JWA RFP: Interactive Media Site for 11-13 year-olds
The Jewish Women's Archive (jwa.org) is a 15-year-old national non-profit based in Brookline, MA, dedicated to uncovering, chronicling, and transmitting to a broad public the rich history of American Jewish women. One of the first organizations in the Jewish community to stake a claim on the new frontier of the Web, JWA continues to innovate in its use of the virtual world for academic, cultural, archival, and educational purposes.
A new project, “Bat Mitzvah Interactive” (working title), will create a virtual gateway for 11–13 year-old Jewish girls to explore their own family’s stories and learn about the lives and achievements of American Jewish women. BMI will provide online tools and templates for collecting family stories and for researching one or more “cool Jewish women” who might be role models, including offering reflective questions, design templates, and structured prompts. The overarching goal is to help girls and parents use the Web to link the past with the present and place the bat mitzvah girl in the context of her personal and communal history.
The site must:
- be visually appealing to 11-13-year-old girls and credible to their parents and educators;
- fit the user experience needs of girls in this age group; and
- draw on existing JWA tools (written or implemented using the Drupal Content Management System).
The Scope of Services may also involve the creation or modification of new and existing Drupal modules.
Participants will engage in a variety of activities, including but not limited to:
- a branching quiz;
- uploading media files (image, audio, video);
- creating presentations (using a “presentation tool” that JWA has developed); and
- customizing the look and feel of their page.
Modules have already been implemented on JWA’s website for many of these purposes, including uploading, searching, and browsing media.
To comply with COPPA, we will not make use of popular social media tools or sites such as MySpace, Facebook, or Ning. (There will be no “friending,” for instance.) Access will be password protected. “Read only” password protected access for parents, family, and friends will ensure that search engines don’t find the content (even those that ignore .htaccess files) and minimize access by unauthorized visitors. At the same time, it will be possible for users to save items uploaded to or created in the site and to share copies of the items to Facebook, YouTube, etc.
As we move into the implementation phase of the project, we are requesting qualifications from designers and/or website development partners.
- The project has a budget of $30,000 for Web design and programming.
- Respondents should have experience designing websites for children in this age range. Respondents should submit samples of work that demonstrates ability to design/program for the target audience.
Designer must demonstrate familiarity with target demographic (American Jewish girls 11-13).
- Site programming must be developed as Drupal modules so that that the subsite can be easily integrated into our existing setup. This implies the ability to package the work using tools such as the “features” module; use of the JWA-familiar alternative where several modules exist to solve the same problem; and the ability to check the finished work into a version control system so that we can check out the code, implementation scripts, and instructions; and successfully implement. (Testing will be done on our development server, not on the live site.)
The Bat Mitzvah Interactive subsite will have its own look and feel and need not incorporate any design elements of jwa.org or existing subsites (other than inclusion of the JWA logo).
Interested parties should send a summary of qualifications with links to samples, as well as a description of how you would work with us to create an engaging site that kids will enjoy exploring and that parents and educators will find credible no later than November 15, 2010. You may submit either Design or Design/Build proposals.
Completed Site
… is at MyBatMitzvahStory.org, due to launch July 2011
