When I started my job as Director of Communications at Parents for Public Schools of San Francisco (aka PPS-SF) I inherited a ten-year-old website. The site used Dreamweaver and it lived on a desktop in the home of (a very nice) contract design consultant that I had never met in person.
The site was full of outdated text, complicated links, ancient pictures, and too many drop down menus. Our executive director joked that she didn’t like to give out our URL because it was too embarrassing.
However, our work depended on the clear dissemination of information and resources to San Francisco families. Clearly, we had a problem to solve.
We needed a tool to help us take lots of complex policy information and make it accessible. We needed to upgrade our platform and our information security. We needed a brand overhaul. We needed translation into Spanish and Chinese. And we needed it to be incredibly affordable to create and maintain because we had a budget of zero dollars, being a scrappy nonprofit.
So we rolled up our sleeves and solved the problem in true scrappy nonprofit style.
Our then executive director, Masharika Prejean Maddison, wrote a stellar grant for $80,000 for a website overhaul and brand refresh. We were awarded less than half.
So we scaled it back and put out a call for bids. We Are Licious, a high-end, innovative production team, came in well under budget with a special “nonprofit rate.” It helped that two of their team members were public school parents and felt an affinity for our mission.
The We Are Licious team managed the product design and I furiously spent three months writing and editing copy. It was a challenge to make thousands of words on the notorious SFUSD student assignment system fit into our clean and tidy new site. We user tested with our own staff who patiently sat through many impromptu focus-groups, before getting feedback from other public school parents.
We also overhauled our newsletter, social media, presentation decks, and other collateral to match the design and branding on the new site. We had to do all of this in-house, with no graphic designer, as we had burned through our grant budget.
Finally we launched. Just in time for families to receive school assignment letters and for a school district communications crisis on the eve of our annual fundraiser. The site was polished and ready to go. And our social media, text messaging, and email communications all came together so that we could manage the crisis remotely from the event.
None of this would have been possible a mere six months earlier.
