JournalismGrants & ImpactAFRICA camps

How to build a workplan

Project management: tips and tricks for new grantees

Jacopo Ottaviani – @JacopoOttaviani

ICFJ Knight Fellow - Data editor at Code for Africa

Quick résumé

• ICFJ Knight Fellow 2016-19, Chief Data Officer at Code for Africa

• Data journalism for 5 years

  • ​Mostly in Europe and Africa
• ​​Working at the intersection of media, technology and data science

• I coordinated multiple projects w/ JournalismGrants.org

  • Land grabbing project (very first round! 💥)
  • E-waste Republic: https://elpais.com/especiales/2015/basura-electronica/
  • Lungs of the Earth:  http://bit.ly/lungs-earth
• Co-authored cross-borders data projects such as #MigrantsFiles and #GenerationE

How to build your workplan?

 Ingredients:

1. Team
2. Tasks
3. Time
4. Budget
5. Content
6. Audience and format
7. Publication and dissemination strategy
8. Impact
9. Tools

Manage your team

Appoint a project manager or coordinator (you?), in order to:

• Define roles of all participants (a.k.a. areas of responsibility)
• Minimise complexity (i.e. agile teams work better ⚡️)
• Distribute / outsource tasks
• Keep a bird's eye view on the project
• Take decisions, deliver and negotiate with partners

Build your team

• Typical roles in these kind of projects
  1. Journalist
  2. Film-maker / photographer
  3. Data expert / researcher
  4. Designer / Illustrator
  5. Video editor
  6. Developer
  7. Translator
  8. Project manager
  9. Social media manager
  10. Fixer(s)
  11. Media diplomat

Build your team, 2

• Usually some members cover more than one role
  1. Journalist
  2. Film-maker / photographer
  3. Data wrangler / Researcher
  4. Designer / Illustrator
  5. Video editor
  6. Developer
  7. Translator
  8. Project manager
  9. Social media manager
  10. Fixer(s)
  11. Media diplomat

JACOPO

ISACCO

EXTERNAL

Manage your tasks

• Some tasks can be ran concurrently
• Every task should have:
  • task ↔ deadline
  • task ↔ person in charge
  • task ↔ budget line
• The coordinator should constantly keep a bird's eye view on the project 
• The coordinator will report back to the funders/partners

Manage your time

• You all have a deadline. Set more!
• Share a calendar within your team ⏰
• Set flexible time-slots (try not to have tight timetables)
• Count up to 3 weeks of «buffer zone» from "zip delivered to media" to "publication up and running" 

Publication strategies

• There are many options that can be combined:
  1. One-off simultaneous publication (e.g. on World Health Day)
  2. Multiple stories published on different days
  3. Modular story (narratively stand-alone stories that can be published separately and eventually together in a longform / web-doc)
  4. Series of stories

Explore it: http://bit.ly/lungs-earth

☝️

Less is more.

Simple solutions trigger impact!

http://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/shorts/india-menstruation-man/

Media diplomacy

1. Involve staff and make them feel part of the project / coalition
2. Tell media partners from the beginning about your coalition
3. Make editors' and techies' lives easy (give them a zip-file, vectorial files, subtitles, etc.)
4. Do not give your stories away (collect multiple fees 💰)
5. Build a coalition of partners:
   • for European partners talk to EJC
   • for African partners talk to Code4Africa
   • for US, Asian & Latin-american partners > ICFJ

Map your audience 🗺

and go cross platform!

• Map audiences you want to target
• Your content can be repackaged, recycled, upcycled, translated and adapted to serve your audiences
• Different audiences use different platforms (e.g. radio is fundamental in many regions in Africa)
• Videos can be re-used (online & on TVs)
• Audio can be extracted from videos and re-used for radios or podcasts

Go mobile.

Useful tools

• Use Google Drive for co-editing and file sharing
• WeTransfer to transfer heavy files
• Slack for communication & project management
• Invision to share and comment design previews (especially when you work with a designer)
• Github for code

Slack.com

Final tips

• Use a hashtag to identify your project (ask media outlets to tweet using that hashtag)
• Negotiate w/ media a number of tweets/shares (not just one!)
• Remember to monitor the stats of your project:
  • include an Analytics code, or
  • make sure they monitor stats and collect data after publication
• These projects take time: do not forget that things could change quickly (keep asking your sources about updates before publication)

Thanks.

Questions?

@JacopoOttaviani