Background:

After the 2016 election, I decided to get more involved with my local Democratic Party chapter. When first looking into how to get involved with the Democratic Party of Dane County (Dane Dems) I was shocked to find the party’s website had almost no relevant information and looked like it hadn’t been updated since 1997. After emailing the vice-chair for communications to no avail, I went to my first meeting to get some answers and movement on the issue of the deplorable website. At this first membership meeting, I stood up in front of the 100+ people there and advocated for a redevelopment of the party’s website to bring it to modern standards. There were cheers of support because the site was woefully out-of-date from both a UX and content perspective. At the party’s next meeting, my second, I spearheaded an entirely volunteer effort to undertake the county party’s website redevelopment.

Project Scope & Accomplishments:

I organized party members who were interested in working on new site, gathered contact information, recorded our brainstorm, and created an infrastructure utilizing G-suite with all this information, enabling a collaborative remote work base. I contacted the party’s vice-chair of communications again to invite him to lead this effort but he asked that I take the lead as I had more knowledge of current technology. The county party’s leadership was extremely homogenous and unrepresentative of the party in general, so I worked to engender a diverse working group for the project. Working mostly outside the party’s leadership, other party member volunteers and I created a strategic plan for expanding and refining the digital presence of the Democratic Party of Dane County.

As default project manager, I revitalized the Dane Dems then-defunct communications committee by organizing volunteers to effectively harness the Internet’s affordances to take advantage of the medium’s significantly lower transactional costs. I personally:

• Coordinated a vendor analysis to decide on the new site’s build infrastructure. To that end, I researched and priced various platforms.
• Culled feedback on the current sites problems and researched other such sites for insight on productive features, creating a list of objectives for the new site..
• Educated the committee on the advantages of a content management system, elaborating on how this type of site’s facility in updating would facilitate legacy management and multiple contributors
  • The previous site was hosted on a personal server with only one committee member acting as sole contributor and administrator. It required that person’s credentials and knowledge of HTML and CSS to update, so it was rarely done.
• Drafted the project scope, mapped the site, and delegated responsibilities among committee members.
• Developed new written content and commissioned new photographs to populate the various digital accounts by securing an in-kind donation from a party member who is a professional photographer.
• Increased the party’s visibility and ability to communicate remotely by creating social accounts for the party on Facebook, YouTube, and G-suite.

Challenges:

Frustrated with how slow the new site’s development was under absentee project management by the committee chair (in 9 months we had nothing to publicly show), I built an entirely new website in WordPress over the course of two days with all of the old site’s content and further expanded on that with education and membership tools. This site is linked here.

Unfortunately, the sunk coast fallacy prevailed with the committee chair unilaterally deciding to continue slow, clunky build on the first WordPress site. I dutifully wrote most of the content on that site, the party’s current WordPress-based site, transferring all the old site content and adding a few others. Working within the county party leadership’s lackadaisical, analog culture felt Sisyphean, so I limited further work for them and hope a more robust, progressive digital culture will be allowed to flourish under new leadership someday.