Population Media Center Website Project Request for Proposals February 4, 2015

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Table of Contents: 1. Short Project Description………………………………………………….……3

2. Background......………………………………………………………...……….4

4. Project Requirements and Project Objectives…………………………………..5

5. Project Budget………………………………………………………………......6

6. Milestones and Deadlines………………………………………………...…..…7

7. Vendor Selection Criteria………….………………………………………....…7

8. Contact Information and Deadline for Submissions…………………….……....8

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1. Short Project Description Population Media Center (PMC) is looking to hire a vendor to build an online presence at population.org that provides a dynamic and engaging entrance into understanding the rapidly increasing human population and its implications on the planet and people. This website will show that solving population growth requires working on issues that are important in their own right, ranging from women’s rights to education to healthcare, and that solving population growth will also improve the prospects of solving many other global challenges currently being faced, such as carbon emissions and climate change. This site’s content will be solution-oriented, focusing on improving human health and human rights as the ways to address population. This site will be a mini-site that is a gateway into three other, more robust, online properties: Population Media Center (populationmedia.org), Population Institute (populationinstitute.org), and Global Population Speak Out (populationspeakout.org). These three sites address the population challenge through the same human health and human rights lens, but they focus on three separate areas of activity. Showcasing all three will demonstrate the need for different types of efforts and allow people to click through to the types of efforts that most appeal to them. Our goal with population.org is to create a flexible, informative, small website that serves as a doorway into the issues and into these organizations. The site needs to spotlight these three other sites as innovative entities working on solutions for a global challenge (overpopulation; aka human population size and growth) that alleviates individual suffering and also aids in the solution to global crises such as climate change. Many people may be unaware or unfamiliar with global population and its implications; others may be aware of global population and its implications, but unaware about what can be done. This site should inform about the perils of our current population growth, while still giving hope and solutions that benefit everyone, and entice people to learn more about at least one of the three approaches provided by Population Media Center, Population Institute, and Speak Out. The main features of the website includes:

• Intuitive and simple navigation/information architecture (very few pages and less content delivered more powerfully to accomplish the job is what we hope for)

• Engaging graphical/user interface and responsive design that doesn’t feel jarring when the visitor travels from here to populationmedia.org, populationinstitute.org, or populationspeakout.org

• Strong SEO • Ability for PMC staff to easily make modifications to the site • Integration with Google Analytics • Forms, some of which may need to connect to other systems (payment, etc. – more on

this in the functionality listing of the site on page six.)

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Upon completion of the development of the site, PMC will assume full responsibility for web site content maintenance and administration, with the understanding that PMC will need to be informed about maintenance needs and costs to be considered at the beginning of the project. All content, coding, and graphics will belong to PMC. 2. Background on PMC, PI, and Speak Out All three of these entities envision a world where the number of people, and their diverse ways of life, are in harmony with earth’s current naturally renewable resources. It’s a world where education and information has enhanced human health, human rights, environmental protection, and economic equity. These enhancements have empowered women and men to make decisions that result in smaller, healthier families and has stabilized population at a level that can be sustained by current natural resources (instead of archival natural resources). Although these organizations address a fairly large number of human health and human rights issues, all three organizations focus heavily on women’s rights, women’s education, gender equality, voluntary family planning, and the benefits of small family size to achieve a world population that can be sustained by the Earth’s natural resources. Population Media Center (PMC) focuses on changing individual and community behavior around specific human health and human rights issues, such as gender equality, teenage pregnancy, and girls’ education. PMC uses entertainment-education. PMC’s primary activity has been to create long-running dramas on radio and television in which characters evolve into role models for the audience, for positive behavior change. PMC is a nonprofit, international, nongovernmental organization founded in 1998, and its work has impacted more than 50 countries around the world. – www.populationmedia.org Population Institute (PI) focuses on educating policymakers and the general public about population to impact overall understanding and positively influence local, regional, national, and international policies and laws around human health and human rights issues, such as family planning and reproductive health. PI is an international nonprofit that seeks to promote universal access to family planning information, education, and services. – www.populationinstitute.org Global Population Speak Out (Speak Out) is an activist campaign, empowering people to be advocates and ambassadors of messages and information, raising awareness and inciting action. The campaign has recruited world-class scientists, academicians, opinion-leaders – and thousands of lay environmentalists and concerned citizens – to help bring international attention to the crises posed by overdevelopment and human population size and growth. Speak Out is jointly administered by Population Media Center and Population Institute. – www.populationspeakout.org

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4. Project Objectives and Project Requirements PMC is looking to contract for design, front-end, and back-end web development. Audience: There are two audiences for this project:

1. People who are unaware of the global population (“new learners”), and 2. People who are aware of the global population but may not know the solutions.

