All right, so who is rooted for those of you who don't know us, we are a nonprofit focused agency. And we focus and lead with values. And so let me share what some of those values are. I'm not going to read through each one of them. But we, as always, welcome people to read through them. And I just shared the deck into the chat as well. But we focus first and foremost on anti racism, equitable access to opportunities and resources, partnership through listening and building trust, community led breakthroughs, fearless curiosity, and health and healing. And here are a couple of our services just to let you know, some of the work that we do alongside all of the community outreach and free sessions is focusing on community engagement and internal team alignment. We do brand development, logos, and all those kinds of things website design and development, analytics and optimization, some of which we're going through today, as you'll see, and then campaign design and strategy. So we're always happy to help give suggestions. You know, have a be an extra thought partner or pair of eyes if you need any of those kinds of things. So we're glad you're here. Please share your name, department role and pronouns into the chat as well as where you're coming from. And I will paste all this into the chat as well. And this is also a good moment for to please put your mic on if the chat is not available to you. And let us know. So that we make sure to repeat everything and you know, want to make sure that everything's as accessible to everyone as possible. All right. So we'll do a quick introductions of ourselves. My name is Val, my pronouns are she they I'm the Director of Strategy at rooted. I live on Chanyeol Aloni. Land in the San Francisco East Bay. And what else, I don't have any accessibility needs today. But I am a white skinned person with red hair and green rimmed glasses wearing a black shirt today.
Great. My name is Andrew Goldsworthy, he him pronouns. I'm on Menominee lands here in the Midwest in Wisconsin. I'm the Director of Client Success. And I do a lot of this type of analytics and content strategy work with our clients. And so you'll get a little bit of a taste of what that typically looks like today. And hopefully, we can share some of our resources and tools with you.
Thanks.
So welcome, everyone, it's really nice to see some familiar faces and some new faces. And thank you again for joining us here. So our agenda will start with our welcome and intro and community agreements, which we're doing now, then we'll move into organizing your assessment, do a bit of activity and share out, work through our page audits and how to build an action plan, do a little more sharing out together and then have our closing there at the end. So before we get started on anything further, again, we have a couple more people who have come in. So I just am going to paste the deck into the chat in case you want to follow along. And if you are not able to access the chat, let me just pause for a minute and please turn on your mic and let us know. So we can make sure everything's accessible to you.
Okay, so into our community agreements, we wake up, I didn't actually do. So we'd like to start all of our sessions together with creating a space of belonging. And this isn't just to go through community agreements, but also to help us set a tone and you know, we're all very busy and have so many things going on, and to just try to help us slow down and reduce the urgency and be in community with one another. So I won't read through all of them. I'll just highlight some of them. But we'll ask everyone and ourselves to approach with curiosity, be open to new ways of doing and thinking today. Engage in be present, practice mindful listening. We want you to, you know, be a part of the conversation and try not to multitask, but we also know that you're, you know, have lots of things going on and we want you to most of importantly, take care of yourself and have fun. So do what you need to do. If you need, you know, a bathroom break or water, coffee, tea, whatever. Number eight being willing to slow down notice and name what's coming up in the room, sometimes different aspects of these, this work can sometimes be uncomfortable, or, you know, I don't know, just different things about it may strike you in different ways. So if you're having discomfort or having something positive, let's slow down and notice name that in the chat or, you know, raise your virtual hands so that we can acknowledge and, and stay in space together. So I'll stop there with those anything else that anyone as they're reading through feels like they want to elevate in our conversation today.
Okay, then the last piece is to finish our context setting, rooted centers all of our work around the design Justice Network principles. And here we've listed principle two, which is really about centering the voices of those who are directly impacted, impacted by the outcomes of the design process. And if you don't think of yourself as a designer, now is the time because this is really all the work that we're doing, where we're, you know, coming up with structures or processes, ways to think about things all of that are all of those are designed processes that you're being intentional about and centering new ways of thinking around. So if you aren't familiar with the design Justice Network, I'm going to paste the link into the chat now. And then I'll also paste in the link to the liberatory design process cards as well, because they're a tool that we use in all of our work, and is really useful in helping center center who you're really doing this work for, as well as to help yourself be reflective. And notice some of how your own biases, your own identities, things along those lines might be coming into play into the decisions that you make throughout your your work. So we just encourage you to take a look at both of those things and think about how they might apply to you.
