HOWTO: Design a Strategic Communications Plan

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Hello, I’m Nick Norman – I volunteer as the Lead Communications Fellow at the Internet Archive’s Open Library.

The Open Library provides readers with free, digital access to millions of library books, but we can only help readers who know we exist. My mission is to cultivate an inclusive communications program that helps even the most remote readers discover and access our free services, learn about new features, and stay informed about the latest library news. In the service of achieving this goal, I’ve spent the past several months designing a strategic communications plan for OpenLibrary.org.

In this post I’ll share my personal story. I’ll also teach why effective communication is essential to helping patrons, explain how we’re structuring our communications strategy, and share what we’ve achieved so far.

For me, volunteering was always in the books

Open Library’s mission of being a free, public, open source catalog of books is personal to me because my parents were both librarians and my mother was a writer. Growing up, my library card was one of my most prized possessions and I seldom left home without it. In 2020, I took my library card digital by participating in an Open Library hackathon – a unique social event where volunteers of all backgrounds joined together for a few intense hours with the shared goal of improving the website together.

During this event, I felt supported by a passionate community of designers, engineers, and librarians. It was the Open Library community’s emphasis on inclusivity that truly resonated with me and motivated me to apply and become an Open Library Fellow. As someone who has felt personally marginalized and overlooked, the community’s commitment to equity and inclusion holds deep significance to me.

Empowered by these experiences, I’m proud to direct my expertise in communications to help bridge the gap between the many overlooked readers who need access to books and the bountiful books lining Open Library’s digital shelves.

The Importance of Communications

The greatest minds may develop the world’s greatest ideas and still fail to reach the minds of others. Some of Nikola Tesla‘s most brilliant inventions ended up being coopted by more effective communicators; his invention of Alternating Current was capitalized by Thomas Edison and his Tesla Coil, which proved the concept of wireless transmission, was popularized by Guglielmo Marconi who applied the technology to produce the iconic radio.

Since connecting with other humans through storytelling is such an important aspect of effective communication, here is a story of a renowned scientist named James Hutton, who in 1785 failed to excite those at the Royal Society of Edinburgh, despite making the groundbreaking (pun intended) discovery of tectonic plates. You can probably guess why based on this excerpt from Hutton’s writing recounted in Bill Bryson’s book, “A Short History of Nearly Everything”:

A practitioner may architect the grandest service with every bell and whistle, but if it doesn’t reach the right audience and get presented in a way that resonates with their needs, it’s unlikely to stick. It’s a sentiment perfect captured by Dr. George Berkeley in his proverbial question, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

So how might a project go about communicating a message effectively? What does effective communication look like and what does it achieve? At Open Library, we start with a desired outcome, like teaching patrons about a new feature, and then gain additional clarity by applying a framework to answer 5 Ws:

  • For Whom is the message intended (audience)?
  • Why is the message being broadcast (purpose)?
  • What is the strategy, tone, and approach for the message (content)?
  • When will the message be broadcast (timing)?
  • Where & how will the message be broadcast (distribution)?

Within each of these 5 W’s, there are opportunities for experimentation and testing to measure and improve success. Where did readers prefer to receive our messages — on twitter or our email distribution channel? Was broadcasting a message when it was 2pm better for readers than 5pm? Was what we sent out engaging to readers? For those who read the news, were we able to reach librarians or did we reach teachers instead? As we systematically break down communications into smaller problems and a framework for testing and improving success, we begin to see that it’s a lot of work. The more news there is to publish, the more features to announce, and the broader the audience, the more challenging it can be to effectively coordinate answers to each of these questions.

Communications Challenges at Open Library

Open Library’s growth over the past several years, driven both by the challenges of the COVID pandemic as well as a continuous torrent of new features, has led to increased demand by patrons looking for resources to guide their experience. The absence of a formal communications program has made it challenging to produce content at this large a volume and frequency — particularly articles for our blog. No one person could do it well and so our first objective has been to explore streamlined processes for coordinating the production and distribution of high quality content.

