Composable Content

The mission was to create a dynamic and inclusive web app for this grassroots Facebook-based social just organization based in New York City.

Background

The organization started as a Facebook Group then hired me to help them transfer their legacy content from Facebook to a new web app. The web application I worked on – let’s say, System A – is the main repository that stores records related to events, campaigns, partnerships and initiatives. Organization employees (aka internal users) can search for content, member profiles, articles using specific tags. The site aimed to unite community members, provide essential information about local programs and events, facilitate lawmaker letter writing campaigns, offer political candidate reviews, share polling locations, integrate an API for aggregating local news on social injustice, and introduce a school-based curriculum program. Leveraging AI development, user research, content mapping, taxonomy, and tone frameworks, we aspired to build a platform that empowers individuals and fosters positive change.

Problem

All of their activity was located on the Facebook app, within the groups Page. This included member names, geotags, events, corporate partners, news, group activity. The organization wanted a way to capture and manage all content from Facebook on their new platform. They also wanted to make sure they didn’t loose members by migrating from Facebook.

Journey Mapping

Created User Journey Maps to prioritize project steps, define language, and understand user flow with the product and experience. Determined the type of journey we were working with, would it be a reflection journey (a journey that reflects existing mental models) or a disruption journey (where we interrupt a model because it is incorrect).

Questions to answer:

see – what will the audience see (and where are they seeing it)?

hear – what are they hearing and who from? Which channel?

feel – how they are feeling

do – what will our audience be doing? What decisions do they feel they have to make?

Content Audit

With the user journey and language defined, I conducted an in-depth content audit within the Facebook Group. I created a spreadsheet in Excel with specific content categories, created composable content structure with cards, then mapped the cards to specific stages along the user journey. This framework became the outline for the composable content structure, which could be scaled up and scaled down.

Content Strategy

Implemented a composable content experience with Airtable along with ux design which resulted in a continuous and fluid CX to create a consistent experience. While most turn to Airtable to plan and organize their work, it's also an extremely viable option to manage data and content.

Why Airtable

If you’re running a Facebook Group, you're generating content (i.e. posts, comments). Every post is composed of data like the text, author, image, reactions etc. All that data needs to be stored somewhere (if not on Facebook) so we chose Airtable because of its headless CMS capabilities. We could capture the usage statistics directly from the Facebook Group—and own it within one center of truth. It also allows multiple contributors to create, edit, and publish

Content Pipeline

Airtable has a number of content calendar templates. If you use Airtable as a CMS in conjunction with these calendars, it turns into an an end-to-end content pipeline. Thus, we could easily feed any content from Squarespace directly into the Airtable base. Then we would have a complete content repository ready whenever the next product idea was initiated.

Prototype

Worked with UX Designer to develop wireframes for a Squarespace website, with mock-ups and ultimately a high-fidelity prototype.

A/B Testing

Tested two versions of the website, with slightly different content experiences, different CTAs, UI elements, information architecture.

Impact

Replatformed this Facebook group of almost 40k members to a Squarespace ecommerce web site with a membership community

Utilized APIs to create an automated content pipeline, and implemented automated predictive audience creation leveraging Twilio Segment, allowing us to sort content by relevance, chronology and popularity. This meant having a constant feedback loop with the audience in a highly-changeable space

Geo tagged event listings and local community news which made every user feel a sense of place with behavior-based recommendations

Eliminated confusing design elements, relied on design conventions, and established design standards for every important task where required and boosted sign-ups by 15% 

Led brainstorming workshops to establish 5 primary themes, matching personas and identified personalization opportunities within the creation flow, increasing user generated content by 200%