Yeah, great. Thanks, Val, for teeing all this up, and actually, we'll, we'll definitely see a couple of these principals kind of pop up today as we talk about this audit process and start to think about really, you know, who should be involved in some of these conversations? And who should we be designing with, not necessarily for right. So just to start jumping right in here, a couple of objectives for today. First and foremost, as I said at the outset, we really want to walk you through the framework that we use for assessing client websites. Hopefully, this gives you a framework or some focus for ways that you can do some of this work on your own website or on another organization's website. Oftentimes, auditing a website can be really overwhelming. There can be 10s, or hundreds or 1000s, of pages. And it can be kind of hard sometimes to understand where to get started. Thirdly is how can we bring data into this process a little bit, whether this is community input, or analytics, I think it's really important to make sure that we're removing our own biases and making sure that we're focusing on AS VAL talked about last time, focusing on the people that we are designing with, right and shameless plug here we are having an analytics workshop next month, that actually is a really good follow on to this and starts to talk about how to think about using analytics to assess the effectiveness of our site and also report, you know, how effective our site is doing. And then lastly, here really is just about momentum, I feel like sometimes it can be really hard to get started. And so that's partly why we wanted this to be interactive experience, so that you all can actually practice doing some of this today, we'll have a couple of breakout sessions, and then we'll do some group share outs as well. And then lastly, along the way, we have a bunch of free tools that we're going to share with you all and at the end and offer so hopefully everybody's able to stick around for the full workshop. Before we get started and jump into the process, it would be great just to get a little bit of a sense of some of the questions or challenges that you all have run into with assessing your website's effectiveness. Is it tools are there certain things Things that have stopped you from doing it. Have you tried certain methodologies that have been challenging in the past? But we'd love to just hear from you in the chat? Are there specific questions or things you really want to make sure that we focus on during this process? 1000s of orphaned pages. Yes, that is a good one. That is definitely a big challenge. How do we one know where they are? How do we find them? Identifying stakeholders? That sounds like a really good question, especially sometimes we only think about web users. But oftentimes, we need to consider internal stakeholders as well. We'll talk a little bit about that. How do we get them involved in the conversation? We're going to talk about that, especially in the final phase around reporting and trying to make this actionable. Explaining to leadership, why a website should be organized for users and that organizational staff love that. No specific questions. starting the process, we're looking at Google Analytics haven't done any systematic audit. So hopefully, this will be a good starting point for you, Jennifer, in terms of giving you maybe a little bit of a system, at least a starting point. different pages have different goals, we'll definitely talk a lot about that. Keeping content to a minimum yet impactful. Yeah, definitely no. We have a couple, we have a good resource for that, that hopefully will be helpful thing, segmenting audiences and target content. That's a good point, making sure we explain complex concepts in an accessible way. That will definitely come up. That's great. So a lot of these things. I'm happy to see I think we're going to cover a lot of them. And obviously, as we go through this, if you feel like you have additional questions, keep them coming in the in the chat. And we'll have a big share out session, kind of in the middle and at the end of this and then hopefully, we can get some questions or thoughts there too. So let's just jump right in and talk about the overarching process. This is a five step assessment framework that we use. And basically, we break this into three different sections organized. So that's where we're going to start. It's always nice to get things organized before we actually run our audit. The second section is our audit. And then finally, how do we make all of this work actionable? How do we report it out to folks? How do we get them to understand what it is we were looking at in the first place? And do we need to find additional resources, whether it's time, or bandwidth or budget, and then how do we prioritize the work that we want to do? So just jumping into this first organized section, throughout the course of today, we're actually going to be sort of following along with a case study. Many of you may be familiar with the ACLU as a national organization, but they actually have a local branches, in different regions as well. So the ACLU of Northern California is obviously working within that Northern California region has been a partner of Route IDs for almost 10 years or longer, actually, at this point, and one of their strategic goals is to deliver civil rights information to a diverse group of individuals. And I bring that up, because we're going to come back to it a few times during this session, just to kind of ground you in what we're trying to do on the website. For those of you that would like this is actually an audit report that we did with the ACLU of Northern California, we're going to be following along in this audit report. And this is actually the same report that you all are going to generate today, you're going to be working on today. So it can be a good tool to kind of follow along as I talk through this stuff, but also a really good tool. As you're doing your work. If you get stuck or something like that, it can be a good example that you can take with you. So the way we're going to structure today, as I said, we're going to work right now, I'm going to walk you through the first three steps to get your assessment or your audit organized. After we walk through those steps, we're going to do an activity where you all have a chance to run through and do those three steps for yourself or for your organization. We're going to come back and do a share out session together. And then we'll go through I'll walk you through the last two steps. We'll do a breakout where you can again complete those last two steps on your own. And then we'll do a big group share out to wrap things up. Okay, so with that, let's just hop right into step number one, where we are establishing the goals for this process for this audit. The reason why we start here is because there are a lot of different ways to assess or audit websites. We can be talking about content strategy, we could be talking about technical performance, accessibility, brand voice, there are a million different things that we could potentially assess And so we start here because we really want to narrow in on focus. We want to know what, what content are we looking at? Why are we looking at it? What are we hoping that content will do. And this is also really important because either if we're performing this audit as a team, it can be helpful to get everybody on the same page. But just as importantly, if we're going to report this out to a team, it's going to be really clear in terms of it's going to be really clear in terms of setting the context for what you're reporting. And yes, there will be a blank version of that audit worksheet, and I'm going to share that with you right, before we get to do our breakouts. So the reason, as I said, there are three kinds of reasons that we start here. And that helps set the context. The way that we get started with setting this context is I always like to formulate what's called a guiding question. And in this question, we really want to be as specific as possible about what we are looking at. So there's a couple of elements to a guiding question that I really think are important number one, that this question is time bound? What is the period of time that we're going to be looking at? Or what you know, for what period of time are we going to be accessing the website? Number two, we want to be as specific as possible about the content or website functionality? Are we looking at a group of content? Are we looking at a specific page? Are we looking at a workflow where maybe there will be, you know, three or four different pages. So we really want to be very specific about the content, or the thing that we are looking at? Number three, we want to make sure that our question is relevant to a strategic goal. And that's why I brought up the strategic goal earlier, we want to make sure that we are assessing or auditing towards a particular goal that we might have. Now, this might be an organizational goal, or it could be a specific department goal for a fun development group or communications group. But it is important, I think, to make this question relevant to a specific strategic goal that you have. So getting back to our case study, our question example here is during the last year, referencing that time bound, did the Know Your Rights section of our website specific content that we're going to be looking at, effectively deliver civil rights information to a diverse group of users. So again, ending there with our relevant strategic goal? Now, for those of you that are familiar with something like smart goals, this is kind of like that concept, where we're making the question as specific as possible, so that we can measure.