The production of each blog post involves multiple stages: ideation, research, graphics, writing, editing, promoting, and evaluating impact. With a small team, one could only produce a few quality articles a month. Scaling this process requires first having a formal process for producing a single blog post and then understanding where the bottlenecks are, which tasks may be parallelized, and developing effective training tools for a volunteer community where contributors are likely to come and go based on their busy schedules. In a scenario where multiple blog posts are being authored at once, we also needed a system for coordinating progress and needs across blog posts.

Solution: Our Communications Program

To address the challenge of not having a communications program in place, we initiated a period of planning and strategizing which has led to some amazing achievements. One notable accomplishment is the successful implementation of a dedicated Slack channel, serving as a space for our communications team to work together on a diverse range of projects. Additionally, our communications channel fosters cross-functional collaboration by allowing leads from within Open Library to join and contribute to the progress of intersecting projects.

Another significant accomplishment is the creation of our communications homebase, providing a central location for our communications efforts. Within the homebase, volunteers can access information about active projects and stay updated on the latest strategies being developed. Additionally, the homebase serves as a valuable resource for understanding our communication guidelines, community rituals that foster inclusion, and policies that shape our collaborative environment.
By establishing a dedicated communications homebase, we have successfully tackled the challenges associated with showcasing active communications projects and onboarding volunteers at varying engagement paces. The homebase also plays an important part in keeping everything organized, streamlining volunteer contributions into our Slack space and ensuring everyone’s impact is truly felt.

Another achievement by our communications team is the implementation of a bi-weekly communications video call. This gives us balance between working on projects in our Slack space and having real time check-ins to connect and share updates, provide support, and engage in discussions around intensive aspects of projects such as our blog program, a project that’s been our center focus.

Through the progress we’ve made with our blog program, we have defined processes and identified key roles to form a team of dedicated volunteers responsible for producing one blog post at a time. Each team will consist of a project lead, content writer & graphics, editor, and promoter. This structured approach not only allows us to scale up with additional teams as new volunteers join but also enables us to accommodate the expanding scope of future blog posts.

The ongoing development of the blog program has enabled us to establish two distinct pathways for volunteers to participate. Individuals can choose to fill a specific role in the production of blog posts or they join a blog testing team, which helps us to test and explore best approaches to expanding the program as needed. Here are a few links to documents pertaining to testing and the development of our blog program.

In the process of obtaining these learnings for our blog, our team of volunteers have also been able to advance Open Library’s communications efforts by creating 15 pilot episodes of an amazing unofficial community podcast. In doing so, we’ve achieved a better understanding of what it takes to run a podcast program where community members are empowered to help produce episodes.

Ways to Contribute

You can learn more about our progress with the podcast by visiting here, as we eagerly anticipate sharing an update in the future.

If you’re inspired by the work we’re doing in our communications program, we’d love for you to join us. You can do so by visiting our volunteer page or you can visit our fellowship page to learn more about contributing that way.

Personal Reflections

The process required for a single person to produce a blog post is very different from the systems and conventions required for a team to coordinate on producing content collaboratively. As a fellow on the communications team, I am quite proud to contribute to the mission of Open Library to bring online books to patrons and to serve as a champion for the idea that every reader should be included.

Reflecting on my journey from the time I first arrived at Open Library to where I am today, it feels like I have traversed two entirely different worlds. Each person I’ve encountered throughout my fellowship has played a significant role in contributing to expanding my professional skillsets and fueling my drive for promoting inclusion and accessibility in my work and daily interactions.

Work with Nick

While I intend to continue volunteering with the Open Library to further its communications program as a fellow, I am seeking career opportunities to support developing communications programs for communities, both online and offline. I love engaging with communities and making people feel welcomed. If your community would benefit from working with a communications specialist, please do not hesitate to contact me. I am also open to being contacted with opportunities to share my expertise through speaking, writing, or mentoring others in implementing similar communications programs.

