Roddick activism site lacks the human touch

I came across an unusual website today, that of Anita Roddick, the founder of The Body Shop.

Roddick is probably best known these days for her strong views and stand on environmental and other social issues.

That stand and those strong views permeate the website. From the site description:

[…] Think of this website as a kind of global travel agency for your heart and mind, with me as your humble guide. Take a trip with me into the worlds of activism, ethical business, human rights, environmentalism, womanhood, family, and so much more. […] In other words, this website is a grab-bag of ideas. But isn’t that how we learn to appreciate life? Join me: I want to connect with people who share my outrage over the menace of global business practices, and who, like me, are seeking solutions. But I also want to tell — and hear, from you — stories that lift our spirits, that celebrate how glorious our planet is.

So that’s quite clear. It’s a tremendous website, one that no doubt fulfills a major goal of enabling Roddick to express her passionate views and opinions on the many issues she champions.

The site is well designed. A pleasant experience in visiting. Easy to navigate. It enables you to quickly grasp the issues of the day. And it has blog-like features such as chronological posts, categories and commenting (but no RSS or trackbacks).

Not only that, if you register, you can also post articles yourself. What a great way to "connect with people who share my outrage," as Roddick says in the site description. Not only leave comments but contribute full content as well.

Yet I’m bothered by this site. There’s something here that just doesn’t gel with my mental picture of Anita Roddick and all those noble issues.

This site is just too slick. There’s little or no human-ness here.

This is a marketing site, in my view, dressed up a bit as something else. One clue – the credits page lists Anita Roddick, but the live link to her email address is ‘staff@.’  That indicates to me that any email from this page certainly won’t go to Roddick, more likely to the PR folks listed on this page.

Could this be one reason that I could find not a single comment left on any post that I looked at (and I didn’t look at every one – there are lots of posts here)? Nor find a single article bylined by anyone except Roddick?

It’s hard to tell how long this site has been up. There’s no calendar or archive list of content, but clicking on some posts at random indicates it’s been online for at least three years. (Actually, may be better to say – the content indicates it was written during this time. Not the same as saying this site has been online for this time.)

I wonder if anyone thought beyond website design and structure when you want to achieve clear people-connection goals. That means a great deal more than purely the mechanism, so to speak, for the messaging – much more than a slick website.

It also means the human touch – letting you believe that if you comment or otherwise interact in some way with posts that carry Anita’s Roddick’s name you’re actually interacting with Anita Roddick, making a connection.

If all this is any indicator, I can’t see how this website will meet any of those sharing goals outlined in the site description.

But I’d love to be shown that I’m wrong, so I’ve dropped a note to Anita Roddick… er, to the staff.