So for those of you following along at home with the audit that's filled in, you'll see in step one, we filled out our key question. And again, this is just a really good way to kind of ground ourselves in terms of the activity that you are going to be doing here shortly. Let's jump into step number two. And we're going to start to talk about what content or individual page are we going to be looking at during our audit process. So if your guiding question already referred to a single page, so for instance, and said, you know, over the last year, did our homepage, effectively move people to XYZ location on our site, then you've already identified the page that you're going to audit. But in our case, you'll remember that we said Does the Know Your Rights group of content, do XY and Z effectively. So in that case, we need to at least decide where we're going to start auditing that group of content, we need to identify a single page within that group that we want to start with. So how do we go about the process of selecting an individual page if we've talked about a group of content? Number one, and this goes back to the stakeholder thing? I always like to go to the people that are quote, unquote, owning this content within the organization, these internal stakeholders, right? Because they're going to understand the people that they work with best, what are they trying to communicate to them? What are the situations that they're in. And so oftentimes, those content owners within your organization, are going to understand which piece of content maybe is most valuable, out of the content that they manage on the site, what's most valuable to their work, what's most valuable to their community? Secondly, you can consider analytics, oftentimes, pages that get the most visitors, it's going to be a lot easier to audit those because large numbers give us really good information, right? So when we're looking at analytics later on, we can say okay, this page had 10,000 page views, the numbers that we see, because they are very large, are representative of really what's going on. So you could use number of visits as a way to prioritize the content or the individual page that you want to audit. Thirdly, and most importantly, is was that page actually published or public For the entire timeframe that your guiding question includes. So in our case, our guiding questions said, excuse me over the last year, did this content do X, Y, and Z. So we'd want to pick a piece of content that was available or published in the last year. And then lastly, I always like to just say, it's more important to get started than to get it right. If you're kind of stuck between maybe auditing a couple of different pages, just choose one, and it's possible in the future, you'll end up auditing all of them. So this is, this is a new process for you all. So it's all about doing it repetitively. So you can build that muscle and get more comfortable with it. In our case, we ended up selecting a page that had very high traffic, it had a lot of programmatic impact, the content was really relevant to current events, and it had been published for quite a long time. And so we ended up selecting this abortion accessing California page. And we did consult with the legal team at the ACLU of Northern California. And they said that this was actually a really important page for their work. So the final step in this organizational process, we know what our question is, we know what individual page we are going to audit. And now we're going to talk about what is it that we're actually trying to assess? Which is a good question. So websites are created out of 10s, or hundreds or 1000s of different pages of content. We heard from the community here that they often have a lot of different content that they're thinking about. But if you start to go out into the world and do a little bit of research about website content strategy, you may come across this idea that there are different categories of content. And so I like to think about four different categories of content. The first is informational. These are things like blog posts, or maybe resources. And their goal is to deliver information, maybe that answers a question. Maybe it addresses a specific pain point or delivers technical knowledge, or maybe it delivers, like timely information, like a news event, or a press release, things like that. But typically, this type of content may attract new users to your site. The second type of content is what we call investigational. These are things like your about page, your staff page, maybe your work page, annual reports. Typically, these are pages that help describe your organizational values, your mission, who you are, maybe it has details about a specific program, or the impact that you're specifically having. And oftentimes, this is where users come to kind of investigate who you are, as an organization, what you do what uniquely qualifies you for the work that you're doing. This can typically be some a place for new types of individuals that are in your community. But oftentimes, you see other types of users go here as well. Thirdly, our navigation pages. These are like our homepage or our program landing page, we're helping people take the next step in their journey when they come to our website. So we don't typically want people to dwell on these pages for too long, we want to be able to really quickly deliver information to them so that they can navigate to the next step. And then lastly, our transactional pages, these are the pages like your donate page, or your events page where you're trying to get somebody to RSVP, maybe an advocacy or a petition page, the idea of these pages is we want people to complete a specific task, right? In our case, the Know Your Rights content kind of falls into that informational category. And that's important to note, because it's going to kind of guide us in terms of the things that we're assessing. The second thing we want to think about and this came up in our chat is starting to think about who is the audience that's coming to this page? Because we want to understand what their relationship is with us right now. Are they new? They've