Public Engagement

Constructing a good web site is hard. Our Public Engagement web site has an engaging home page and lots of useful linked content, but it's not easy to grok or navigate.

A book I came across, Web Style Guide: Basic Design Principles for Creating Web Sites, 2nd ed. by Patrick J. Lynch and Sarah Horton, Yale UP, starts with first principles by urging articulation of goals and strategies at the beginning of the planning phase:

• What is the mission of your organization?
• How will creating a Web site support your mission?
• What are your two or three most important goals for the site?
• What is the primary audience for the Web site?
• What do you want the audience to think or do after having visited your site?
• What Web-related strategies will you use to achieve those goals?
• How will you measure the success of your site?
• How will you adequately maintain the finished site?

We've defined the mission of the Office for Public Engagement on our brochure, connecting it to the relevant part of the University of Minnesota's mission statement:

Extend, apply, and exchange knowledge between the University and society by applying scholarly expertise to community problems, by helping organizations and individuals respond to their changing environments, and by making the knowledge and resources created and preserved at the University accessible to the citizens of the state, the nation, and the world.

The mission of the Office for Public Engagement is to advocate and foster the public engagement activities of the University of Minnesota, so as to support the University's mission and its goal of becoming one of the world's preeminent public research universities.

Answering the questions posed by the next few bullets is harder. I'll put down some thoughts, which need much more discussion.

How will creating a Web site support your mission? A Web site is primarily a source of information, which society can use in various ways (either directly or with the help of university personnel) and which can keep university faculty, staff, and students informed of the resources, activities, and opportunities that will facilitate and encourage their engagement work.

What are your two or three most important goals for the site?

• Make the University community aware of the U's many exciting and important public engagement activities, so that they value engagement more highly and see how it is relevant to their own interests.
• Provide a source of information for public engagement activists at the U and their community partners.
• Provide an entry point that enables the public to learn about the U's public engagement activities and connect with potentially helpful resources

What is the primary audience for the Web site? There are three important audiences: the University community as a whole (faculty, staff, and students); public engagement activists at the U and their community partners; and the public at large who turn to the University of Minnesota for help and information. If I have to choose just one, it is the U community as a whole, since changing the culture of the U to more highly value public engagement will be the most important factor in realizing our mission.

What do you want the audience to think or do after having visited your site?

• I want the broad U community to think that public engagement work is interesting, significant both academically and societally, and something they could imagine doing themselves. I want them to feel that engaged scholarship supports the U's aspiration to be among the preeminent public research universities in the world.
• I want the public engagement activists to feel that this kind of work is recognized, to be assured that there is a community of like-minded people, and to see opportunities for connections and resources to further their work.
• I want the public to understand the extent and nature of the important public engagement work being done at the U, to realize that resources at the U may be available for fruitful collaborations on their issues, and to be able to find those resources without undue hassle.

I'll leave the last three bullets for some other time, since they relate to strategies rather than goals. Of course, that's the hard part.