Using a self hosted Wordpress site for project communication

When we’re asked to set up a blog to support projects, most of the time the choice is a simple free installation at wordpress.com. However, once we’d identified the functions that we wanted to support with technology in our KM activities for the BDS program, we quickly realized we would need more functionality and features than the ones available on a free WordPress blog. So we opted for a self-hosted version at wordpress.org - and made use of the dozens of plugins that are available to expand your WordPress blog into a rich, complex website.

There are tons of posts out there on the pros and cons of self hosted solutions, and step by step guides to installation and hosting. There’re also an awful lot of resources about essential WordPress plugins you should be using on your site. So we won’t cover any of these topics in this post. Instead, we’ll be looking at 3 plugins that we’re using to expand the BDS KM site beyond its core blogging functionality.

Custom taxonomy and categories 

The first function of the bdskm site is to act as publishing platform for the selection of monthly curated updates about water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH). We wanted these updates to be properly categorized, according to type of resources, geographical and thematic coverage. And we wanted to make it easy for our curator to apply these categories, by choosing from a list or drop down menu. So we needed something that goes beyond the (useful but rigid) standard combination of WordPress tags and categories.

Installing the plugin WCK - Custom Fields and Custom Post Types Creator allows you to create additional taxonomies for your website. Most importantly, you can do so without having to touch any piece of code.

In our case, we defined three custom taxonomies for type of resources, geographical and thematic coverage. These can be easily selected by authors when they post new content on the site.

Further, we reflected this custom taxonomies in the front end of the site. Adding the plugin in Search and Filter, we could expand the search functionality, allowing users to filter and display content for each of the categories included in our new taxonomies.

Five stars rating widget 

Another key specification for the Curated Updates part of the website was the introduction of a simple content rating system. We wanted to give readers the possibility to assess and rate the content published monthly on the site, through a rating or start system. This had to be as easy as possible for readers, meaning no login should have been required for them to cast their vote on a specific article. 

The Rating-Widget Star Ratings WordPress plugin allows to you to embed and display star ratings after each post or page on your WordPress website. You can customize style, theme and colors, fonts etc. of the ratings. You can also display the 'Top Rated' content as a widget on your site sidebar or footer.

The plugin comes with a free version and several possible upgrade option. In this case we purchased the Professional version (8 USD/month) which, among other features, gives you a very useful dashboard to monitor ratings. All data can be also exported in a zip file.

Private content area 

The last and third functionality we wanted to add to the bdskm site is the creation of a private content area, accessible only to the core group of project participants. In our plan, this would allow for a more intimate interaction and dialogue between project participants, where they would share their reflections about learning from the project, and how they are learning about the way they learn.

There are many ways in which a private content area can be created on WordPress, and several plugins do this job. After some research and a little more testing, eventually we opted for using the User Access Manager plugin.

With this plugin, you can create user groups and specify what site content each group has access to. User accounts are created via the WordPress dashboard, and they are added to a specific group. As a convention, we set up the users accounts with their email as login name and use a standard password that they could change after their first login. Using their account details, users could access any restricted content page or post.

While we use a dozen other plugins on the bdskm website, the three illustrated above here demonstrate how flexible and scalable WordPress is, and how much you can do with it. With WordPress it is really easy to make the site do what you need it to, even without being a programmer or webmaster.

Measuring the quality and reach of a curated news highlights service

In my previous blog post, I introduced the process and tools we’re using to publish a monthly curated news update about about water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) as part of the work we are doing to support KM in the Building Demand for Sanitation (BDS) programme.

With 9 monthly issues published so far, how do we measure if this activity is working well, and grantees are using the curated news put together by their peers?

As we’re using several tools to run our Curated Updates, we also make use of several metrics and indicators that form our basic M&E system. But before we dive into this - and what we’ve learned from our own monitoring and evaluation - I think it’s important to mention that this activity is intended for a rather small audience, with an initial list of around 50 recipients and website that is purposely not indexed in search engines.

Nevertheless, some useful lessons can be identified also from a small project like this one, and maybe scaled up to larger initiatives.

How useful is the service? 

From what we can see, users make use of this curated news update. They do open the newsletter that hit their mailboxes regularly during the first week of each month. Out of the many different things you can monitor in MailChimp, we decided to focus primarily on open rate and click rate. As you can see from the image below, MailChimp provides you also with benchmarks and average for your industry, and we’ve been pretty happy to have an email open rate which has constantly been above what MailChimp consider the industry average.