never heard of us before? Maybe they know us, but they're coming back to our site for some updated information, or are they a loyal advocate of ours? And they're coming to donate or you know, share their voice? By signing a petition or something like that? Thirdly, what are they looking to do? Are they looking for information? Do they have a specific pain point or a goal that we can help them with? Or are they really trying to complete a specific transaction? Right? So it's, it's important for us to write down what is this target audience really looking to do? Lastly, are there environmental factors, right? Are they on a specific device? Do we think? Is there a lot of noise where they are sometimes are they in a stressful situation? All of these things I think are important when we're thinking about how effective a particular piece of content might be. So again, in our case with the Know Your Rights content, the abortion access and California are probably looking at new users, they are looking for trusted medical information, which I think is pretty important, and probably some legal advice, too, to a certain degree. And it's very possible that they are in a stressful situation, because they're looking for these health resources that are clearly a hot topic within current political environments. And it may be specifically for themselves or a loved one, or somebody else that they really care about. And so it's very possible that they are in a stressful situation. So the last element of all of this is starting to look at page level goals. We know what type of content we're looking at, we know who we're talking to, given that, what are some page level goals that we're looking to accomplish on our audit. So number one, for us in the Know Your Rights content, we really want to build brand trust, right, because again, we're talking to somebody who is looking for legal and medical advice in some regards, we want to deliver rights information to a diverse group of audiences. So again, that goes back to our strategic goal.
We really think that it's important to deliver this information to a lot of different people. Right, this is a very important topic. And the ACLU in particular, is really one of their strategic goals is to deliver civic rights information. And then lastly, we really feel it's important to provide a resource to users that they can take with them. So they don't have to necessarily come back to the website to find this information. They can download it, use it on their own or share it with other people. So again, we're getting close to activity time. And if you look at the audit example, we are we have filled in all of these different steps, we have our URL identified, we have the type of content we have a description with our relationship, what they're looking for, and environmental factors included in our target audience. And then we have our four page goals filled in. So we are coming up here on activity time, we have now we're going to do give you some time to actually practice this process on your own. And as somebody asked earlier, is there going to be a blank worksheet to work off of there is so the first link that says Oddish audit dash report is going to be a Google Doc, if you prefer to work off of Google Docs. This is what it will look like and you get a blank one, if you prefer to work off of Microsoft Word. If you download if you click on this link, and then download it, you can use that off of Microsoft Word. So we're gonna give you about 10 minutes to go offline, do a little bit of these steps on your own, feel free to go through step number one, and fill out your guiding question. And then go through and do steps number two, and three. And if you have time, trying to get about one page level goal for your audit, if you don't get there, not a big deal. But if you would like to go ahead and think about one specific page goal that you want to assess against. If you get stuck, go ahead and use that example report. And then lastly, when we come back, we'll do a five minute shell session and then we'll jump right into the second portion of this workshop. So anybody have any questions before you jump in, otherwise, we can start the activity clock? Okay, if any questions come up, please feel free to unmute your mic and go ahead and ask any questions. Or feel free to add things into the chat. But go ahead and take the next 10 minutes. I'll put the timer on. And I'll give you about a one minute heads up. And then we'll come back and do a shout. Okay, do we want to take five minutes or so and just do a quick share out? Is anybody willing to share some of the work what their guiding question was, who they're who their audiences and any page level goals that you might be working with?
I'm up for that. Thanks, Neil. Appreciate it. And it sure is messy. Okay. So prompt me again, Andrew.
What was your guiding question or your key question that you were looking at?
Um, I chose and, you know, I'm here for feedback and learning. So I chose how can said website bibliography page become easier on the eyes to navigate and be updatable? Okay,
And what how do you kind of connect that to an overarching either department or organizational goal?
Department, I am it I'm the end of the cohousing Research Network. And I'm surrounded by research directors who have other lives to lead. So that's sort of how I'm understanding the department question. The other one was about organizational goal.
Yeah. Or what's how, if we improved that bibliography page? How would it help move your organization forward?
Well, I feel like it would deliver on a promise that they've had for years, which is for researchers, intentional community professionals, and then people like you be able to easily find articles on this flat html page as it stands today. Okay, gotcha.
So, users are kind of looking for resources more effectively, or how can we make it more? How can we make it easier for our target audience to find resources or something like that? Yeah. Yeah.
It's, it's a totally niche. Marketplace, if you will, and it has attracted more researchers than we expected. It just would be nice. If it was, yeah, easier for them to find stuff.
