Landscape Calendar

Challenge:

The Landscaping Committee for the HOA was receiving complaints because homeowners were expecting landscaping tasks to be done by the contractor that were outside the scope of work. Also, members were doing landscaping tasks that interfered with the landscaping contractor, such as watering their lawn too close to chemical treatment making it ineffective. The Landscaping Committee needed a way to educate homeowners on the landscaping services provided by the contractor and landscaping tasks that they could do on their own. The community has a weekly email newsletter, virtual community meetings, an electronic bulletin board in the clubhouse, and an online document center.

Solution:

During the kickoff meeting, we quickly decided that the best way to reach as many residents as possible was the weekly email newsletter. While the client originally suggested putting a link in the newsletter to a calendar that would be posted in the document center, I shared that we wanted to minimize the steps that residents needed to take to access the information so they selected a graphic to embed in the newsletter with a link to the document center to see the graphics from other newsletters. This format would also allow the graphics to be used on the electronic bulletin board, increasing exposure. I created a mock-up of a full page, which included all of the information and would be the same each week for the month, and a mock-up of a half page design where each week would focus on a different topic, and submitted it for review. Although I felt the half-page design prevented information overload and allowed for a more eye-catching design, the committee selected the full page graphic. After two months, the client asked to switch to the smaller design to allow for a shorter newsletter.

The head of the landscape committee was my point of contact and the subject matter expert (SME). She wanted to include information in three categories: turf & lawn, shrubs & trees, and annuals & perennials. We discussed including a section on vegetable gardening, but we excluded it because it was too seasonal and there was no impact on the contracted landscaping services. These three categories eventually became the topics of the half-page graphics. One concern she had was making sure all information was sourced through university cooperative extension agencies or other reputable sources and that the sourcing information was available to the residents in case the advice in the graphics led to problems. The SME provided me with several websites with reputable information to be my research foundation. I included sources on the graphics, but because the links in the graphic aren't clickable, I provided a separate document with sources that is posted in the document center and is linked with the graphic in the newsletter.

I used the Successive Approximation Model (SAM) to develop the final design. After the kickoff meeting and research, I sent several mock-ups to the SME for approval. She provided revised wording on several points. For the first month, the committee submitted the full-page graphic to the newsletter. The feedback was that the full-page made the newsletter too long. The next iteration was a quarter-page graphic, but that created problems with the layout of the newsletter and did not fit on the electronic bulletin board well. The final design was a half-page graphic, each on one of the three topics for the month.

Results:

"A work of art" - HOA general manager