Olivia Backus

13 / Systems + Workflows

Perry Scope.

One place to find the stories happening across an entire school district.

Perry Scope is an internal content-discovery platform I designed to bring school updates, community information, and potential story leads into one centralized workspace.

Instead of manually checking dozens of different places for something worth sharing, Scope brings content discovery and organization into a more focused workflow.

The content feed. School posts and story leads show up in one place.

Sources

Where a story can start.

Schools, departments, athletics, clubs, and community organizations each publish in their own place. The source directory keeps those places in one list, with the channel named beside the account.

The source directory. Schools and programs are listed with the channel beside each name.

Review

Decide what deserves a closer look.

The feed can be filtered by school, category, and status. When something is worth keeping, it can be saved with a category and a note about the original post, ready for a later decision.

Saved stories. A lead can keep a status, a category, and a link back to the original post.

Dates

A date can become part of the plan.

Dates found in collected posts and newsletters are gathered for review. Saving one to a calendar is a confirmed step. It does not happen on its own.

Dates found in posts and newsletters. Each one can be reviewed before it is saved anywhere else.

The workflow

Discover, review, organize, create.

This is the path the platform is designed to support.

  1. Discover

    Bring relevant updates and potential story leads into one place.

  2. Review

    Examine items and identify information worth following up on.

  3. Organize

    Sort and save useful ideas for later.

  4. Create

    Use the information to guide interviews, district news, social content, or other communications work.

My role

Why I built it.

Managing district communications means keeping up with information spread across schools, departments, organizations, social channels, and public sources. I identified that search as a repeating part of the work and started developing a tool around it.

My part of the project covers the product and the communications problem it is meant to help with:

  • Product concept and requirements
  • Workflow strategy
  • UX and interface direction
  • Source organization
  • AI-assisted development
  • Testing and iteration
  • Content operations and communications strategy

The takeaway

Less searching. More storytelling.

The point is to spend less time hunting for the next story and more time telling it.