It’s hard to overstate the important of your organization’s digital presence. Most people will first interact with you through social media, websites, and e-newsletters. This makes these essential parts of a complete communications strategy.
Websites
Without regular maintenance and refreshes, websites become messy and out-of-date. That reflects on your organization. So a functional and well-designed website is essential. I’ve helped refresh two institutional websites, malariagen.net and cifar.ca.
With MalariaGEN, we ported an old Drupal instance into WordPress, moderninzing not just how the website looks, but also how it works behind the scenes. This made posting easier, faster, and more consistent. It also made user journeys easier.
At CIFAR, we redesigned the look and feel and updated the back-end of cifar.ca in 2020. I was responsible for creating engaging, multi-layered content that told the story of this unique research organization.
E-Newsletters
Newsletters are a great way to keep in touch with your audience, providing personalised information straight to inboxes.
However, there’s a tendency for organizations to use them as a laundry list of updates from the previous month. Instead, they work best as curated selections of news that your audience can use. At CIFAR and MalariaGEN, I updated the newsletters, dramatically shortening and implementing a more narrative style. This increased open and click rates, as well as subscriber numbers.
Jon Farrow 