The Advocacy Institute’s Legislative Directory, “The insiders tool for outsiders”

Project Goals: 

Facilitate a discovery and design process which examined the data needs and work flow habits of social justice advocates with the following goals: 

• Create a web-based, easily mined database that will collect and organize the enormous amount of information scattered throughout New York State government websites, organizations’ internal spreadsheets, institutional memory, and resources like the Advocacy Institute’s intensive courses.

• Provide entities that cannot afford lobbyists information about who the power brokers are, who works for them, and how to target the correct elected officials and legislative staff for a particular issue.

• Liberate organizations to spend more time building relationships and have substantive conversations with the legislature to advance their advocacy goals.

• Inform tactics to the point of transforming strategy.

Process

• Conducted interviews and on-site observation with social advocacy groups

• Identified seven personas and many potential scenarios

• Facilitated the discussions necessary to identify the primary personas and scenarios the project would be addressing

• Created interactive prototypes

• Conducted usability tests

• Redesigned the prototypes to incorporate the feedback from the usability tests.

Outcomes

Armed with the documentation and protytpes created in this project the Advoacy Institute was able to secure funding, hire a development  team, and launch the application. 

Prototypes

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