Interview with Jon Platner on Planned Parenthood Online's Web Strategy

Thanks for having me, Andrew.

Sure. I think the best place to start is an overview of how Planned Parenthood is structured as an organization. In addition to Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA), which is the national office headquartered in NYC and DC, there are 110 Planned Parenthood affiliates located throughout the country that operate more than 860 health centers. Planned Parenthood of New York City, Planned Parenthood Association of Utah, and Planned Parenthood of Los Angeles are some examples of affiliates.

Our vision was to take all of the different Planned Parenthood websites out there, and unite them into one online portal at plannedparenthood.org, so that when a user searched for health information, or wanted to locate a health center, or wanted to take action on an advocacy issue, they could do that through "one Planned Parenthood" online, instead of various Planned Parenthoods, with various websites, that all looked distinct from each other.

Our affiliates needed to sign on to join this portal voluntarily, so our big challenge was developing a strategy for getting buy-in. Early on, that strategy was focused on talking primarily about how the portal advanced the Planned Parenthood mission and presented some new business opportunities. Later on, in addition to continuing to talk about the mission and business opportunities, we also began to focus a lot on data and performance metrics, expanding staff resources for the centralized online team, and increasing our personal, face-to-face interactions with stakeholders and affiliate staff.

Today we have 60 affiliates out of 110 participating in the plannedparenthood.org portal. And by July 2008, we expect to have nearly 100 percent participation.

Yes, that's true -- some participating affiliates have been more Web savvy than others. But believe it or not, I think the bigger challenge for us has been with those who are Web savvy, because those are the people who are (understandably) more reluctant to give up control over certain aspects of their websites. Many of these people had been doing phenomenal jobs running the affiliate's website before the affiliate signed on to the portal, and some were reluctant to leave certain decisions in the hands of an unfamiliar group of people located in a different office.

The way we got past that was to provide opportunities for affiliates to be involved in decisions being made at the centralized level, so that those decisions were not being made in a vacuum, but rather with input from all of our stakeholders. And we did that by creating Federation-wide work groups for certain projects, partnering with affiliates who had already begun work on new interactive features (like our podcast), and increasing our overall communication with the field. These efforts are still a work in progress, but I think we've come a long way from the early days of the initiative.

Website traffic data, consumer needs assessments, usability testing, and search engine optimization are, in my opinion, the metrics that are most important for a nonprofit to pay attention to when making decisions about online strategy. At Planned Parenthood, we have used those types of data to essentially try and answer these questions:

- Who is the site for?
- What are they looking for?
- How do they want it delivered?

In particular, I really value usability testing, because it's the one metric that allows you to tell a story through case studies, personal experiences, etc., rather than through numbers.

It certainly makes it difficult for us to give users an opportunity to interact with our websites in a way that's not moderated. And anytime we’ve launched a user-generated content initiative, we've had to build in some mechanism for moderating the content that's sent in. But when it comes to having a presence on outside online media that we don't manage -- like certain blogs or social-networking sites -- we've had to give up some of that control. And in most of those cases, it's actually worked in our favor, because the types of comments or content the anti-choice opposition submit tend to make them look worse than it does us. They are also almost always drowned out by a pro-choice majority.

I would say the impact has been to further Planned Parenthood's mission by expanding access to education, health services, and opportunities for involvement. The Planned Parenthood mission is really at the core of what we're trying to do, particularly through the expansion of access to everything Planned Parenthood offers.

I don't know if I'd characterize requests as "strange," but there have certainly been requests for new types of interactive features and Web pages that the Planned Parenthood Online team would question as to whether the expected pay-off is worth the resources we'd have to put in to launch the feature. I think Web professionals often fall into pursuing initiatives that "sound cool" -- and I've been guilty of this, myself -- without making sure those initiatives are guided by what the data supports and what our users really want. And that’s something we're really trying to be mindful of at Planned Parenthood.

We have a steering committee that oversees the online work for the Federation -- it's kind of a board of directors that the online team reports to -- and it's made up of national staff, affiliate staff, national board members, and outside experts. They have to sign-off on the major changes we propose, so the affiliates are represented in that way. We also communicate with affiliate staff directly, giving Federation-wide presentations on where we are with the redesign and soliciting feedback. And for certain special projects related to the redesign -- for example, the restructuring of our health content -- we put together special work groups that include representatives from affiliates to guide the process.