Besides the generally positive informal and anecdotal feedback that we receive from users, we can also see that the they appreciate the service: the list of subscribers keeps growing, in spite of the fact that we don’t do any active promotion of this service. So the list growth is all driven by peer recommendations and suggestions, with subscribers encouraging their peers to register for the service as they find useful to receive a monthly newsletter with a few, key resources that are already filtered and digested by experts, and whose judgement they can trust.

Are users clicking on the suggested links? 

In general, resources shared through the newsletter are opened and users go and read the original document. MailChimp provides automatic tracking of the links included in any newsletter. However, for some technical reason, this didn’t work at first with the RSS driven campaign, and we failed to properly track clicks on links in the first few issues of this Curated Updates service. So while figuring out the issue (which we did eventually, thanks to the great MailChimp support team) we started using Bitly to shorten the links for each curated update resource included in the newsletter.

This gives a better idea of what resources resonate with our audience, where the click happens (if on the newsletter, on the website or elsewhere) and where the audience is located. Through Bitly, we can also see if the link is re-shared on other social media channels, allowing us to have better link tracking and potential insights into where our audience interact online.

How valuable are the resources? 

The RatingWidget Wordpress plugin allows us to get a better feeling of the usefulness and relevance of each single curated news item for the users, and to understand the appetite they have for different types of contents. As we’re using the pro-version of this plugin, the ratings are nicely collected and displayed in the RatingWidget dashboard, as illustrated in the image below.

As you can see, the number of votes remains low and we find it challenging to encourage users to make more use of this feature. However, we believe it remains a valuable addition to our M&E for this activity. Ideally, the perfect scenario would be to include the rating widget directly into the newsletter campaign, but this doesn’t seem possible from a technical point of view - or at least, we haven’t yet figured out how to do it!

Publish, review, adapt, publish...

This activity has been planned around a “publish, review, adapt, publish” cycle for 12 months, and indeed for each of the issues we’ve been publishing so far we’ve been tweaking and adapting the newsletter, the way we present the content in it and online, as well as some of the tools we adopt to track users’ behaviours and preferences. Each time, we try to learn something and put it into use in the next issue - the curators from a content point of view, looking for resources that resonates more with the audience; and us from a technical point of view.

We’re running the service for a year, which comes to an end in July 2015. As we review how it worked we’ll share what we learn and update our findings on this blog..

A curated news highlight service using Wordpress and Mailchimp

With all the news sources that are available out there and are populating our email boxes and social newsfeeds, how do you help reduce the noise to signal ratio? And how do you measure if what you’re doing is valued and used by the people that are benefiting from this service?

In work we are doing to support KM in the Building Demand for Sanitation (BDS) programme, we started to experiment last year with a selection of monthly curated updates about water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH). This activity came as response to the strong recommendation from BDS grantees about the problems of information overload and the need for support in navigating the flood of documentation and evidence.

We were lucky enough to find in Jonny Crocker and Shankar Narayanan two great curators, willing to work with us to identify 4 to 5 recommendations per month, curated and based on their own reading and selected from other peers’ recommendations.

But how to implement such activity?

Screenshot from last issue of the Curated WASH updates

A newsletter, with some extra features 

First and foremost, we wanted something as easy as possible for users. And having run several interactions and surveys with them, we know that if we wanted to have some hope for success, we had to plan around email. So our WASH Curated Updates had to be an email newsletter.

But we also wanted to be sure that each curated resource could remain easily accessible and searchable, into a browsable online archive that would grow with the content posted in each issue. And that this library of resources could potentially be exported and included into other archives and datasets.

Finally, we wanted to give readers the opportunity to rate the individual contents we would post in the newsletter. Something easy to use and without readers having to be logging into any account, because we know this is a major barrier to participation for some.

How does our Curated Updates work?

After testing various options (for example, using a social bookmarking service such as Diigo, which allow users to rate each bookmark shared in a group, or Scoopit), we developed an online system that works as follows:

• Curated Updates are posted by our two curators each month as blog posts on a simple Wordpress website (bdskm.net) - they are properly categorized, using a custom taxonomy for type of resources, geographical and thematic coverage; 
• For each (short) post, the ‘read on’ link is shortened using bitly and brings users to the original resource, whether it’s an external website, article or PDF uploaded on the Wordpress site; 
• The RSS feed from the Curated Updates section of the blog feeds into MailChimp to populate an RSS-driven campaign that goes out in the first week of the month to the newsletter subscribers; 
• When subscribers receive the newsletter, they can read the full post and click on the link to read the original source. Alternatively, they can click to read each post online and rate it; 
• The rating can be done on the website using the RatingWidget Wordpress plugin, which is displayed after each post and website page. 

So how do we measure if this activity is working well, and grantees are using the curated news put together by their peers? In the next post, we’ll present the tools and indicators we use in our basic M&E system.