Renaming Service Recipes lean style
How we’re doing it. Avoiding the easy title ‘whats in a name’. #notaweeknote #notyetconfirmed
Last week Kat and I both wrote independently that we’d reopened the box on renaming Service Recipes. This week we may have actually done it.
The problem with the name ‘Service Recipes’
Service Recipes is a website that shares guides to how to do digital things, from charities who have done them and the tools and software they used.
We’ve tested Service Recipes with 11 people since November. 5 of these didn’t know what the site was before the test. We learnt that:
- The uniqueness of recipes is that they are contributed by other charities. The name doesn’t indicate this. We think this is a big missed opportunity.
- The site is as much about inspiration and encouragement of what is possible as it is about following a recipe to do a thing
- Some people use recipes to validate what they have already done
- Some use recipes as examples to leverage resources for similar things they want to do
- The name ‘Service Recipes’ doesn’t help people form accurate expectations of what they will find at the site
- After using the site for 30 minutes we asked people how they woudl describe recipes. The most common description they gave is ‘guides’.
- Some people don’t understand the Service (what service?) part. Some don’t understand the Recipes part.
- Plenty of recipes focus on internal operations rather than service delivery
- The name doesn’t indicate that these are digital guides
None of these reasons on their own are deal breakers for the name ‘Service Recipes’. But put together they make a case for changing it to something that helps people:
- form more accurate expectations about what they will find
- understand that recipes are peer-contributed
The case against changing the name was that:
- ‘Service Recipes’ is maybe good enough
- There is no immediately obvious alternative name and its unclear how much we could improve it
- The right strapline can help mitigate problems in a name
- Resource/effort could (possibly) be better spent elsewhere on the project
The criteria for renaming
We decided it was worth putting a little effort into exploring a new name. We drafted criteria for any new name. It must:
- Be descriptive of what people will find
- Convey that charities are sharing what they do
- Incorporate the idea of “guides” or “how to” or “steps” to give people a sense of the format
- Possibly include a reference to “digital” — as recipes are currently focused on digital tool use.
We had a chat, outlined the problem to Harry Harrold at Neontribe then met with Dan at CAST for 50 minutes to come up with a shortlist.
The shortlist
How we did it
Digital guide share
How people did digital
Charity guide share
Charities share guides
Open guides
The results
Proposed new name: Shared Digital Guides
About the name:
- Bit long but ok
- Active — more dynamic than Digital Guide Share (which is a noun)
- Frontloaded with the USP — that these are shared by others
- Uses ‘guides’ — consistently people’s main descriptor
- Uses ‘digital’ — because recipes are about digital tool use to do things
- SDG acronym doesn’t clash with anything horrible
- The domain name is available if we want to move Recipes from being a Catalyst subdomain
Where’s the word ‘charities’?
Yeah. Well spotted. This still potential new name doesn’t use the word charities. We thinkg that’s ok because:
- The context of the name’s use in the non-profit sector suggests, and supports an expectation that they are from non-profit organisations People will mainly hear about the service from other places in the nonprofit sector.
- It avoids the problem of using a name that only references one type of non-profit organisations . Its more inclusive of CICs and social enterprises and other organisation structures who use and have contributed to the platform’s 82 recipes.
- We can use the word ‘charities’ and ‘non-profits’ etc on the homepage and other places to make it clear these are from them and for them
Next steps
Sleep on it. Probably confirm it next Monday.
That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading 👍