Okay. And then based off of what you were looking at, where what type of content, do you feel like that specific pages?
I chose information.
Yeah, and this is actually a good moment to also consider not all pages have to just fall into one type of content. So we don't, we don't have to live in a black and white world. Right. So I think that's a great point, it could be information. It could also, I think, maybe fall into navigation, maybe if that page has a whole bunch of links on it. One of our goals probably is to try and get people to move through to those resources.
Yes, it could easily be navigation. However, my own personal kind of methodology has been, we have the data, we have the articles, we have the excerpts, I should say, but actually, actually, this is good for me, too. There's a higher likelihood that we would be best to provide navigation out to Research Gate, you know, to sort of educational academic organizations and servers where the full article would be available. Right. So yeah, I can see how it's some of both actually. Right.
And then as far as your audience goes, it sounds like you were mentioning researchers were there. What typically, does their relationship to the organization look like?
Hmm, great question. I think for the researcher persona. Oh, probably finding things to support their own papers, their own teaching syllabi. Yeah, I haven't heard that question as to me before. So I'm digging deeper. Yeah, initial thought about serving as a result of being able to share to make this information public. But the researchers that feels like a couple of things that come to mind right this moment.
And then I would imagine that many of them are coming on a desktop device, maybe they're sitting in their office or something like that, but that's my assumption.
Any thoughts on that? For an academic? Yeah, using? Yeah, being at work? Yeah, I think that's that's probably accurate.
Okay. And then was there one page level goal that you were thinking about?
I don't think I got to that box, Andrew. Okay. Yes. Sorry. I can easily make that up. I didn't actually get to the to the goal. Sorry. Yeah. I actually wrote down just visually less bulky.
Yeah. Okay. legibility. Yeah. Yeah.
readability. Yeah. I mean, I mean, it's just, it's a flat HTML page with 200 articles on it. And, you know, scrolling and scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. There weren't search on it, which was sort of my workaround, right until I build right tool. But I haven't done that. Yeah,
maybe that's a page goal, you know, is to make it searchable. Something like that. Yes,
that is a goal. Just an image, not too embarrassed about it, because I'm sort of becoming the parent of this organization. But that's what happened. origins look likes, if that helps at all, anyway. Okay.
Great. Well, thank you for sharing. Yeah, there's a lot more.
Thank you. I mean, content is great. And it just needs to be made more friendly for, you know, people like us. Yes.
Anybody else? We got probably time for one more if somebody wants to share or walk through it. Yeah. Thanks for sharing. Appreciate it.
Rhonda, we'll keep it anonymous because it's a client. Okay, no problem. Thanks, Tanya. So I can just kind of talk you through it. So a nonprofit homepage. And the type of content is navigational. I'm the target audience is most likely new, new visitors, new users, people not familiar with organization, my thinking was that if you are familiar with organization, or you follow it, you're getting a link from a newsletter or social media that's taking you directly to an internal page. Yeah, definitely. So if you're new to it, maybe you click maybe you don't yet follow it on social and so you just clicked on, you know, the homepage. In their bio, or there, this organization has a decent amount of search google search traffic, because they have kind of key words in their name. But I think it also means that some people are coming to the organization. And that's not where they're in. They're trying to find something else. Or maybe they're not. Or maybe they're looking up keywords hoping to find a resource. And could this organization be that resource? Yeah. So I'm thinking errors or people trying to find a resource and not sure if this organization will be that.
So it sounds like these people are putting in research mode. Yeah.
Looking for, yeah, they might be looking for help, or their own institution.
Okay, gotcha. So, and then page level goals.
Yeah, so I said, like brand awareness and positive associations with a brand want to do some kind of transaction, like sign up for a newsletter, follow on social. And even if they just look at it, and leave to like, understand a little bit about what the organization does, so that they think of the organization in the future like, yeah, maybe it's a partner down the line. Right.
So I think that's interesting. Again, we have a little, almost a combination of content types, right, we have a little bit of the navigation a little bit of the investigational to sounds like, Right,
that's true. And I guess I didn't even say that a goal is to get them to click and do something, like go to another page, like, right, do not just leave after the homepage.
Right. Right. Okay. Um, yeah, and that was going to be one of the things I was going to bring up is, do feel like this is the primary audience and therefore, like, the big navigational pathway that you want to try and promote on this page is getting people to the area of the resources they might be looking for.
Um, I think the organization is more the resources, the services rather than some kind of, like document or contract tangible like a deliverable, so it's more follow on social get in touch to partner higher than, like, the problem, someone's not going to find content that's gonna like answer a question, and then they're gonna go away. Yeah,
yep, exactly. Okay. Well, thank you for sharing any questions that came up for you that you wanted to walk through?
