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

Lungs of the Earth

  • 4 short stories (text + videos)
  • Long form project (4 videos above + extra content and dataviz)
  • Some satellite-publications (a photo story)
  • One brand #LungsOfTheEarth (to expand the project in the future, publish extra content)
  • All content distributed on multiple media in 5+ languages
  • Scalable project: more episodes to come from the other world rainforests, such as Congo Basin

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)

LIVE THE POETRY

Thanks.

Questions?

 

@JacopoOttaviani

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