The Dangerous Speech Project (DSP) works to counter rhetoric that inspires violence between groups of people, with original ideas, research and policy work. After a decade of research and publications, our work is quite well known and many people rely on our website, but it leaves a lot to be desired.
That’s why we need you.
What we need
We want our website to achieve the following goals:
- Inform new visitors who we are, what we do, and what dangerous speech is
- Quickly and thoroughly answer the question ‘What are you doing?’ – highlighting both our recently completed work and projects that are underway
- Provide a clear, engaging library for all sorts of publications and tools about dangerous speech and related topics, by us and others
- Lift up the voices, identities, and work of our partners, especially those working in contexts where dangerous speech and related violence are rife
- Provide an engaging, interactive, “choose-your-own-adventure” style interface for a new project we are working on, about counterspeech (constructive response to harmful speech) and the people who use it to create positive change
To achieve these goals, we know we need the following:
- A fresh, modern style that impresses visitors without being overwhelming
- A dynamic homepage that highlights our latest work and quickly guides both first-time and returning visitors to where they want to go
- A reimagined navigation system that’s intuitive for people not familiar with our work, including a complete overhaul of menus, categories, and tags.
- A more comprehensive and easily accessible search feature
- A clearly defined and user friendly approach to document sharing and presentation[1]
- A clear policy on when and how to link to external websites, and a review of existing content to comply with that policy
- A way to include footnotes/endnotes in posts and pages that doesn’t make our staff want to pull their hair out
- Responsive design that’s easily navigable on mobile devices and on slow internet connections
- Adherence to accessibility best practices
We also want help making our website interact well with Twitter, Facebook, and Mailchimp.
About you
You’re an experienced web designer (or design team) with expertise in WordPress, who has worked with education/nonprofit clients in the past and produced dynamic, interactive content. You’ve worked collaboratively with people with varying levels of web expertise – we want you to come with your own ideas, listen to ours, and figure out what the best path forward is.
You can be based anywhere. Our team is in Washington, DC and Mexico City so we’ll need you to be available for meetings between 10am-5pm Eastern time (UTC-4).
Budget
We will consider proposals up to $20,000 USD. As an independent contractor, you’ll be responsible for providing your own equipment and space to work, and paying all taxes on this income.
Application Process
Please submit a proposal that convinces us you can do just what we’ve described, with examples of similar projects you’ve done in the past, and references who’ve worked with you on them. Include a proposed timeline, deliverables, and payment schedule. We anticipate starting work in October 2021. Proposals should be submitted via email to tonei[at]dangerousspeech[dot]org; include “Web Design Proposal” in the subject line.
We encourage you to talk with us before submitting a proposal – you can schedule a time with our Director of Operations here.
Legal Notes
You will be working for and signing a contract with the DSP’s executive director. This contract is funded by a project-based grant from Public Safety Canada’s Community Resilience Fund to create new resources about counterspeech.
[1] Our publications are typically shared as PDFs, but sometimes those are embedded in a page and other times they are linked to from a page that has a brief summary. In one case – our Practical Guide – we have both a lightly formatted HTML version and a fully designed PDF version.