Um, I'm not yet I'll sort of see what you all talk about. But I've this homepage is one I've struggled with, because I find it confusing as someone who is unwell. And so I, you know, I think I'm going to be giving them advice around around that, but I think some of the problem is language. Right, right. That it may not actually have anything to do with the page layout or the navigation or whatever. But it's like, I don't know what to do next, because I don't understand the way these buckets are labeled or something like that. Yeah, yeah. What the problem is, that's just my hunch. Right?
And you know what, we'll, we'll talk about this in a second, but sometimes the best place to start is to actually do so. and use your conversations. And also ask them what they find confusing and try and drill down on that a little bit. So we'll talk about that in a little bit. Yeah, okay. Well, thank you so much. I know, if anybody wants to sort of take a break here, do a quick 60 seconds stretch, stand up, you know, feel free to do that. I know sitting for a little while, we've been in the seats for about an hour here. And I'm going to try and get through this second section relatively quickly. So we have plenty of time to do more activities. So if you want to take 60 seconds here
because when the standing desk comes in handy. Okay. Well, let's go ahead and start with our second portion, here, we're going to jump into sections four, and five or step four, and five, we've got our audit organized, we're ready to actually do the analysis are ready to do the audit. So let's talk about page analysis or actually running this audit. So at a high level, when we're doing this process, we like to take it in three different steps, I'm going to give you kind of the overarching process. And then we'll drill down on some more details for each of these steps. Step one, where I always like to start is analytics. And so you know, if today, you don't have access to the analytics, not a big deal, but we can walk you through a couple of things to think about in this process. Step two is we actually have sort of a cheat sheet that we're going to send over to you, I'll walk you through it in a second. But it will give you some best practices based on the type of content that you're looking at. So you can really just go through and check a bunch of boxes and say, Hey, this does this, well, it doesn't do this well. And you can use all of that, put it in your audit report, and then find some ways to improve those issues. And then lastly, again, remember, we set those page level goals, we're actually going to go through the process of looking at each of those goals, and deciding what works well, where there are opportunities, and what we might do as a result of that. So let's drill down on each of these steps in a little bit more detail. And I'll start to walk you through the analytics portion of that. So number one, in our audit guide, and let me pull it up. I'll share this with you in a second. But you can see in here that you have on the left hand side, all of the different content types. And if you jump to that section, it will have a description of what the content is the examples of types of content, what a successful web visitor looks or visit looks like the metrics that you might want to consider. And then we'll talk about this in a second. But it has a bunch of basically a checklist of things based on the type of content that you're looking at. And so you can use that guide as a way to understand what metrics should I actually be looking at. And again, shameless plug in June, we are going to go through this process of deciding which metrics are most meaningful to your website, and a lot more detail. And so if you'd like to participate in that, we'll send a link for that, at the end of this. Secondly, oftentimes with analytics, we get overwhelmed, we try and look at every single thing. The great thing about Google Analytics or any analytics platform, as it gives you lots of information that can also be its Achilles heel, right? When you try and look at 20 analytics, sometimes you get overwhelmed. So I recommend just start with one or two at the outset, and try and use analytics to compare or benchmark, the page that you're looking at, versus other pages, like it. And then lastly, again, dashboards help a lot. So if you have a particular area where you report already on specific metrics, that allows you to narrow down on to just the metrics that are meaningful to your organization. And again, if you participate in that analytics workshop, we actually go through the process of figuring out which metrics to choose and then we actually give you and we're going to share this with you as well, a free Data Studio template that you can use to plug your analytics into. So what we found when we looked at analytics on our access to abortion page, we found that it was one of the top ranked entry points across the ACLU of Northern Cal California website. It had only average engagement rate so we kind of put that into the maybe this is an opportunity but bucket, we might want to investigate what other Know Your Rights pages do well to increase the engagement rates. And then lastly, you'll remember one of our page level goals is to deliver information that people can take with them. So unfortunately, when we looked at the analytics, this particular page did not Have any situations where people were downloading those resources that they could take with them. So I just kind of walked you through it. But the second step here is our content Best Practices checklist. And so again, if you keep scrolling down to the bottom here, you'll see that we have a content audit checklist, all you have to do is read the item, if it looks good to you, go ahead and check it if not, leave it unchecked. And again, that can be put into your report as an opportunity for potentially improving the page. If you're kind of on the fence about it, I would just include it as an opportunity. And maybe you can talk through it as a group during the reporting process. The other thing to note in here is there are a number of links that are really helpful for tools like Google's automated testing for mobile friendliness, this Hemingway app does a really good job of giving you like readability scores. There are a lot of other tools out there that do that. But this is kind of a cool new one that I've seen. And so there are a number of links in here for tools that you can run automated processes on your site. So hopefully, that's going to be really helpful. And again, we'll share this with you shortly when we get into the activity. So in our case, when we went through the checklist for informational content, we basically found that the content that we looked at looked at on our Know Your Rights page was well structured, it had very clear headers, it had a pretty good mobile experience, we felt like it had a big opportunity around adding in video or images as a way to deliver information, not everybody is going to necessarily be in a situation where they can read long blocks of text. And then also we were, we noticed that there was not multilingual content available for this. And again, if one of our strategic goals is to deliver information to a diverse group of people, then having multilingual content available is a really important feature there. So the last step of all of this was, again, during our organization process, we outlined our page level goals that we wanted to hit on. And so we go through and do a page level goal analysis. So some tips on how to get started with this. Number one, just ask some really simple questions about what works and what doesn't, about that specific goal, right? Now, this starts to be a little bit more of an art form than something that's really specific. But after you do this a few times, again, it's like an exercise, you're going to get better and better at it. So if you get frustrated or stuck at the outset, that's okay, just keep moving forward. And you know, as I said, after you start to look at some examples, or you start to look at other pages on your site like this, you're going to get better and better at it. Secondly, I'd highly recommend, if you are looking at your site, go out and find some other sites on the Internet, whether their organizational peers, or maybe even commercial sites that do similar things to you, and start to get some inspiration from them. We'll walk you through an example about that in a second. But looking at other sites can be a really good way to sort of assess the effectiveness of your site.
