This week TED will release the recently completed manual “How to TEDx” to its community of over 3000 TEDx Organizers. IDEO.org" target="_blank">IDEO.org Fellow Liz Ogbu reflects on the IDEO.org redesign of the manual after gathering valuable input from the global TEDx community.

As our last post showed, we’ve been impressed by the passion of the TEDx Organizers. With that as our inspiration, our guiding principles for the manual became to celebrate the Organizers’ enthusiasm, harness their energy, and increase the efficiency and capacity of their organizing process. Here are some key strategies we deployed in the revised manual:

Introduce hierarchy: The existing manual had a lot of good content, but Organizers often felt overwhelmed and overlooked both critical and helpful information and resources. We restructured the content to follow a consistent hierarchy in each section.  We also used simple graphic devices to help the most important elements read more clearly.

Show the big picture: Very early on, we realized that the primary audience of the manual should be first-time Organizers. New to the TEDx process, they know the components of a TEDx event but often don’t understand things like the difficulty, timing or cost associated with individual components. We created a Task Rating Chart and a Task Timeline at the beginning of the manual and in each section to better orient them.

Organize the Organizers: The TEDx Organizers are ultimately ambassadors of the TED brand in their local community. Yet, it takes a whole team to put on a successful event. Many first time Organizers have limited or no previous experience organizing such an event or managing this type of team. We created a new “Team Management” section with helpful Best Practices and links to Resources, allowing them to more effectively channel their energies and that of their team.

Embrace the community of experts: As the community of TEDx Organizers grows, there is a greater wealth of knowledge that TED can harness to expand the quality and impact of TEDx. We introduced the idea of creating a TEDxpert program. TEDxperts can help curate the best insights and resources from the community of Organizers. TED is now actively gathering suggestions of resources, best practices, and inspiration for later inclusion in the manual.

Enable the manual to evolve: A tricky challenge for any design team is to create a graphically compelling manual that the client can easily update on their own. Our team embraced the challenge and with the help of graphic designer Aaron Shinn, we created a fully editable yet visually engaging document in the Pages word-processing program. TED will be able to continue adapting the manual to keep pace with evolving world of TEDx.

Note: All images taken from the Facebook pages of various TEDx events.