Shoutouts

In Buddhist culture, “Dana” embodies the spirit of generosity. Mek Karpeles, the leader of the Open Library project, has exemplified this virtue by selflessly dedicating his time to help not only myself but also many others in their personal and professional growth. Just as Buddha teaches, I have gratefully received his gift with open hands and intend to share it freely with others.

I also want to thank Wendy Hanamura, the Director of Partnerships at Internet Archive, for providing me with valuable mentoring and foundational knowledge in communications prior to the start of my fellowship here at Open Library. It is a great privilege for me to have both Mek and Wendy as mentors in the same lifetime.

I would like to also acknowledge the valuable contributions from the members of our communications team over the past several months: Rachel Bayston, Urja Upadhyaya, Debbie San, Samuel Grunebaum, Crystal Mares, Roselle Oswalt, and many other volunteers who have played a crucial role in advancing our communications program from the planning phase to its actualization. Their feedback and contributions have greatly enhanced my learning and professional development.

Finally, I want to express my deepest appreciation to the many staff members and community leads across the Internet Archive and Open Library and volunteers who have provided their support to our communications program. Here are some of those names: Lisa S., Chris Freeland, Drini Cami, Jim Champ. Mark H., Brenton Cheng.

Update: Open Library Book Page Redesign

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Last year, as part of our inaugural ‘Internet Archive Summer of Design fellowship,‘ we conducted design research on making our Books Page easier for patrons to navigate on both desktop and mobile devices. We are excited to announce that a significant number of these improvements have been implemented this past month.

We extend our heartfelt appreciation to Hayoon Choi, Jim Champ, Katherine McGonigle, Jayden Teoh, and all the dedicated individuals involved in bringing these changes to life. 

Key design updates we made to the our Books Page:

  1. Navigation Menu. The Books Page navigation menu has been designed to be more visually clear and relocated to the top of the page, directly beneath the main menu for better discovery. As you scroll, the fixed sub navigation menu dynamically highlights the corresponding section option based on the scroll position within the website.
  2. Buttons. Because we had so many buttons competing for attention, the “Preview” button has been replaced with a more subtle link below the book cover. The prominent green “Want to Read” button has also been updated to a more neutral gray color. Finally, on mobile, the share button has been moved up from below the fold, next to the title.
  3. Mobile. The Mobile Books Page now features the book title and author first, then a prominent book cover, and finally available read options, all above the fold.

Desktop

Before

After

Mobile

Before

After

Feedback Welcome

In pursuit of improving accessibility for all patrons, we empathize that website changes may also be challenging for our readers. We welcome and appreciate your feedback so we can further improve the usability of our services. Please feel free to share your thoughts or questions in the comments section and connect with us on Twitter.

Book Talks: Watch Virtual Talks by Trailblazing Authors

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by Nick Norman & Mek

In an ongoing series, the Internet Archive hosts renowned authors of the digital humanities and beyond for virtual book talks that are free and open to the public.

Graphic credit: Urja Upadhyaya

For nearly a decade, the Internet Archive has hosted events at its headquarters in San Francisco, occasionally welcoming forward-thinking authors of give presentations about their recent books in the digital humanities.

The COVID pandemic has been a catalyst for change, both in the types of challenges facing our communities and how we may address them. In 2020, many libraries were required to close their doors, leaving many authors without important venues for connecting with their audiences. Many patrons have increasingly turned to their screens for access to trusted voices from the safety and convenience of their homes. Organizations like ours have also adapted by running more digital events. For instance, did you know that since 2020, the Internet Archive has commissioned more than 200 artists to perform live Essential Music Concerts From Home? We invite you to browse their recorded performances.

Over this past year, in an effort to support authors and to help patrons access trusted voices, Chris Freeland, Director of the Open Libraries initiative, has helped cultivate the Internet Archive’s Book Talks series. This ongoing series features more than a dozen trailblazing authors, such as Harvard University Law Professor, Lawrence Lessig, author of, “They Don’t Represent Us” and Rachel Ignotofsky, the author of “The History of the Computer“.