As I said before, use our audit guide as a good starting point. Below our checklists section, we have another section called content strategies to consider. So again, it's going to give you a little bit of a hint in terms of how to assess those page level goals. So you'll remember in our organization process, we had four different goals that we were looking at. The first one was to develop trust with our users. And so we felt like our page just because the ACLU brand oftentimes carries a lot of weight, we immediately have the capability to create trust with a lot of our users. However, there were a lot of opportunities, I think, to increase that. And so one of the things that we did was we went out, and we found on WebMD, this really interesting thing at the top of their informational articles, that says medically reviewed by a specific person. And if you click on that it elevates who that person is, what their credentials are. And so in our case, we thought, hey, maybe we could add in that this was reviewed by a specific expert in this particular law area. And then again, connect to that to a biography about what that person's expertise is. And again, that just goes towards that building trust this information is something that you can really consider. The second goal that we had was delivering information to a diverse group of users. We really liked how this page was set up to have this jump menu on the left hand side. So it was really easy for people to jump down to the section of the content. It's also a great way for people to see an overview of what's on the page. So that really worked out well. But as I brought up before this page, you can see is a lot of text and some of that text is very jargony We thought it would be really great to have some supporting media, whether it's videos or images as a way to explain complex things to people. Not everybody is going to be in a situation where they can read a really long document. And so especially with the way social media is now today, we're very familiar now with consuming information through video and audio. And so adding that into the page, I think could be a really a big benefit for this page. Thirdly, one of our goals was to get new users to our site. And this particular page performs really well on a lot of different keyword searches related to abortion in California. But we also thought there was an opportunity maybe to incorporate Google Ad Grants. So for those of you that are familiar with this, this is a program that Google puts on, they give 501, C threes $10,000 a month in free advertising on their search engine. So we thought, hey, maybe this is an opportunity to show up in even more search results. And then lastly, we wanted to assess are there resources on this page where people can take them with you, right. And so the last thing was, we noticed there were no downloads. And that was because this download button, there wasn't actually a resource. So that's a huge opportunity, and one that we think is really important to consider. So that was the process of going through and auditing those four page level goals. Now we have all of this information, we've gone through three steps of auditing this page, what do we do with it, we need to make this actionable in some way. So ultimately, we actually really like to keep this process very simple. And we just focus in on four different questions. And you'll see at the bottom of your audit sheet, that there's an area where you can fill this in. So number one, what worked well, we like to start off with the positives, right? If you're reporting to people that maybe created this page, or quote, unquote, own the content on this page, it's really important to start off with positivity, right? Because if you start off just talking about the things that you don't think are good, you're gonna people are going to shut down and stop listening right away. So just start with, Hey, this is the positive thing. This is what's working really well. And here are the reasons why we think that the second question that we like to answer is, where are the opportunities to improve? Right, and again, let's talk about let's keep this focused on the content itself, let's not make this a personal thing about somebody's writing style, or whatever it is. Try and frame things in terms of opportunities. Three, what are the resource resources that are going to be needed to accomplish this? Can we do it in house? Does the team that maybe needs to participate this in this have capacity? Right, especially organizations? We're always dealing with different capacity issues? Do we need to hire outside resources to do this? If so, do we have somebody that we already work with? Do we have a budget for it? You know, we need to really consider all of these things. And then lastly, how do we prioritize this work? Who should drive it? And what I would recommend? And you don't have to follow this advice, but I think it's this is actually one of the more important questions to answer is, how do we do that, we recommend that you try and start with the easiest things first. And one of the reasons for that is that that helps get momentum and gets the team moving forward. Secondly, what we've seen oftentimes is that sometimes the simplest changes actually make the most impact on a page. And so it could be even something as small as hey, let's break this text into sections to make it easier for people to skim, right. And so when you start with the simple things that don't take a lot of resources, and then you start to see improvements in the metrics for this page. Oftentimes, that gets people more excited to continue to do more things to it. And then you can start to take on some of the larger projects that maybe take more resources more time. But if you start off with the biggest process first or the biggest project first, it could take months, people can lose steam, it could, you know, chew up all of your budget. So just be really cognizant of how you try and prioritize things as you start to make all of this audit process actionable. So, activity time, let's take 10 minutes here to do the last two steps. And for those of you that would like to check out our audit guide, I just put the link in there, feel free to make a copy of that and take it with you. We're going to take about 10 minutes here and do the last two steps number four, which is actually the audit process and the number five if you can get through putting together kind of the report. If you can go ahead and if you don't have access to analytics, you can kind of skip that. Part, if you want to use the audit guide checklist, as a starting point for your assessment process, go for that. And then if you do have one page level goal, go ahead and try and go through that exercise of what's the one thing that worked, what's one opportunity and go from there. So we'll give you about 10 minutes here starting now. And I'll put a little bit of music on for you. And then we'll come back and do a five minute share out. And then we'll wrap things up. Anybody willing to share out their last two steps here?