It's difficult to name one thing as the "hardest," but one of our bigger challenges was coming up with an online fundraising model that everyone would find fair. In the current model we use, affiliates direct visitors to their sites to the portal-level donate page, where the visitor then has a choice to donate locally, nationally, where the need is greatest, etc. And depending on what the visitor selects, that determines where the money goes. It's not a perfect model, and we’re always trying to improve it, but it's been working out OK for the most part so far.

Thanks for attending, Kimberly! It really depends on which of our three main program areas -- education, service, or advocacy -- we're trying to measure. With education, it's mostly about traffic numbers and the number of new interactive features we launch. With service, it's also about traffic numbers, but the traffic numbers specific to online health services, like online appointment requests. And with advocacy, like most organizations, we've been relying on e-mail list size for the most part as a metric. Across all three of these, those main four metrics I keep going back to -- web traffic, consumer needs assessments, search engine optimization, and usability testing -- are things we're always paying attention to. And of course, we’re also paying attention to the number of affiliates on the portal and how that number grows.

Early on, the undeniable fact that this is what we needed to do as a Federation to really further our mission, I think, is what was really compelling. For the affiliates that joined later on, I think that showing them we were guiding our decisions with data and the needs of our users in mind is what gave them confidence in what we were doing, and therefore, made it even more compelling to join.

Thanks for your interest! The audio of all presentations from the Web Executive Seminar will be available later this week at www.forumone.com/strategy.

We do share names with the affiliates that are on the portal. As part of our fundraising policy, affiliates are not allowed to direct people to donate to them directly online -- they have to refer users to the portal-level donate page, which then determines how the money is distributed depending on what box (local, national, where the need is greatest, etc.) that the donor checks off.

That also applies to e-mail in the sense that we share list names and send e-mails about advocacy and fundraising on a Federation-wide level. The exception to all this is that twice a year, affiliates are allowed to run an e-mail campaign for their specific segment of the list to ask that donations be made to the affiliate directly.

I think there was a previous question about what we do with e-mail, so I won't go into that again. But with advocacy, in general, we've looked a lot to outside online media that we don't manage -- blogs like DailyKOS, social-networking sites like MySpace, and user-generated content sites like YouTube. I think that's essential to engaging folks on a peer-to-peer level, and we've often found it to be the best way to engage and energize activists.

Hi Chas -- I think our online fundraising policy is probably the thing that's required the most compromise. It's hard for me to be specific about what those compromises were, because I admittedly wasn't in the process of developing the current model we use. But I know it's generally been an area where it was difficult to find a solution that makes everyone happy without some level of compromise from all sides.

We use a CMS called RedDot. We worked with a consulting company to help us select it -- they evaluated our needs, interviewed people who would be working the most in the CMS, etc., and came back with a handful of options to look at. I think it ultimately came down to RedDot and one other (whose name I honestly can't remember), and we were pretty unanimous in our final decision.

We have seen a steady increase in traffic, but it's hard to know what to attribute that to. One thing that's been pretty clear is that making it easier for users to find a health center and make an appointment online has substantially increased the number of clients visiting certain clinics. We've also seen some pretty substantial results with our search engine optimization work. Our pages have really improved in their rankings on sites like Google, and a big part of that is less competition between plannedparenthood.org and affiliate websites.

We have an Online Services Division that works out of the Planned Parenthood National Office. It's comprised of 17 staff members, and organized by our three main program areas -- online education, online health services, online advocacy & fundraising -- as well as by "execution" teams -- online technology and online strategy & programs. We work closely with the national IT Division on training. And we work closely with the national Communications Division on content, making sure necessary stakeholders are looped into the process.

We commissioned a market research firm to run a series of online surveys that were given to both the general public and people intercepted when they visited one of our websites. It gave us a really good idea of who our users are and what they're most interested in.

A few months back, there was a big Supreme Court decision that we were directly involved in and it was a big advocacy issue for us. We launched a campaign website called wallofprotest.com where users had the opportunity to submit a picture and message about their reaction to the court decision. It did require some moderation on our part, but the website was a big success. A lot of users submitted content, and we collected a lot of e-mail addresses.

Thanks for having me! It's been a lot of fun participating in this.