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Concept Phase: Calling all Creatives

“Creativity takes courage” ― Henri Matisse

Remember back in the summer when the Planet 4 team published “We have a plan”? Well, we did and do, and we’re moving forward in the treasure map towards the development of the new greenpeace.org. Today, we are pleased to welcome you to the Concept Phase of Planet 4, in which ideas will be created and refined into concepts using the outcomes of the Discovery phase.

These ideas will help form the design which is the next phase of the Planet 4 project. The concept phase is needed to make sure we design a website with the needs of our end users in mind, in alignment with the organizational strategy.

… we discovered

For those who missed a few posts, here’s a quick list of what happened in the last few months:

We then ran the Discovery Phase and came out with these results:

All outputs of the Discovery phase and other preparatory work are the ingredients to shape the Planet 4 recipe. Analytics outcomes will turn into global methodologies to measure, understand and consolidate website data. Content audit data will help us populate Planet4 with content from existing websites. Storytelling outcomes will support work around users journeys, key audiences and content guidelines, and so will survey results. Technical preparatory work will turn into practical decisions on which the Planet 4 skeleton will be built.

You can keep reading to have a glance at Design, Technical and Analytics & Focus Group tracks, or you can sit comfortably and download the entire full plan for the Concept Phase. We’d like to take the chance to THANK those of you who have been involved, the Discovery Phase would not have been possible without each one of you.

Shaping the right experience for the right people — the Design Track

Our web properties contain rich, knowledge-full content. Content guidelines and globally-applicable site maps can be built from existing work, but what about shaping new journeys, new options, new actions to take? More importantly, how to present all this to the right people?

To develop an innovative, cutting edge Planet 4 that drives people to action, we need to think carefully about the target audience(s) and how they will interact with our web properties. In the next few weeks we will create personas, archetypes and user journeys.

To speak to these personas and create interactive pathways through Greenpeace content, we will need to define a compelling concept that drives people to action. We need to think about different experiences for different types of supporters. These experiences will depend on how engaged they are with Greenpeace. We will visualize and iterate through new ideas using low-fidelity (low-fi) prototypes and wireframes.

At the end of all this data crunching and visualisation, creative sessions, weekly sprints, epics, tasks and stories, a proposal concept containing prototypes for interactions and basic wireframes, together with a full deck explaining the conceptual ideas will be delivered to guide the Design track. Sounds interesting? Do you want to get involved? Keep reading, please.

Shaping the right platform for today’s web — the Technical Track

WordPress will be the underlying software for the Planet 4 project. We are working on creating a clear functional requirement for the infrastructure. Multiple questions still require an answer: will P4 be built upon our own distribution of WordPress? Will it be on a multi-domain or a one-site per domain approach? Which translations modules will be standard? How about themes: a default master theme and a series of child ones? Which modules will we adopt for what? How will we test and develop? What will hosting look like?

As expected, Planet 4 will require a number of integrations, modules and plugins which are not part of the default WP distribution, and that’s where the technical folks will focus in Phase 2.

Starting from the outcomes of the technical investigation, we will perform a deep technical analysis: we will review WordPress modules and themes, as well as 3rd party apps and APIs Planet 4 could integrate with. We will also have a look at infrastructure performance and development tools that will help us structure the final product delivery.

Shaping the transition — the Focus Groups and Analytics Tracks

Alongside creative and technical phases, we will continue with multiple internal streams. These are crucial preparatory pieces of website migrations and implementations, which will start in 2017.

We will interview face-to-face (camera-to-camera) Greenpeace colleagues’ worldwide, to identify roles and permissions, 3rd party integrations, migration or archiving tools and scripts, workflows, training needs and resources they require to get onboard Planet 4 as effectively as possible.

The Planet 4 community is forming, and will include people in and outside Greenpeace, developers and bloggers, senior stakeholders and volunteers, remote techies and groups of activists.

We decided to try to look a bit further migration times, and will carry on a few activities on KPI and Analytics, following the ace work done in Phase 1. We have sets of (micro and macro) KPIs to track type and ways of web engagement, standard conversion rates and scores, and sources for external benchmarking: it is time to explore how we will consolidate and analyze them, which templates will make this easier and which can be our first rough targets.

How all this will be done? How long it will take? How can I help?

Let’s start from the last question. We need your help in each one of these phases. See something you think you can help with? Want to make sure you are the first to see the creative work? Fill this 2 minute form and you will hear from us. Or simply keep following this publication, #GPP4, the Google Group or the Wiki, there will be plenty of chances to contribute .

On the HOW and, more particularly HOW LONG, please just wait a few days, a clarifying post is on its way!

(cross-posted on Planet 4 Medium Channel)

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