Advocate

Creating, extending, and organizing content.

Use the #des-public-relations channel to share ideas and discuss about advocating initiatives.

Why

Sharing our work is important for increasing the influence of our department. Highlighting our work beyond finished products, to how and why we do things will help everyone. Sharing these things thoroughly and transparently has two primary benefits:

1. Learning — Our audience will gain a greater understanding of our perspective as designers, and we can learn from each other and our audience by creating an open environment for dialog.
2. Confidence — By articulating their reasoning, designers can better understand their work — and by having a deeper understanding of why we’re making decisions, the people we’re serving can feel that solutions are well-made.

How

As important as sharing our work is — it is secondary to actually doing the work. As a result, we need to be strategic and well-organized so that we don’t unnecessarily overburden individual contributors.

Managing all of this could be someone’s full-time job. But our goal, by creating an open process that all can use and contribute to, is that between the whole department we can have an effective, cohesive, public-facing presence.

Where

Workplace

The reasons we’re using a Trello board to manage everything are threefold:

1. Comprehensive View Allows us to track the status of any post, ensuring that we’re posting consistently (at regular intervals), cohesively (posts are coordinated with each other), and complementarily (posts drive traffic to multiple places).
2. Centralized Tool Allows everyone to have an aggregate view (Board or Calendar) of what’s going on, empowering all to contribute in their specialities (Lists or Cards). At any point during the process, you can add someone to a card and ask for their help or feedback.
3. Just kidding, there’s only two reasons.