I reengineered the process and technology landscape for a non-profit media organisation I volunteer for. The new system has now been in successful use since June.
The old system had grown organically, relying on multiple separate tools and end user solutions, creating a disjointed and inefficient experience with a lack of control over the process.
The result of this was that posts were not getting produced and published quickly enough and there were risks of accidentally publishing materials that were incomplete or unreviewed.
Use of Canva permitted too much freedom over images created, meaning many did not conform to our brand guidelines.
The Google Sheet became messy and hard to navigate, and lacked consistency in names with the cards in Trello, leading to confusion.
Design principles and guardrails for the new system
- No sacrifice to quality
- Integrated system approach
- Single source of truth for information
- Desktop and mobile optimised
- Encompasses controls
- User access controls
- Minimal or no copying & pasting
- Financially sustainable
Designing the new system
The first step was to perform a market scan for suitable solutions. Unfortunately solutions that did exist were either cost-prohibitive or not fully suitable, requiring customisation. I identified the most suitable solution as WordPress (which had the benefit of already being in use by us for a basic website) with custom Plugins running on top.
I elected to build the new system around WordPress for the following reasons.
- Open source, therefore free for us to use
- We control the hosting and content, nobody can de-platform us
- Easy and low cost to host
- Highly customisable through off-the-shelf and custom plugins
- Secure
- Intuitive to use
The system I designed uses WordPress as the backbone, with two connected plugins I created to customise it to our exact needs, the Editorial Workflow plugin and the Image Creator plugin.
Stay tuned for the next part of this article, which will be a deep dive into the Editorial Workflow Plugin.