Digital engagement – Page 2

Strategising digital engagement

April 4, 2013

Do you need a digital engagement strategy to get it right? Perhaps you don’t, but it can’t not help, surely.

Start with a vision. What do we want to achieve? Where do we want to end up? Pick an arbitrary date in the future – say 2015 – and imagine how you’d like things to be done then. What steps to get there?

One way I’d look at it would be that with budgets under lots of pressure, a digital by default (or design) approach has a load of advantages for organisations. You won’t reach everyone online, but you will get to plenty of people in a cost effective way.

Next, think organisationally. We want everyone we work with to get the benefit of this new digital way of working! How can we achieve that? It might be by having digital enthusiasts in each department talking regularly to their colleagues about how putting information and opening up services online can help improve things and make them more efficient.

Think about how having lots of people on Twitter and Facebook might affect the organisation. What training might they need? How can we know about all the profiles and pages that have been set up? How can you support people to keep up the momentum, or to help them make the right response to a question? How to help them not cock something up and get the organisation into hot water – or how to get them out of trouble if they do?

Consider breaking down activity into different types, such as having business-as-usual digital activity (ie ongoing), digital campaigns (ie time limited) and the difference between communicating, engaging and collaborating.

Now, write this stuff up on a sheet of paper. It shouldn’t take more than a side of A4. Show it to your boss, their boss, the chief exec. Get the most senior person you can to endorse it.

Start doing stuff yourself. Play with some tools. Find which ones work for you in your role, and for your team and service area. Monitor responses, successful interactions, not so successful interactions. Get your colleagues involved, ask them to cover for you when you’re on holiday, or off sick. Then encourage them to do their own thing once they realise it’s really not that bad. It’s actually fun!

Next, identify the willing. Find those digital enthusiasts, show them your bit of paper and the signature on it. Get them to show it to their bosses, and their bosses. Do talks at team meetings about it. Show people what you’ve been doing and how it worked. Tell them what went wrong and how you fixed it.

Get your digital enthusiasts to meet up every so often to share experience and stories. Maybe have an online community of practice so you can keep discussions going, even when you’re not in the same room. Encourage them, support them, cajole them, replace them when they leave.

Show other teams your community of practice. Show them how they could have one too, to share their learning, experience and problems with one another.

Revisit your strategy. Are you closer to achieving those goals? Is the organisation becoming more digital? Is the use of online tools for communication, engagement and service delivery becoming embedded in lots of people’s working lives?

What needs to change? What could be improved? Change it. Improve it.

Make it happen.

Need help getting the skills and knowledge to make this stuff a reality? Check out our online Successful Digital Engagement course now!.

Succeeding or not on the internet

January 4, 2013

A lot of people are unwilling to innovate online because they’re worried it’ll go badly. After all, there’s a story every week in the media about someone ballsing up online in one way or another.

It strikes me, from only a cursory examination of a lot of these stories, that most of the time, people or organisations get into bother online for one of two reasons.

They either take the internet too seriously, or they don’t take it seriously enough.

If you take it too seriously, you worry about what you put online to the point where it comes out like it was written by committee, is completely bland and unengaging. Decisions take ages to be made, and opportunities are missed – and disasters can’t be fixed in time.

If you don’t take it seriously enough, you don’t take enough care. Maybe you don’t feel all that bothered about what users of the net think, or say. Being dismissive of the medium is disastrous, but we see it all the time.

The trick is – as always! – to take a sensible, middle way. Treat the web and the people who spend their time there with respect, but don’t take the whole thing so seriously that you and your colleagues tie yourselves up in knots every time you need to post on a Facebook page or reply to a tweet.

As is so often the case in terms of tone and style on the net, getting the balance right is one of the main keys to success.

A few thoughts on the year ahead

January 3, 2013

But certainly not any predictions!

In the space in which Kind of Digital operates – which means largely working with public sector people in helping them innovate in the way they engage with citizens and communities using technology – I suspect the next twelve months will see a bit of gradual evolution.

There are two conflicting agendas in a way – perhaps a bit of a catch 22. There’s no money to innovate, but unless organisations start to innovate they’re to making the most of the money they do have.

