimal impact on the wider success of the project. If readers want to participate by filing requests that focus that investigation on an overlooked location or problem, they do so on their own without direction or a clear way to make that contribution known. By widening the scope of features that already exist, we can direct reader attention and support in more productive and beneficial ways.

Solution

Projects are a way to quickly introduce our audience to the topics and issues we cover and then provide them avenues for deeper, sustained involvement with our work on those topics.

Presentation

Projects should contain a mixture of general and specific information. General information should include the project's name, its goal or area of focus (including why that goal or area of focus is worth investigating), and content that sets the tone for the investigation. Tone-setting content includes images, maps, charts, and voiced writing; this will give the reader a sense of what to expect from the specific information. Specific information should include links to individual articles and requests.

I think, and this is less critical, that projects should also show information about scope. What is the geographical focus of this project? Is it limited to one state, a region, or all across America? When did it start, when will it end, when was it last updated? And more critically, who is in charge, and who else is involved? These can be put aside at first, but should plan to be addressed over time. — Michael

This information can probably be extrapolated from the information accumulated within a project. For scope, you can examine the jurisdiction of the requests. For dates, look again at the request (once we add the estimation completion date tracking function, we can also predict when new info will come into the project). — Allan

Projects should be designed and built for mobile first.

Projects should be composed with an understanding towards how it will appear on social media when shared. When creating a new project, it should be made obvious how the general information for that project will be condensed and distributed socially. This can also be used as a way to encourage the project creator to provide a clear, concise, and complete set of information early on in the process (including a high-resolution primary ("hero") image, a title that is tweet-length, and a small set of relevant keywords/hashtags).

Projects should be flexible when it comes to organzing and presenting general and specific information.

Projects should be public by default with the option to become private. When a project is private, it is visible to only its contributors.

What should the rules be around deleting a project, especially a project with more than one contributor?

Involvement

Sharing

Projects should help readers to synthesize and communicate the motivations and information contained within. Raising awareness and building audience around projects depends on easy and straightforward sharing. Projects cover wide, sometimes abstract areas of investigation. We have already gone through the process of distilling and focusing this information, so we should present those problems as "solved" to the reader.

Crowdfunding

Projects should make it easy and obvious for readers to provide financial support. Projects may need the support of a committed audience, either to get started or to continue in the face of unforseen obstacles. Moreover, financial contributions are the easiest way for the reader to assist projects that require a high amount of time and attention. We already have a module to receive crowdfund contributions on requests, so this should be adapted for use by projects.

Projects should be able to have more than one crowdfund. When they expire or complete, crowdfunds should create a CrowdfundTask.

Is there anything particular or unique that crowdfunding a project entails?

__Not too much, although I think we should bump up crowdfunding fee to 15%, inclusive of Stripe fees, for both projects as well as request crowdfunds. We also will want funding integrated pretty quickly with updated emails, so that if you fund a project it's a very nice experience to start getting notifications for it in email.

I believe over time we consider experimenting with:

  • Recurring payments
  • Payments for perks
  • Payments to read supporter-only updates
  • Breaking out what funding goes to support, a la humble bundle
  • Integration with Stripe connect so we don't have to worry about complexities of managing payments for users who have funded projects. https://stripe.com/connect

None of that is high priority as long as there is a fair amount of flexibility in the presentation.

Prompted Actions

Projects should make it easy and obvious for readers who are also MuckRock users to provide additional support. Some readers may be more willing to contribute their time and energy than their money. Projects should help to ensure that their contributions are meaningful, productive, and focused. Prompted actions include suggesting requests to file.

Any other actions to prompt?

  • Share on facebook/twitter
  • Tip box?
  • Subscribe for updates, which are sent on schedule with instant/daily/weekly based on how you're receiving request updates?
  • Ask to join?

I think these should be kept fairly minimal at first, but eventually maybe asking users to do tasks drawn from task system, etc. seems viable.

Tip box is a feature that was requested for the news side as well—would be fairly straightforward as an embeddable widget. — Allan

Goals

  • Increased traffic through audience sharing of projects
  • Increased revenue through audience contributions to projects
  • Increased site activity through prompted actions

How are we measuring these goals? How are measuring success and failure?

I'm hesitant to put specific numbers on a project that's this infant, but I look at them as a critical part to hitting our overall growth goals of 8% month-over-month, and we measure all of those areas very critically. I don't think we expect any immediate site activity on prompted actions, unless I misunderstand, but I expect that over the first four months we'll see project pages become a meaningful part of that growth on both ends. I think one open question will be how to drive traffic to these pages, a question which we'll delay on the technical side until we see how they perform with promotion in news articles and on social media. - MM

Previous Project Pages

Other journalism project pages/crowdfunding pages

Clone this wiki locally