IDR bootcamp

Project management

Tips and tricks for new grantees

 Amsterdam, NL, 11 December 2016

Jacopo Ottaviani – @JacopoOttaviani

Quick résumé

• Data journalism for 5 years

  • ​Mostly in Europe and Africa

• I coordinated 3 projects with Journalism Grants

  • Land grabbing (very first round!)
  • E-waste Republic: http://aljazeera.net/ewasterepublic
  • Lungs of the earth:  http://bit.ly/lungs-earth
• Contributed in few other IDR projects (e.g. Dark Side of the Italian Tomato)
• Co-authored cross-borders data projects such as #MigrantsFiles and #GenerationE
• Now ICFJ Knight fellow, data editor @ Code4Africa

How to manage your project

• Team
• Tasks
• Time
• Budget
• Content & format
• Publication strategy
• 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 (BTW, agile teams work better)
• Dictate the pace and keep an eye on the project as a whole
• Take complex decisions and negotiate with partners

Manage your team, 2

• 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. Media diplomat

Manage your team, 3

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

JACOPO

ISACCO

EXTERNAL

Manage your tasks

• Some tasks can be ran on parallel
• 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 

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 always at least 2 or 3 weeks of «buffer zone» from "zip delivered to the media" to "publication up and running" 

Co-publication strategy

• Four options:
  1. One-off simultaneous publication
  2. Different stories published on different days
  3. Hybrid approach (e.g., simultaneous online + radio on a different day)
  4. Modular media campaign (long and complex, but more impactful)

PROs

• Maximise impact on social networks & presence on search engines
• Possibility to run it on a special day (e.g. "World Health Day")
• Wider resonance
• Summed prestige

CONs

• Complex coordination of media partners
• High pressure right before the co-publication day
• Fixed format for all publications (requires: design compatibility)

One off co-publication

PROs

• Easier coordination and time management
• Design-independent
• Keep the project in the hype for longer (however within different audiences)

CONs

• Less impact on social networks
• More complex to leverage on the media coalition
• Watch out for audiences overlaps

Publication on different days

PROs

• Relax rigidity of previous approaches
• Re-ignite the attention around core
• You can publish more than once in the same country (different content!)

CONs

• Complex project management
• Different outputs for different media in multiple languages
• May lead to disperse your energy

Hybrid: core co-publication + satellite publications

PROs

• Mosaic-like storytelling project (e.g. series of story + final publication with all stories)
• Tension around the core topic within the same audiences for longer periods
• Optimised use of content

CONs

• Needs to be well planned beforehand
• Time-consuming
• Budget-consuming
• Requires strong trust between media outlet(s) and collaborator(s)

Modular publications

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

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

Media diplomacy

• Involve staff and make them feel part of the project / coalition
• Tell media partners from the beginning about your coalition
• Make their life easy (give them a zip-file, vectorial files, subtitles transcriptions, etc.)
• Do not give your stories away (collect multiple fees)
• Build a network of partners (e.g. for European partners talk to EJC, for African partners talk to Code4Africa, for Indian/Pakistani and Latin-american partners > ICFJ fellows)

Going cross-platform

• Map the audiences you want to target
• Your content can be repackaged, recycled, translated and adapted to your audiences
• Different audiences use different platforms (e.g., radio is still fundamental in some areas in Africa)
• Videos can be re-used to some degree online & on TV
• 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
• Trello or Slack for project management (especially when you have big teams)
• Invision to share and comment design previews (especially when you work with a designer)

Trello.com

Slack.com

Final tips

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

Thanks. 

Questions?

@JacopoOttaviani

Brainstorm!

5 minutes to list all useful tools to manage:

•  your team
•  your data
•  your files, videos, cuts, translations
•  your budget