Still, I think the move this year is likely to be around the use of those tools that emerged recently by more people within organisations. Twitter isn’t quite the telephone on your desk, but it can’t be too long before the comparison is valid.

I still feel that we haven’t seen anything really interesting with mobile in the digital engagement space. Money is an issue here of course, as mobile development needs time and space to get figured out and money to develop. Still, with the proliferation of smart phones these days, surely someone is going to make the jump soon.

One other area I’ll be keeping an eye on is the rollout of quicker broadband throughout most of the country. There are still a lot of questions about those rural areas that won’t get the access, but even so – what happens once the vast majority of folk have decent speed internet access? Most folk assume that having it is de facto a good thing – and I agree with them – but it will be fascinating to see the use cases emerge.

For me personally, there are challenges ahead, and the economic situation is very much a part of that. It’s tough out there and one has to work ever harder for each pound customers pay.

I’m obviously looking forward to OurHousing being up and running in the next couple of months – it’s a new sector to work in, and an exciting tool that we are developing which I think can have a really positive social impact.

I’d like to get around to blogging more often here – it was this blog that allowed me to start doing this stuff for a living and I feel I owe it some love. Part of that will be to start doing regular web chats again, and maybe experimenting with other ways of interacting online – maybe some Google Hangouts perhaps?

That’s probably enough from me. Many thanks to all the lovely people who have supported me and Kind of Digital in 2012 – and here’s to another interesting twelve months!

What I’m talking about when I’m talking about digital engagement

November 3, 2012

I do a fair bit of training on digital engagement to public sector bodies up and down the country and most of the time it means very different things to very different people.

To some, it means running a corporate Twitter account or Facebook page – which, of course, it does.

To others it means teams delivering services making use of digital tools to engage with service users, to improve the quality of the service being provided – which, of course, it does.

To another group, it means bringing social technology into the organisation, to improve the way people work, learn and generally get stuff done – which, of course, it does.

Then there are those to whom it means an approach to consultation on a particular decision, policy, campaign or project – which, of course, it does.

So all of these things, and a fair few others as well, are a part of what digital engagement means. Often the trouble is that they aren’t always considered by those looking to implement digital engagement.

So, if people bring me in to deliver some training on this, it’s usually because they have one of the above things in mind.

Rarely do they want to take a step back and put into place a kind of framework so that everything that digital engagement can mean can happen, in a sensible and well-governed way.

In other words, setting up and maintaining corporate Twitter and Facebook presences matter and are important. Equally important, however, is the use by people in service delivery roles, and indeed the other forms of engagement I mention above.

One shouldn’t preclude the others, and nor should they necessarily take precedence over others.

So what does this mean for organisations wanting to start to engage digitally?

As part of the book I’m still writing, I’ve broken digital engagement down into three main elements which should be considered by anyone undertaking some digital engagement work.

The first is strategy – whether organisation-wide, within a team or teams, partnership working with other organisations or even as an individuals. External or internal is another strategic consideration.

The second is tools and techniques, which includes the big platforms like Twitter and Facebook, but also non platform-centric stuff like blogs, email newsletters, web chats, crowdsourcing, mapping and so on.

Finally there are the skills such as curation, community management, social reporting, user centred design approaches etc.

Overall, organisations need to take an approach where:

Every piece of work undertaken is encouraged to have a digital element unless there’s a good reason not to
Anyone within the organisation can make use of a documented suite of digital tools and techniques to support this
A policy sets out people’s responsibilities and what they ought to be doing
Training is provided to fill in skills gaps

It just seems a shame to me when so much effort is put into working out how just one part of an organisation can make effective use of digital tools. Building a framework that the whole organisation can use strikes me as a much better use of time.

Webchatting about localism

October 9, 2012

Our site for NALC, What Next for Localism, is going pretty well. Quite a few ideas submitted and some conversation starting up around them and the articles published on the blog.

To further development the online discussion, we’ll be hosting a live web chat on the site next Tuesday (16th October) at 1pm on the future of localism.

It ought to be a great opportunity to debate the issues and opportunities with a group of like-minded folk – so bookmark the page and stick a reminder in your calendar!

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