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Overview of Onboarding a Resource Directory

Birds eye view of what's needed to get your Resource Directory set up.

Skyler Young avatar
Written by Skyler Young
Updated over 5 months ago

Introduction

This document outlines how to customize your Resource Directory.

Brand Name

Please provide an official brand name that will be published for this Resource Directory. It will be used in:

  • Copyright

  • Privacy Policy

  • Page Titles

  • Browser Tabs

This could be the name of a program, an organization, or some other entity.

You may optionally provide a second brand name to be used just in the Copyright.

URL

A URL is the website address of your Resource Directory.

We recommend using a subdomain of your primary domain, for example search.example.org, so that the root domain is free to use for landing pages or other likely purposes.

Even if you don’t need landing pages today, experience has shown that it’s best to reserve the root domain in case you need landing pages in the future.

IMPORTANT: If you want to use the apex domain, your DNS provider must support ALIAS records. Your IT should know what this is.

Categories and Suggestions

You will receive a shared Google Sheet with a template for defining Categories and Suggestions. Both Categories and Suggestions may be defined with any text that makes the most sense, along with one or many taxonomies that will return resources for the defined need. We encourage our clients to consider two things while defining Categories and Suggestions:

  1. Create items for the most common needs your team receives.

    This is a great opportunity to take some pressure off your call center staff for the “easy” referrals.

  2. Use plain language that is readily understood by your target audience.

Best Practices for Categories

Categories are intended to provide a scannable, non-overwhelming overview of popular needs in terms that help seekers will easily relate to.

  1. An ideal Category grid has 9 - 12 Topics

  2. Try to limit each Topic to 3 - 6 Subtopics.

  3. Avoid adding too many links as that can be confusing or difficult to navigate for users.

    IMPORTANT: Categories are limited to two levels. Users migrating from a system that has more levels of nesting will need to redesign their grid for our service. Feel free to ask for help during this process.

Best Practices for Suggestions

Like Categories, Suggestions provide a quick reference for the most common needs your help seekers encounter.

  1. Suggestions should be limited to 6-12 items.

  2. Ideally, suggestions should be a short but complete sentence that reflects a top need in language that is readily understood by your target audience.

    The Suggestions defined here are just the default Suggestions that will be displayed when a user first activates the search bar. Hundreds or thousands of dynamic Suggestions are generated from your taxonomy system and returned as they type.

Branding

  1. Color Please provide the HEX code for your primary brand color.

  2. Logo Please provide your logo in either SVG format, or else transparent PNG that is at least 200px tall. If you can only provide a JPEG, make sure it has a white background.

  3. Hero Image Your hero image frames the Search Bar, and should follow a few guidelines:

    1. Make sure the focal point is off-center. The Search Bar component will be centered on the image and we don’t want that to cover someone’s face, for example.

    1. The image will be 2800px wide by 1000px tall.

    The image will scale to any screen size, so be conscious of how it might look on mobile (square aspect ratio) vs widescreen (panoramic aspect ratio).

  4. Category Icons (optional) You may optionally provide custom icons to be displayed beside your Topic headings. However, if none are provided then we will provide them.

    Most of our clients let us choose the icons. By default we use the open source OCHA Human Needs v2 icon set.

  5. Attribution (optional) You may include logos for data providers on partner sites for data attribution. For example, government programs using 211 data may provide attribution back to the data provider. See this example: https://pprs.doh.wa.gov/
    ​
    These logos should be SVGs or transparent PNGs at least 400 pixels wide.

Hero Examples

Here are a few creative hero images in the wild for inspiration:

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I request changes after it goes live?

Yes! In most cases, our team can update any of the customizations including Categories, Suggestions, and Branding assets quickly and for no charge. Please email us for support.

I see beautiful icons in some of your examples. Can I have custom icons?

Some of our clients have a marketing team that provides custom icons for Categories. We can add those no problem. Custom design services are not provided in-house, but we can connect you with an agency if you need help with that. Otherwise, we’ll use default icons from OCHA (https://globalsymbols.com/symbolsets/ocha-humanitarian-icons?locale=en)

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