We love making things and helping our members and clients perform acts of great journalism. We want to make it easy for you to approach us with ideas and projects, and we want you to know what to expect when working with us.
When you approach us with a project, we'll talk about the idea as a team and review the requirements and expectations. We strongly recommend you familiarize yourself with our process so you know what to expect.
To get in touch with the INN Labs team, send an email to labs@inn.org. Include a brief project description, what you hope to accomplish, and any timeline considerations we should know about.
You'll hear back from us within a week, at which point we'll let you know whether we can work the project into our schedule and share some initial ideas about direction. We'll also provide an estimate of how long we expect the project to take and ask you a few more questions about what you're trying to create.
We will also go through the time and cost involved in building the project For non-member organizations (both nonprofit and for-profit) and for INN member projects that do not meet the criteria outlined in our member services doc we offer competitive rates including discounted rates for INN member organizations and non-member nonprofit organizations. Please familiarize yourself with the details of our consulting program to understand how our decision making process works.
If we can't take on the project, we'll do our best to connect you with vendors we trust, or point you toward tools and resources that could help.
When working on a project with us we'll typically follow the process outlined here. You should expect to receive weekly updates and multiple opportunities for review and feedback. We'll let you know about the important deadlines for submitting changes and feedback, and work with your team to make sure issues are addressed quickly.
Maintenance: As part of our contract, we'll work with you to identify any ongoing maintenance needs for a project, and if necessary create a plan to archive or retire projects that have a shorter shelf life. We won't ever leave you with a mess to clean up.
Approach us with problems or questions, not solutions. To do our best work, we prefer to start with the question or problem we're trying to solve, and work with you to build a feature or product from there. Often times the first or most obvious solution may not be the best one and we want to be a partner with you in crafting the best solution because we are invested in your success. Here are a few examples of what that can look like:
| Better 👍 | Worse 👎 |
|---|---|
| We'd like to better incorporate our social content into our website | Put a Twitter stream widget on our homepage |
| Nobody is clicking our donate button, could you help with that? | Make this button red |
| We want to tell this important story in a big way that sets it apart | Build us a Snowfall |
| We want readers to know what our current top stories are | Can you add a carousel to the homepage? (Ahem.) |
Have a product idea you'd like us to help you with? We'd love to hear from you.