Collecting Ideas from the Community (Why We Love Tumblr)
Community Involvement
During the months of November and December, the Village of Pemberton is looking for input from Pemberton and Mount Currie residents on future recreation facilities. They have developed a series of workshops and seminars in order to learn what community members are looking for in order to make the Village better.
In addition to tradition engagement and consultation methods, the Village of Pemberton expressed interest in creating and testing a complimentary and creative method for community members to provide feedback and share ideas. They noted that they enjoyed Pinterest's ease of use, submitting, and sharing, but also liked the more traditional, chronological posting style of blogs.
Tumblr to the Rescue
One of our earliest suggestions was the popular microblogging service, Tumblr. Because the Village's deadline was coming up fast, and we needed to build a lot in a small amount of time, Tumblr was universally agreed upon as our go-to service.
Tumblr has really exploded in popularity over the past little while, making it a common stop for many web surfers and content creators. It is also incredibly flexible and easy-to-use on the development side, with a quick setup time. It has excellent built-in features that were necessary for this campaign, such as archives, voting/sharing/discussion, and submitting.
Once we determined what was needed, what the intermediate goals were, and how we were intending to get the results necessary, the wireframe fell into place quite naturally. Intended as a collection medium-not curation-it was important to show all content as equal. With content "tiles" forming upwards in a chronological order, it is easy for a viewer to scroll through various ideas. Submitting was the overall goal that we had to keep coming back to, so making it stand out in a prominent yet tasteful was key.
The campaign branding had previously been established, making our task that much easier. Working within constraints has many benefits, as things just fall into place. Using campaign colours, typography, and imagery, we were able to reproduce the feel of auxiliary elements created elsewhere.
Another Tool On the Belt
We are big fans of Tumblr. Personally, I think it is a great service. Its simplicity and focus on posting content quickly without any of the extra bells and whistles is refreshing. Using it so in-depth for this particular project was interesting and insightful. We will be working on our own Tumblr blog in the near future, more as a playground than anything else, so we can experiment with its full capabilities.
You can check out the community-based site at haveyoursay.pemberton.ca and submit your recreational ideas. We are always open to feedback, and love answering questions. Leave a comment below or join us on Facebook and Twitter.
From the Custom Fit Online team