The goal
The organization needed a public site that explained clearly what Women in Global Health is, what it does and how it does it. It also needed information architecture that supported the site's key goals and a distributed content model that made publishing more efficient for the team.
Who we heard from
I combined three methods so that both the network's leaders and its wider membership were heard.
| Method | Who | How many |
|---|---|---|
| 1:1 interviews | People working where global health and feminism meet, spread evenly across career stages, in six countries | 8 |
| Internal focus groups | Chapter leads and members | 20 |
| Network survey | Newsletter recipients, reached through an email with about 4,000 impressions | 98 responses |
I coded every open-ended survey response by hand, by category and feature request, then ranked them by how often they came up.
"For the spaces women are not in, please open them up so that we can get in."
Women in Global Health chapter member, West Africa
What we found
People couldn't tell what the organization does
Visitors wanted plain-language answers on what Women in Global Health does, what it takes to get involved, and the different ways to do so.
The network wanted to see itself
Members asked for inclusion across geographies and levels of expertise, and for stories about women on the front lines, not only those at the highest levels.
Events were hard to find
People wanted one calendar of past and future events, at headquarters and chapter level, with a way to register.
News was what they would miss most
Asked what they would miss if the organization disappeared, people named news and updates, events, and a sense of community.
From findings to recommendations
Each finding in the report comes with specific recommendations the web team could build from. Among them:
- Explain what the organization does in plain language on the Home and About pages, with clear calls to action such as "Join Us" and "Start or Join a Chapter".
- Keep action lists on the Chapter and Get Involved pages under seven items, to reduce cognitive load.
- Add built-in translation, with Spanish, French and Arabic versions of content that isn't on a web page.
- Create an event content type that chapters can tag, that handles global time zones and that connects to existing email marketing.
- Build a news section any chapter can post to, with a scalable tagging system and an approval step.
