Pigeonhole is a tool ONE/Northwest developed as an extension of its website strategy consulting that accompanies most of our website projects.

Many non-profit websites reflect their organization's internal conceptions of how the group is structured, say, by breaking the sites structure down along program area boundaries, or the roles that individual staff members play.

This doesn't usually serve the site visitor very well, though, because her interests likely don't fall neatly into these program areas, but map more to one of her many identities, such as "kayaker", "mother", or "legislator". We consider these to be potential website audiences.

We say that Pigeonhole is "audience-centric" because its goal is to bridge the divide between the site structure imposed by your organization's structure and the world as your site's audiences see it.

It is designed to help you accomplish your website's goals:

• build trust for the new site visitors
• engage your visitors in your work, both offline and on
• help them find information on your website that's most relevant to them

There are three broad ways it tries to do this.

• It allows you to set "metadata" -- that is, information on who a page is for and what it pertains to -- on each page of your site specifying the audiences and program areas that it targets
• It helps you show the correct types of "related" content on each page based on these metadata.
• It introduces a few new content types that allow you to engage your visitors more (common "content types" that already come with Plone include folders, events, and news items)

It's important to note that Pigeonhole is an extension of our strategic planning, and its success hinges on the execution of a solid website communication plan; most of that is an offline, non-technical issue. This documentation doesn't get into coming up with the best audiences and program areas for your organization or website.