Part of IWS's consulting process is to meet with key stakeholders and decision-makers in your organization to conduct a thorough analysis of your needs and those of your audiences. As preparation for this analysis, please take a few minutes to consider the questions below and answer as many as you can. Feel free to be as general or as specific as you like.
Who are you?
Your name
The group, unit, or department you represent
Your audiences
Who are your audiences, and what do they want from your site? Please summarize as much as you know about your online visitors here.
Primary Audience(s) Who are they? What are they coming for?
Secondary Audience(s) Who are they? What are they coming for?
Your Mission
If your organization or department has a mission, values, or goals that you live by, please include highlights here in a couple of bullets.
Your messages
Think about your audiences and your mission to serve them--what messages, information, or learning do you want them to take away?
If visitors take only one thing away from this site, what should it be?
What else would be great for visitors to pick up during their visit?
Your unit and the larger organization
Consider your entire organization and identify key strengths or differentiating features. Also, consider whether there are areas for improvement that you hope to downplay, or recast as strengths. (e.g. UCLA's law school changed a potential liability, their relatively short history, into a strength. On the law.ucla.edu “About” page, a lack of tradition became a “tradition of innovation.” The school extends the theme of innovation throughout their site.)
Now think specifically about your department, team, or unit. Please provide three bullets summarizing what it does, its strengths, or its distinguishing features.
My unit's strengths/features · · ·
My unit's goals and priorities for the next five years · · ·
Your comps
Whether you think of them as competitors or comparables, there are other sites or institutions with similarities to yours. Please list some web addresses that IWS can use to learn more about these comp sites.
Consider whether they are meeting the needs of their organization and their audience. What are they doing right, and what are they not doing well (or enough)?
What are they doing that you wish your web presence were doing?
Your inspirations
Think about sites or specific features of some sites that you like (they don't have to be related to your field in any way), and list them here.
Your notion of improvement
In general terms, what aspects of your unit's web presence do you hope to see preserved, added, or changed?
Preserve this:
Add this:
Lose or change this:
Your aesthetic
Please list some words to describe the look and voice of the site you hope to have.
Existing content
Consider what written content, photos, audio, video or other media you currently have, or could have available. Be sure to think about other publications or media you have created for other initiatives or campaigns.
Gathering these materials and securing the permissions to use them can take a surprisingly long time, so please get a head start on that work if you can.
New and future content
Who in your unit will be responsible for generating, approving, and updating content for your section of your site? How often do you expect to make updates to your content?
Other ideas, suggestions, comments
If you can think of anything else that will help the IWS team to understand what you and your audience need from your site, please add it here.