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Part IV ✦ Designing a CMS
✦ Benchmark publications: What, for this audience, are the most well-known and
respected publications that cover the same information that you do? Include competi-
tors’ Web sites and other publications as well as commercial publications such as mag-
azines and books. What publications aren’t well regarded by this audience and why?
✦ Current publications: What publications from your organizations and others do people
from this audience most commonly read? Where do your current publications for this
audience rate relative to the field of benchmark publications?
Value proposition
If you provide value in your publications equal to their effort or expense for your audiences,
you create a stable system that continues to draw the audience and provides your organiza-
tion with the value that it deserves back from its efforts. The following constraints help you
work through a value proposition for each audience:
✦ Benefit: What do you want from this audience? Include in your answer any actions
(buy, try, use, encourage others, and so on) and any attitudes (believe, trust, under-
stand, know, and so on) that you want your publications to this audience to affect.
✦ Cost: What does this audience want from you? What must you give its members for
them to leave your publication with the highest level of satisfaction?
✦ Balance: What is the balance point between what you want from the audience and
what its members want from you? PLAN, for example, may want its in-country staff to
promote the organization in the towns and villages they serve in. Staff may want more
free time and less hassle translating materials into the local language. The balance may
be for PLAN to create a small-sized print publication that consists only of pictures of
children around the world who are involved in PLAN activities. By producing such pub-
lications, PLAN serves its own needs and also those of its staff.
✦ Communication: How do you communicate this value equation to this audience?
Crafting a balanced value proposition in the mind of your team is one thing. Really
crafting it with the audience is quite another. You’re probably not going to choose to
put the literal words of the value equation on the home page for this audience. But
what do you do? How do you clearly show the agreement the publication is willing to
make? Sometimes a simple headline is enough to get the message across. PLAN, for
example, may detect that a staff member logs into its site and so prominently displays
the tag line “Promote PLAN in 30 seconds!”
✦ Feedback: How do you monitor the acceptability of the value equation over time to
your audiences? You may or may not have the wherewithal to hold focus groups and
send out surveys, but what do you do to make sure that your equation stays in balance
while you’re continuing to deliver more to both sides?
Use
Correctly assessing the uses that your audiences make of your publications is critical to your
success. If they’re likely to come to your publications with certain tasks in mind, discover
them and tailor your publications to help each user accomplish her goal. The following
design constraints help you catalog the tasks and goals that a particular audience may have:
✦ Goals: What are the top three things that this audience wants from each publication
that you target to it?
✦ Use cases: For each goal, develop one or more scenarios of an audience member com-
ing to the publication with that goal in mind. Chart out the actions that the user may
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