Best of all, you can access the complete collection of book talks for free though the library at openlibrary.org/booktalks, or by clicking the “Book Talks” tab under the “Browse” drop-down menu on OpenLibrary.org.

Stay Up To Date

Photo credit: Chris Freeland

Want to learn about upcoming virtual book talks hosted by the Internet Archive?

Sign up here to get updates delivered to your inbox.

Is there a Book Talk you enjoyed watching? Is there an author you’d like to see featured for a future Book Talk? We’d love to hear from you in the comments section below

Authors & Researchers

Are you an author or researcher in the digital humanities that may like to present about your most recent book? Please reach out to chrisfreeland@archive.org. If you’re a researcher that has benefited from the Internet Archive’s research material, please use this form let us know!

Reach Your Reading Goals with Open Library

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Starting January 1st, you will be able to set and track your yearly reading goals with Open Library.

You can set your yearly reading goal here!

Sending us Feedback

Have you noticed a bug with the Yearly Reading Goals feature, have questions about how it works, or have feedback about how we may improve the experience?

Please use this form to let us know!

How to Set a Reading Goal

A yearly reading goal may be set from your “My Books” page.

To set a new reading goal, click the “Set reading goal” button (highlighted above) and enter the number of books that you’d like to read in the input, and press the “Submit” button.

Upon submission, the “Set 2023 reading goal” button is replaced with a progress bar.

Changing or Removing your Reading Goal

Want to change your reading goal? It’s okay to change your goal! Any time before December, you will be able to adjust your reading goal by clicking on the “Edit” link next to your yearly reading progress bar.

Want to change or unset your reading goal? If at any time before December you’d like to stop tracking your progress and remove your yearly reading goal, you can click the “Edit” link and update your reading target to the number 0.  You can easily opt back in later, should you choose.

Tracking Your Reading Progress

Progress towards your reading goal is made by submitting a “check-in” with the date that you finished a book.  Once you have marked a book as “Already Read”, you will be given the opportunity to also set a progress check-in with a completion date. The check-in prompt will appear below the reading log button:

There are three date options for progress check-in. First, clicking the year option will create a check-in which indicates that you have finished reading the book at some point during the year.  Second, clicking “Today” will automatically set the read date to today’s current date.  Finally, if you finished reading the book on another day, you can set custom date by clicking the “other” link.

The custom date form allows for both full and partial dates.  For instance, if you forget exactly when you’ve finished a book but you have a rough idea, you may simply choose to set the year (or the year and the month). As long as a year is provided, the book will still be counted towards that year’s reading goals.

Viewing & Managing Your Check-ins

Once set, the last read date will be displayed beneath the Reading Log button.  These dates can be edited or deleted by clicking the “Edit” link and will appear both on the Book Page as well as your Already Read shelf of your Reading Log.

If a book with a check-in is moved to the “Currently Reading” or “Want to Read” shelf, the check-in can still be seen and edited. 

Careful! When a book is removed from your Reading Log, the books check-ins will be deleted!  In these cases, you will be warned that the book’s check-ins will be deleted and prompted for confirmation:

An example of the confirmation prompt to remove a book from your Reading Log

FAQs

As a small team, we’re doing the best we can to roll out value to our patrons, knowing well that the feature won’t work perfectly for everyone’s needs. As you set out to achieve your 2023 reading goals there are some important things one should note. These limitations noted, we hope you enjoy reaching your goals with Open Library!

Q: Can I delete a previous year’s reading goals?

A: There is not yet an interface for deleting previous year’s goals, however we’d like to make this possible. If and when we do add the ability to delete previous yearly reading goals, all of your reading check-ins will stick around — only the yearly goal number will be removed. For now, if you’d like to delete a previous year’s goals, please feel free to email us at info@archive.org and we’ll do our best to help!

Q: Are my yearly reading goals public?

As of the initial release, only you will see your yearly reading goals but in the future it may be visible to your friends and followers according to your Reading Log Privacy settings.