Site Structure and Content: In October 2014, PMC launched a new website (populationmedia.org) and in December 2014 Speak Out launched a new website (populationspeakout.org). PI also has an informative website (populationinstitute.org). These are resources for vetted content and styles of display for this mini-site. PMC can rework the written content for concise presentation once PMC and the vendor agree on the best architecture to share the data. PMC is acutely interested in the vendor’s suggestions on how to keep the site very easy to understand with clear imperative for the visitors about the benefits of addressing population through human rights and human health-enhancing methods and clear connections to the three other sites. One way that PMC conceptualizes the differences in the three entities is by thinking about the work they do (all addressing similar issues to stabilize population and improve individual lives) along a sliding scale that spans from the boardroom to the bedroom. PI works much more heavily in the boardroom bringing policy issues and disparities to light for decision-makers and the general public; Speak Out works in the middle of the spectrum getting more people to understand the issues and bringing these concerns to people making policies and laws; PMC works more heavily in the bedroom getting people to change their individual behavior, such as increasing respect of women and spousal communication. There is overlap (that’s partly why Speak Out is a joint initiative of PMC and PI), but also discreet differences in the work that each is doing. Overall Site Graphic Design: All three of these entities have a brand, PI and Speak Out use the same graphic mark and use the same colors in their wordmark. It will be important to create a site that is either neutral or works well with all three sites so that it’s not jarring or unexpected for people leaving population.org. We want it to be very clear that you’re headed to a new site that will let you delve deeper into solving these challenges. We will want to make the page content more exciting than just a display of text within the overall site wrapper. We have large collections of photography and there are the data display ideas included in the current PMC, PI, and Speak Out sites, plus other forms of data visualization that we have not utilized. We also have multimedia available to us from the PMC site that could be utilized. We expect that the designers will work closely with developers for a mobile-first approach to design, responsive best practices, and constant consideration of UX and UI. Functionality:

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This is a list of functionalities to provide a sense of the types of things we would expect and a list of ideas for possible ways to present information and engage the audience. Website functionalities:

• Responsive design • Search feature • Google Translate • Forms (contact, subscription, etc.) that export with fields PMC needs to capture data

and connects with Constant Contact • Fundraising ability (currently already integrated into all three other sites, so maybe just

pull those forms through to allow people to donate to one immediately on this site, no having to click through)

• Innovative way(s) for visitors to connect with and understand population growth and the proposed health and human rights solutions, such as this tool that allows people to see their place in the graph of population growth and understand how much population has changed in YOUR lifetime with staggering numbers and a visual. We are keenly interested in ideas that involve the audience and “show” the information quickly so that the site can be concise but engaging: http://populationaction.org/Articles/Whats_Your_Number/Summary.php

Possible features, depending on decisions regarding what we adapt for content:

• Carousel/slide shows • Interactive map with pop-ups of photos and/or text (populationmedia.org/where) • Data visualization (such as D3.js) • Lightbox-type display of information • Audio/video • Population counter (see any of the three sites)

Administrative functionalities

• Intuitive interface for editing and uploading new content • SEO ability to edit (such as Meta description) for each page • Monthly or regularly scheduled broken link checker • Google Analytics connected for review

5. Project Budget Our total budget for this project is $6,000. We also expect the project to include phases, such as the following (example only, your process may differ), so you are welcome to itemize elements according to phase. Possible phases:

1. Informative/learning 2. Information Architecture and Design

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3. Development 4. Testing 5. Training

In addition to the project as outlined, we also want you to provide us with information about the annual cost we would need to consider for help maintaining the technological integrity of the site (hosting, updates, etc.) and any other maintenance you would see happening outside of PMC’s internal resources. 6. Milestones and Deadlines We would like this project to proceed quickly once begun. We are hoping for launch within 10 weeks after the project commences if possible. Please indicate in your proposal if a launch schedule similar to this (or a more aggressive one) is reasonable. 7. Vendor Selection Criteria When selecting a vendor for this project, we will be evaluating candidates on the following criteria:

• Experience building responsive websites • Experience building sites that allow for use by non-technical staff • Experience building strong online brand experiences • Experience creating sites that have strong user interfaces • Experience creating sites with varied presentation of content (text, visuals, audio, etc.) • Experience organizing content in ways that are intuitive to the site visitor • Experience with user testing and testing cross-browser, cross-platform • Wholistic approach to creating a web presence (e.g. insight into information

architecture, UI, UX, performance, integration, web analytics, form integration, etc.) • Ability to communicate and convey information to PMC staff throughout the project

and during an official training period Our other considerations will be how well you explain your process, approach, and plan. Timeline and cost will also be important considerations. Please itemize your costs clearly in your response. Please provide relevant samples of your work. If the mission of your organization is in accordance with PMC’s social mission, please share that information.

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8. Contact Information and Deadline for Submission Please direct all responses to this RFP and/or any questions to: Missie Thurston Population Media Center 802.985.8156 ext. 209 mthurston@populationmedia.org It is helpful if you reference “Website RFP” somewhere in the subject line of your email. We must have all proposals no later than Wednesday, February 25.