All right. Um, I'm not actually going to share because I went down the rabbit hole of Google Analytics. I jumped in there to try to get some data to to start thinking about sort of how successful we were with some of our goals. And yeah, anyway, I went down the rabbit hole, I feel like it's, I'm not sure I'm in a position to really assess. We don't really have we don't have the data set up to answer these questions yet. I don't know how to read the analytics well enough to answer some of these questions. So I was a little bit at a loss. Okay.
Did you have a chance to look at the Audit Checklist? At all? It sounds like you went down a bit of a rabbit hole,
kind of rabbit hole. I was just getting back to that. And then we got called back. So.
Okay, yeah, well, maybe this is something that you can do offline or no. Spoiler alert, one of the things that we want to offer for you all is some time to do a one on one check in. So maybe it's worth, you know, signing up for one of those, we'll put a link in the chat here in a second.
And so but generally, you know, do you feel like we need to get some kind of website analytics to, to answer some of these questions.
I think it's helpful, but I don't think it's required. Okay. So
it's just kind of like, based on your gut feeling and logic, if the questions that you're setting up look like they can be answered by your website. Yeah.
And I think Well, I would, I would say, maybe not gut feelings and logic. But I think typically, number one, this checklist is going to walk you through some best practices for UX, like user experience and page design and content strategy. And so that's going to at least get you maybe to a best practices standpoint. And then secondly, if you don't have analytics, another opportunity is, as I said earlier, maybe connect with somebody that's using the content, or maybe somebody that's never used it before, but maybe looks like your target audience, you can sit down with them and say, you know, have a series of questions, and we can share those with you, too. We have a whole a whole number of stakeholder interview questions that we could share with you as a good starting point. It doesn't have to be analytics, it could be other ways to assess it.
Oh, that'd be great. What, you know, one thing I will say, when I was setting up the goals for our homepage, I did kind of wonder if we were asking it to do too much. We want it to be navigational, we want it to, you know, give people a sense of who we are and what we're all about. And if we're credible, and, you know, and also provide a little information. So I don't know, like that was one thing that was running through my head when I was starting to do the goals if there's such a thing as just like, you know, asking the page to do too much?
That's a great question. I think so I think there could be situations like that. But I think also, to your point, homepages do require a lot of they do play a lot of roles. And so so you have to be judicious with the space, and be really good at what you are using to communicate certain things and what you are using to help people navigate. Yeah, that's a great point.
Thank you.
Yeah, and Val just dropped in a download for stakeholder Interview Guide. For those of you that are interested, and we can follow up with an email on that to anybody else we're, we probably have time for maybe one more.
Okay. Well, let's wrap things up here. I appreciate everybody that was able to stick around the whole time. Couple of things just to get things wrapped up. Number one, I said I mentioned this a few times. But for anybody that's interested or like Jennifer, kind of wondering what to do, what metrics are important and how to get them set up. We are running a workshop in June on June 26. That kind of goes through that process of how to select the metrics that are meaningful to your website to your organization. So if you're interested in RSVP to that, I put a link in the chat. Secondly, as I outlined before, one of the things we want to offer to you all is if you'd like to have a one on one conversation with me about either roadblocks you ran into, or things that you're thinking about, you want to review the audit that you did, or just talk generally about content strategy, feel free to find a time that works for you. And then the last thing that I will put here is really, really appreciate any feedback on these workshops. Just like you all are trying to improve your websites. We're constantly trying to improve our community experiences. So if you have any thoughts or feedback, your input is always always appreciated on the way that we structured this workshop or the time or the content itself. Any input would be super helpful. And of course, you know, if you have your phone with you, you can take a quick snapshot of that QR code two. Last thing, for those of you that are still interested, we'd love to hear from you. What are you what's one insight that you took from today's session or one thing that you'd like to do as a result of today and put it out there in the world so that you can manifest it. But thank you all for taking the time today to be with this community event. And again, thank you for your input your time. I know 90 minutes can sometimes feel like a little bit of time but hopefully you got a lot out of it.