Q: What if I read multiple editions of the same book? Can I add progress check-ins for each edition?

The short answer is not yet. We’ve build the Yearly Reading Goals feature to allow check-ins at the edition level but currently the “Already Read” shelf operates at the Work level and so it will take us some time to develop a UI that supports per-edition check-ins. This means currently there’s no UI for checking-in multiple different editions of the same book.

Thank You

Thank you to Jim Champ, on the core engineering team of Open Library, for leading the development of this feature.

Notice a bug or have a suggestion on how we can improve our Yearly Reading Goals feature? Please use this form to let us know.

A Brand New My Books Experience

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Have you noticed our new My Books page experience?
Please let us know what you think!

Read on to learn more about what’s changed.

Forward by Mek

This year we’ve had the great fortune of collaborating with Samuel Grunebaum, 2022 Open Library Design & Engineering Fellow. Samuel is wonderfully positioned at the cross-section of software engineering, design, and education, making him capable of rapidly prototyping new designs, ensuring these designs are clear and instructional, and bringing these designs to life through engineering. It’s rare I find someone, like Sam, who can so easily and effectively switch contexts between design and engineering while also keeping bigger product pictures in mind. This set of skills has not only made Sam essential to early prototyping stages, we have also benefited greatly from Sam’s ability to uniquely recognize and raise challenges about component accessibility and mobile/desktop compatibility we likely would have otherwise missed. In addition to being a 2022 Open Library Fellow, Sam co-directs a software & design consultancy that is accepting new freelance projects, tutors college, high school, and intro-level computer science and is accepting new students, and is open to the right mission-aligned, full-time role.

Personal Intro

Hello, I’m Samuel Grunebaum and I’ve been working with Open Library as a Design & Engineering Fellow, contributing designs and code to the My Books redesign process. I’m currently transitioning into a career in software design and front end engineering after working as a Computer Science educator at the Horace Mann School in The Bronx, New York and as a freelance designer, developer, and teacher in all things software.

Problem

Open Library patrons and stakeholders alike identified the My Books page as a major pain point in the site’s navigation and information hierarchy. At the beginning of the project the desktop interface loaded by clicking the ‘My Books’ button in the header looked like this:

Perhaps the most confusing issue with this flow, is that the ‘My Books’ button brought patrons to their account’s Loans page. Another problem that was continually observed with the existing design is the mobile navigation on this page:

The mobile design took the desktop sidebar menu and added it directly below the site header, creating three layers of navigation and a very confusing split in the My Books page interface. 

The central problem of the existing design for My Books was that there was no true My Books page, but rather a My Books button driving to the Loans page. This meant that there was no single place for patrons to find their books, whether books they had on loan or books they had added to one of their reading logs. 

The previous menu design also had the unfortunate side effect of burying the Reading Log options, as well as Reading Stats, Notes, Reviews, and Import/Export options deep below the fold in an already confusing mobile menu. 

Digging deeper into this problem and hearing from Open Library stakeholders, patrons, librarians, and the community at large clarified the direction we would take: working towards a mobile-first consolidated My Books interface that gives patrons an understandable and discoverable way to access the books associated with their account, as well as the other account specific sections including Stats, Notes/Reviews, and Lists.

Interim Fix

Before beginning the design process in earnest, we decided an interim fix would be helpful to mitigate the confusing nature of the mobile My Books navigation. The solution we decided on was an extremely quick fix, able to be implemented in just a few minutes. 

The adjustments made used a darker color to differentiate the menu from the rest of the header and the page content, as well as making the menu section smaller with an adjustable height click-and-drag feature:

Approach

After meeting with members of the Open Library team to discuss the main issues, we agreed that the central areas to focus on were:

  1. Creating an interface unique to My Books that would consolidate a patron’s loans and logs into one page accessed by the My Books button
  2. Improving the usability of the My Books page on mobile by moving towards a responsive, mobile-first design for the My Books page and redesigning the menu on mobile

The next step was to iterate multiple potential interfaces for the new My Books page on both mobile and desktop. With the help of the Open Library team and other design fellows, we came up with the following options for mobile and desktop My Books interfaces:

In conjunction with Dana, another 2022 Design Fellow, we continued to iterate on the designs based on feedback received from Open Library stakeholders, librarians, and patrons. 

