My Role and Project Background
The Minnesota Prison Doula Project provides a prison‐based pregnancy, birth, and parenting program for incarcerated mothers at the Shakopee Women’s Prison and two Minnesota county jails. This is my story of working with the project group to reorganize all of their existing curriculum materials, develop a brand and content management plan, and prepare a book layout for printing and online distribution. The work took place between August 2015-January 2016.
My involvement with this project goes back ten years to when it was a graduate school concept. Program materials began as an informal collection of handouts, but had evolved by 2011 to a formalized 12-session group workshop with activities. Interest in the sessions had also increased to the point where it was necessary to create a group for new and expecting mothers and a general mothering and parenting support group. The original materials could scale only so much to accommodate both audiences.
Methods and Strategy
Rather than manage the content in Microsoft Word, then share it through email, the big picture goal was to assemble everything in PDF/A format and create a book layout so that the materials could be sold and managed online at Lulu.com, and easily shared with others outside the local project team. Partnerships had been formed with other counties and states, and requests for materials were coming in from university research programs across the country. Sharing the information online in book format in the Lulu marketplace would provide convenient printing, binding, shipping, and sharing. There were several improvements necessary for this to happen.
High-resolution print-ready images
Permissions and legal approval
Easily reproduced for subscribers
Ready for binding and assembly
Pricing and target audience
Therapists and facilitators had assembled a large collection of articles, lessons, and images they worked into their sessions as needed, but this was a cumbersome and inefficient delivery. The materials were also difficult to distribute. Legislation and process differs not only from state to state, but also between counties in the same state. Managing the content that is shared and used would quickly become a major headache without a plan to keep track of it from a single source.
Methods and Delivery
Therapists and social workers don't spend much time thinking about things like brand identity, content planning, or image quality. Their work is in the field, happening in real time, and tends to be so in your face that their isn't time for much more than a reaction-solution response. Well... guess what... this means that there is a huge need for this sort of thing to be folded in to work like this. With the Doula Project, there were several documents already in use, a document template full of style revisions, inconsistencies in fonts and color, and dozens of images that needed to be replaced or cleaned up in order to be usable for printing.
The initial phase consisted primarily of gathering and organizing the many handouts, lessons, notes, and articles that the group therapists and project leaders had collected over the past five years of conducting sessions. There were hundreds of these pieces in all formats (PDF, JPEG, EPS, printed copy, and email), with text collateral from 1-50 pages in length, and with every image quality imaginable.
There were several obvious things to figure out such as wordmarks, logos, and university publication requirements, but there were also dozens of images, articles, and ideas that came up, and that required user rights, editing, and permission for distribution.
Everything was coming to form by the close of the year. I had rebuilt original images or created new ones that were adequate for print. We had obtained rights for all of the included articles and original content. The finished work included two new books: the content for the new mothers group (open to pregnant women and mothers with new babies up to age one) evolved to become the Pregnancy Resource Guide and the original education group materials were reorganized to become the Mothering Inside curriculum, which consists of twelve sessions with corresponding chapters and is open to all incarcerated mothers. The project concluded with the following accomplishments and recommendations:
The Pregnancy Resource Guide, and the Mothering Inside curriculum are formatted for print and available for binding, assembly, shipping, and sale in the Lulu marketplace.
Without a content management tool, all comprehensive changes are tagged and replicated across impacted documents. Audience- or jurisdiction-specific changes within the master documents are also managed manually.
An automated content management approach needs to be explored as the program scales and receives additional requests for materials from other states and counties.
