Core Problem: Stagnant traffic due to low brand awareness and little top of mind space.
Other Issues: Low budget, few web-savvy staff, a content creation model designed around once-a-year publication (in the form of events, exhibits, articles and books), no coherent or comprehensive marketing plan, fiefdom-like organizational structure where departments don’t communication or share information or resources.
Solution: New web site based on a simple but comprehensive marketing plan that focuses on the breadth of content instead of looking at it as a liability.
The WHS is a hybrid organization, existing within the structure of the State of Wisconsin and also as an adjunct library to the University of Wisconsin. This resulted in an organization that has the speed and budget of a state bureaucracy as well as the flexibility and interdepartmental cooperativeness of a large university. Any new web project that hoped to succeed could not just be an excellent site, but would have to be an agent of change, transforming the environment within the organization. Without support from all departments and buy-in from management and staff, the web site would become an ornament, and would quickly become a useless one, at that.
To change the environment, I needed to build a roster of people who could play roles as advisors to me (as I was new to the organization) and as evangelists (to encourage buy-in from all corners of the organization). The organization’s most obvious issue was that it was really five or six businesses pretending to be a single entity. In few other worlds would things as diverse as a library and archives, a publishing house, a museum, archives for International Harvester and Gaylord Nelson, the state archives, and an office for historic properties and related tax credits be housed under one roof. After a survey of the departments, building a list of individual and program-based needs, I built a structure that gave each program its own space, but focused on cross-promotion. Rather than the breadth of content being a liability, I turned it on its head and made it an asset: Coming to one program would introduce you to a number of other programs you didn’t know about. Each program would be a separate door to the organization as a whole, finding and aggregating diverse audiences in one place.
A focus on repetitive and perpetual content creation quickly became a priority. First, I selected tools to make content creation easy for anyone (CMS tools like MovableType and Adobe Contribute). Then, I designed a series of programs that utilized these tools and extend the brand without distracting from it. For example, Odd Wisconsin leveraged existing resources (the Library and Archive) and turned them from a monolithic mountain of content and broke it down into bite-sized pieces that were educational and fun. Three times a week, staff would publish a short essay describing a piece content (an image, an article, an object from the museum), its place in history and why it was relevant. This program was such a success, it was re-purposed into a weekly newspaper column and a book. Weekly exposure in the newspaper kept the WHS top of mind and helped to reshape its identity from one of a ivory tower-dwelling academian to a helpful mentor or sage (not surprisingly, a rebranding campaign with Lindsay Stone and Briggs would later help us define this archetype for the entire organization).
Odd Wisconsin is also an example of a program that was a part of a broader strategy I refer to as our “Dandelion Strategy.” Rather than focus on a single branding message and broadcast it to the world, I instead turned each program into a dandelion, which would spread its individual messages around in small and seemingly random ways to take root multiple places. Historic Diaries (like the first-hand day-to-day account of Lewis and Clark’s journey across America distributed through a blog), This Day In Wisconsin History, Places Along The Way, Cool Stuff, National History Day Diary, and Museum Object of the Week all spread the word to different audiences in different ways.
I tweaked the site during the 2 years after it was first launched. But each tweak looked to fine-tune the site in the face of successful content creation. The strategy I was responsible for creating and executing increased site traffic by 500% in three years and increased the length of visit time to more than four minutes.