We settled on the following approach for desktop, which includes new carousel sections for displaying books and creates space for a Reading Stats data visualization widget:

Alongside the new desktop design, the mobile-first redesign that we settled on makes use of the existing sidebar menu to guide the structure of the new mobile interface while making use of an information hierarchy already familiar to patrons. 

This mobile design not only improves usability and accessibility to the key components of My Books, but also decreases engineering overhead by allowing for a responsive design using the original sidebar menu:

You can try the new mobile design prototype here.

First Phase Release: Desktop My Books Interface

The first and most immediate step to improving the overall My Books experience was to create a distinct page on the site for an account’s books. The new My Books page now exists at /account/books for any patron of Open Library. The new page is almost a carbon copy of the original My Books page, but with its own content that is separate from the Loans page, which was originally what came up when clicking My Books in the header. Below is an image of the current desktop release of My Books:

After adding the new page at /account/books, I created a new file for the My Books content and added custom carousels to the page for displaying a patron’s loans and reading logs. Beyond improving the flow of clicking the My Books button, this initial redesign aims to increase user engagement with reading logs and will also populate the My Books page with images of book covers from a patron’s own selections, creating a more welcoming and dynamic account page driving from the My Books header button.

Another change in this release is the addition of Reading Stats and Import/Export Options buttons at the top of the page, as these are currently buried at the bottom of the My Books sidebar. In the next phase of the design, there will be a prominent link to Stats at the top of the My Books page with the addition of the data visualization widget.

The creation of this page not only provides an elegant interim solution to the issue of confusing My Books navigation by adding a novel page to the Open Library but also lays the groundwork for a more comprehensive redesign including mobile-first improvements, multiple new custom components, and more prominently featured a patron’s Reading Stats. 

Next Steps: Mobile Release and Stats

The next steps of the My Books redesign process will begin with improving the mobile usability by overhauling the My Books interface. The engineering approach I will take is to hide the My Books index content on mobile, instead only displaying the sidebar menu as the whole My Books interface. The sidebar will be responsively designed to display custom carousels on mobile, as rendered in this interactive Figma prototype.

The next and final step after completing the implementation of the mobile redesign will be to finish the redesigned desktop My Books interface by building the Reading Stats data visualization widget. Here’s an interactive Figma prototype of this new design.

I am so excited to continue working on this redesign process, which has already been a wonderful introduction to the Open Library design system and code base. Moreover, I’m excited to contribute to what is hopefully a welcome improvement to the Open Library ecosystem, increasing both access and usability to some really wonderful account features. My hope is that patrons will be able to more easily save and read books on Open Library once they have one clearly defined place to look at all of their books, whether checked out or saved in reading logs, as well as their reading stats and account information.

Reflections

Working on this project with the Open Library community has been an amazing experience in UX design, full stack web development, and community collaboration across state and national lines. I am grateful to be able to contribute to a project that is so meaningful to so many people through its unique ability to disseminate knowledge freely to anyone with Internet access. It was also a fun way to expand my web design and development experience. 

I am immensely grateful to the Open Library community as a whole for being so welcoming to me when I joined a few months ago and for continuously supporting my design process through helpful critiques and design input, as well as the general kindness shown in the weekly community meetings. I am especially grateful to Mek, my counter-point on Open Library staff, who has taught me so much about the Internet Archive stack and the Open Library design language, and my main collaborator Dana, who has expertly taken the reins on the Desktop interface designs and navigation for the overall site. I also want to extend my thanks to Drini, Lisa, Jim, Abby, and Hayoon who have all had invaluable contributions to the My Books design and implementation process, as well as the ongoing development of a comprehensive Open Library design system. I’m so excited to continue working with this community and for the completion of the My Books redesign.