Change was the name of the game when I left the EBRD’s Comms department last year. Apart from a number of key staff that moved on to bigger and better things a new Director was appointed – Reijo Kemppinen – that no doubt is more web-friendly than his predecessor.

“an opportunity for you to communicate and connect directly with experts, partners and clients”

This is how Mr. Kemppinen introduces the EBRD Blog when it launched in April.

It’s a bit early to say whether the blog will ever establish a meaningful dialogue or whether it will just allow the EBRD to check the ‘Do Web 2.0’ box on their management reports. Ironically comments are closed on a post that is about dialogue, sharing knowledge and exchanging lessons learnt.

Apart from this, there are a couple of things that I would have done differently:

Talk about 3 things: projects, projects and projects

The core business of the EBRD is to finance projects to help build economies. This is what most people are interested in.

What people want to know is how the money is been invested, what is being achieved and whether lives are changing for the better. Instead we get articles worthy of the Harvard Business Review:

• BIS data on cross-border flows – a closer look
• A look at non-performing loans: the boomerang effect

BIS data-what? Non-performing… boomerangs?

If you don’t have a Ph.D in Economics you’re going to find it difficult to understand any of this. Or, like me, you don’t bother reading at all.

But it’s not all technical stuff. Larry Sherwin’s reflections on the events of 1989 is an entertaining read. I can’t quite picture someone in Russia who’s quality of life depends on the success or failure of an EBRD project to be interested in the flash-back of an EBRD Comms Deputy Director.

Blogs need proper information architectures too

ebrd.com may look like 2001 but at least content has been organised rigorously. One of the key meta-data is the Project ID (you can see these on Project Summary Documents). Project IDs can be used to pull together content across the whole of the site about a specific project. Similarly, content is categorised by country and business sector.

But the EBRD Blog does not plug into the IA scheme. For example, the blog post Riding Russian rail: the 12.56 to Sergiev Posad is about the transport sector in Russia. There are no links from the blog post to relevant content on the main site.

Oddly, it has been cloned on the main site as a story titled Riding Russian Rail: then and now in the News and events section. I can’t quite understand what the point of this duplication is – any ideas?

I suspect that the reason for the lack of a more sophisticated information architecture is that they are using a blogging platform provided by an external company that would have taken a developer half a day to set up. A cost effective option, no doubt, but opportunities are being missed to give blog posts proper context.

A better strategy for the EBRD Blog

Here’s my idea: the EBRD should not publish a blog at all.

All they are doing are presenting us articles that already have natural home in the News and Events section of ebrd.com.

Instead, they should create, maintain and promote a platform for people involved in their projects to publish their own thoughts about the challenges, successes and failures they experience. Lets hear it from the foot soldiers and the civilians and not the generals back at HQ.