Obviously most of the work we do is in higher education. It’s been that way for a long time; colleges and universities have probably accounted for 90% of White Whale’s business over the last several years. That’s great for us— working with schools, we get to talk with lots of smart and interesting people and walk around on beautiful campuses. Because our clients have tended to be some pretty great schools, we’re promoting a product that is genuinely pretty great— this makes the job more rewarding and fulfilling than, say, rebranding Pepsi.
All of this is to say that when we do take on a project outside the realm of the .edu world, we generally don’t stray too far. We have recently finished a project for Creative Commons that, even though outside our traditional range, was a great fit for us, and let us try out some of our ideas in a new context.
Creative Commons’ ccLearn project is attempting to do for the world of education what Creative Commons itself does for creative capital in general: to democratize a closed industry by promoting open standards and the sharing of resources, while protecting the rights of creators and authors. It is a really interesting project, that promises a substantial benefit to society; on top of that, it’s excitingly geeky.
What we were hired by CC to do is help convey ccLearn’s message to a wider public audience. Currently CC is about as geek-friendly an organization as there is; certainly most anyone who uses technology on a regular basis knows who Creative Commons is and what they do. But they don’t do too much outreach to the general, non-tech-savvy public; most of the public awareness of CC comes through its integration with sites like Flickr. And even Flickr’s CC info page is fairly technical in tone.
What that means is that in the general public awareness sense, CC works behind the scenes. And for Creative Commons itself, that’s fine— much of CC’s work has to do with promoting legislation, defining open standards, and so forth, and it doesn’t require a large public profile.
But ccLearn’s mission is different— they plan to be much more directly involved with individuals seeking to produce or consume open educational content. The fifth-grade teacher who can use open resources to supplement her class materials, or the program director looking for guidance in developing a poetry workshop: these are very concrete public audiences, and their awareness of open education resources will be of great importance to ccLearn’s overall success.
This means that ccLearn needs (to use a crude marketing term) a different brand positioning than Creative Commons in general. Our job was to help them find that place, and interpret it visually on the Web.
ccLearn currently lives at http://learn.creativecommons.org. This site serves as the base camp for ccLearn’s internal operations, such as its board members, top contributors, and other stakeholders, and it shares a general look and feel with Creative Commons. Our first recommendation to CC was to create a separate URL for promoting open educational resources to the public:
opened.creativecommons.org
And with that new URL came a brand:
(The follow-up text is still in flux, as ccLearn decides how best to position Open Ed with regard to CC.)
As part of our messaging strategy, Donald wrote a couple of opening sentences that neatly encapsulate ccLearn’s offering in a way anyone can understand, geek or not:
“Open education brings the ideas behind open source to the world of education. Open ed resources are learning aids, reference materials, and even textbooks that are free to use and free to distribute— whether you’re a teacher, a learner, or a little of both.”
(This kind of friendly, just-the-facts introduction is a particular talent of Donald’s— he wrote opening paragraphs for Southwestern and White Whale’s 2007 site.)
And finally, we created a site design:
… that will allow ccLearn to put a wide variety of engaging content in front of a relatively non-tech-savvy public, while allowing them quick access to basic information about open education and without turning off insiders with “marketing”-ish language.
We handed off the final files, including XHTML/CSS/JS buildouts of the homepage and inside page templates, to CC this week; they’ll be doing the implementation with their wiki-based CMS. Overall we think it’s a great success, and we’re happy to know they think so too.
To view the buildout version of the site, visit http://opened.babywhale.net. To view Donald’s buildout handiwork, I suggest you try it without Javascript and/or CSS. Oh, and click into the search box!
