Improving Birthright’s Trip Updates

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My brother is in Israel on birthright, and like many travel organizations these days, they provide updates from the trip on their website. I’m always looking for inspiration, and thought this would be a good inspiration to write about.

A quick aside: managing updates like this is something I used to do when I worked for USY in New York, so my expectations might be on the high side. When I did these updates from 2002-2004, given the resources and technology of the time, posting written updates and photos on our website was all we could do. (See this sample.) These days, there are many more tools that to make these type of updates more user-friendly.

We’ve had two updates so far. The first came the day after the group left (the next morning here but the next evening in Israel, with the time difference) and let us know that the group had landed safely and was doing well. The second came two days later (three full days in Israel), and while it didn’t mention anything about what the group was doing, it did direct us to photo galleries on their website.

Let me pause here. If I were writing the updates, how I would write them differently?

• Have more frequent updates. I was expecting daily updates, so to not get that is surprising. I’ve been to Israel several times and know exactly where the group is, so I’m not looking for updates because of safety concerns. I think daily updates would just be something family members back home would want to see.
• Have more detailed updates. Here’s my thinking: if someone is on the trip in the first place, there is a decent likelihood that their parents and other family members haven’t been to Israel either. Both groups are the same in terms of not necessarily knowing about the significance of the places that will be seen – the difference being that participants will see those places in person, while those back home won’t. So just as important as exposing participants to Israel should be exposing family members back home as well. I think a good way to do so would be by providing some brief background information on where the group is and what they are seeing. Some people who have been to Israel (like myself and my sister) might skip over the information, since we are already familiar with a lot of it, but I think in general, it would be more useful than not. And this information doesn’t have to be anything written on the fly either – whoever is writing the updates could prepare it ahead of time and save it for when that day came.
• Post the written updates on the website as well. Don’t just send them out over e-mail, which can be lost easily. It also helps to be able cross-reference what we are seeing in the pictures with where the group is. Plus, once participants return from the trip, they might want to see what their families were seeing as well.

When I looked at the photo galleries that I was directed to, they were a bit disorganized for my taste and somewhat difficult to use. I noticed four things that I would improve on:

• Organize the photos. It would have been a lot more helpful if the photos were categorized by day, rather than as long pages with no way to distinguish between when and where the photos were taken. When I did the updates for USY, we organized the updates from each trip by week rather than by day – see this sample. But those trips also ran for 6 1/2 weeks; birthright’s trips only run for 10 days.
• Have the pop-up windows sized correctly. When I clicked on a thumbnail of a photo, it appeared in a pop-up window that wasn’t sized properly. So in order to see the full photo, I had to take the extra step of expanding the window, either by maximizing it using the scrollbar. Some simple coding would have fixed this and made browsing a bit quicker.
• Make it easy to browse through the full-size photos. Giving the ability to browse through the full-sized photos using “Previous” and “Next” buttons in the pop-up window is an easy and simple way to do this. Something in a slide show format like the Kodak or Google’s Picasa photo galleries would be even nicer, although the time and budget required for something like that make it more difficult to implement.
• Keep you at your spot on the page. When I clicked on a thumbnail to view the full-sized version, the main page behind the pop-up window went back to the very top of the page. So to find where I left off, I had to scroll through the photos again. Not the most user-friendly feature, particularly in combination with super-long pages of photos.

Despite my issues with their website, none of these concerns impact the experience of those on the trip. My brother seems to be having a great time, and word is he’s even tried falafel, which before the trip would have been unheard of. And ironically enough, until our mother told him that everyone in our family was excited to see him in pictures, he didn’t even know that there were photos being posted.

The moral of the story is that like all websites, these smaller points, when taken altogether, do have the potential to influence others’ perceptions of an organization. As a reflection of who they are, sometimes it is the attention to detail that can make people think that much more highly of them.

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