Nice simple video from Twitter.
The art of the tweet
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Think Digital – free webinar 28 July
Thanks for all the interest shown in the 10 Think Digital principles so far. I’m working on building on them to make them even more useful.
Part of this is to run a webinar explaining them in more detail, and giving people a chance to ask some questions.
It’s on Monday July 28th at 11am. You can sign up at the link below.
https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/1958729747205688577
Think Digital
I’ve found myself banging on a lot recently at events and other engagements about pretty much the same stuff.
It’s what organisations need to do to grasp the digital opportunity – but which isn’t about actual tools on the internet. At least, not just about that.
Embedded below is the first attempt I have made to write it up. I would really welcome feedback on this. If you can’t see the embed, download the PDF direct here.
The strategy graph
I rather like this diagram that appeared in a post talking about Microsoft (which is well worth reading in and of itself).
It describes all the elements that make up what an organisation is and does. At the top, there are fewer words and they don’t change very often. At the moment, there are a lot more words and they are subject to regular change.
Strikes me as being a useful model to use to think about this stuff.
Daveslist #11
Issue 11 of my newsletter was sent out this morning.
You can read it on the web here to see what it’s like.
If you are already getting email alerts for this blog, don’t worry – the newsletter contains completely new content which doesn’t appear here.
If you’d like to sign up, you can do (for free!) at daveslist.io.
Community management in digital engagement
This is a bit of a precursor to my session at CommsCamp on Monday, but also links in with a chat I was having with Stephen Hale yesterday.
It strikes me that there is a clear role for community management techniques within digital engagement that isn’t really being done effectively at the moment – at least I haven’t seen it.
The thing is that every time an organisation runs a digital engagement project, it has to build a new community, more or less starting from scratch – despite the fact that lots of people have (hopefully!) already responded to previous efforts.
In other words, digital teams are probably sat on spreadsheets of contact details for lots of people who are interested in having their say on issues, and by combining all of that data, it wouldn’t be too hard to know what sorts of issues various people are really into and thus more likely to respond to.
At the very least, bung all their email addresses into a Mailchimp list so you can let them know when the next opportunity to get involved is happening (of course, you might need some sort of tick box thingy so people can opt out if they want to).
But the opportunity is to get some real insight into what the people you are engaging with feel about issues over a period of time and not just in relation to single exercises.
This can be done through data and analysis – but it has to be recorded and brought together. On top of that there are the vital soft community management skills of making people feel like they want to get involved in a particular engagement.
A digital engagement interaction shouldn’t be a one-off but rather the starting point in a give and take relationship, the foundation on which future conversations can be built.
Hopefully on Monday we will get to go through how some of that might actually work.
Accelerators, intrapreneurs and changing organisations for the better
Lucy Watt shares an excellent, honest post on the FutureGov blog about their learning from the PSLaunchpad project.
Having regularly spoken to one of the teams on the launchpad, Martin Howitt and Lucy Knight from Devon, I’m aware of the transformative impact the experience had on them, and their attitude to work.
As Martin himself reflects in one of his own blog posts about the Launchpad, there are some pretty big takeaways for local government as a whole from a process like this.
There is undoubtedly a tension between existing Council culture and the sort of thinking and process that accelerators typify. I don’t personally believe that there will be another PS Launchpad that involves local government in the same way. I think we are more likely to see a specifically local government version of it instead and this is something I would strongly advocate and be keen to be involved with in some capacity.
Lots of the conversations I am having with people across government – but particularly in councils – is about how traditionally bureaucratic, process heavy organisations can move quickly: make speedy decisions, get new products and services out faster, learn from feedback and respond in a timely fashion.
Being in a process like an accelerator such as PSLaunchpad provides many of the skills and experiences needed to answer these questions. Being told you have to ship something in two weeks, being advised from feedback that you’ve built the wrong thing and need to pivot quickly, having the authority to make decisions and plot a course accordingly yourself, without lengthy governance processes.
But not everyone can spend weeks out of the office on a programme like this – in fact, it’s probably impractical for many more than a handful in any one organisation.
Perhaps the answer is to run this type of programme internally, to embed it into people’s work. Got a change project on the go? Run it within an internal accelerator. Set some boundaries and some rules, put those working on it in a different room and let them get on with it. Put them in touch with potential mentors who have completed similar projects before, in the same sector and in different sectors.
It doesn’t have to be difficult, it doesn’t have to cost any money. It’s just a case of trying something different and not doing things the same way they always have been.
CommsCamp14 session ideas
I’m looking forward to CommsCamp14 in a week’s time, and have pitched a couple of session ideas on the event’s Ideascale site:
What does user centred comms look like? Who actually is the customer? How do we find out what they want to know and how they want to know it?
A session on online community management – what it is, how to do it well, and where it fits in the public sector comms kitbag of skills.
If you’re interested in either of these topics, please go and vote for them!
10 mistakes nobody needs to make again
Love this slide deck talking about lessons learned by a tech startup entrepreneur.
