Guest post

Getting noticed: The Five Step Programme

The second Wednesday guest post! Thanks to Sarah for this great post – if you’d like to contribute, just email me – and being called Sarah isn’t necessarily a requirement!

Online communication isn’t always taken seriously. It’s a nice to have on top of offline work or something organisations have been told to do. It isn’t necessarily considered a channel in its own right. And those that work online aren’t always respected in terms of their skills, their knowledge or the value they can bring.

Convincing others of your worth within an organisation is sometimes a bigger hurdle than convincing them of the value of online communications.

So, how to go about raising your profile and getting social media offerings to the table? I’ve worked up a list of five approaches. This list isn’t exhaustive. I’d like to hear people argue against or add their own take and experience.

1. Passion

Fall in love with online but don’t be blind to limitations and suitability. Talk to anyone who will listen about the possibilities but respect their concerns. Be able to explain why you are passionate about online – have examples of where social media has helped improve life, improved efficiency (internally or for citizens) or has saved money (pick according to your audience). Be savvy and believe in what you’re trying to get others to see the value of. And while being a geek is something to be cherished try to remember than social media is about being social so get out there and talk!

2. Persuasion

You may be the only person that believes that online communication, social media and digital engagement has an important part in your organisation. This can lead to frustration, doubts about your sanity and a relentless need to persuade others to listen to your suggestions. A good way to get people to listen to you is to listen to them – why don’t they value / understand / like online? Once you understand where they are coming from you can work out how best to showcase options to them. They still might not be sold but at the very least they will be more aware of what social media is (and probably think you’re a decent, reasonable sort as well).

3. Persistence

Things move slowly in the public sector, and social media is developing fast. Be the middle ground between the need to develop strategy, policy, protocol and being left behind because by the time you get to the dock that particular online ship has sailed.
Just because the answer is no today doesn’t mean the answer will be no tomorrow. Keep making suggestions, keep listening to the concerns around the use of social media, keep trying out ideas. Just keep on keeping on.

4. Private sector attitude

If you believe you could lose your customers to a competitor you’ll try harder to be the first with innovation and the best with services. We’re all citizens as well as public sector employees so what use of social media would make your personal dealings with the council easier? What would your neighbour, your mum, your friends find more useful. In the private sector you need to get the edge on your competitors and by having this attitude in the public sector you’ll get closer to delivering above and beyond what is expected and be able to prove why what you’re doing is of value to the organisation.

5. Play, practice, prove

Alright, that’s not one but three things. I really mean knowing what you’re talking about. Being passionate and persuasive will come more naturally if you use and know social media. The Internet is a playground so don’t be afraid to try out new platforms and ideas. Get to know other people in the sector and find out what they’re doing, share your ideas and experience with them. Collectively we can be more innovative and efficient than working in silos. And gather your evidence. Know how many people are online and using social media, know the demographics of different platforms, know how far you reach with online communications, know what your citizens think of what you’re doing. Know which tool to use for which job.

So, what do others think? Anyone used a different approach or mix in order to get word out about what they can do for the organisation with social media?

Sarah Lay blogs at www.sarahlay.com, works in online communications for Derbyshire County Council (who don’t necessarily share her views) and is studying for a Masters in eCommunications, concentrating on local government use of social media. She is also the organiser of the first social media cafe for Derby and Derbyshire. If you live or work in the area and are interested in online communications and social media come along to meet others – find out more and join the group.

MyPolice.org

This is the first of the series of guest posts here at DavePress, which will be coming each Wednesday for the next few weeks… Many thans to Sarah for taking the time out to write this!

Less than a month ago, a bunch of designers, developers, business brains and creative entrepreneurs who had never met before, came together and worked on Scotland’s first Social Innovation Camp. Sicamp, (for the tweeters out there), is in their own words;

… an experiment in creating social innovations for the digital age. We think the web and related technologies hold huge potential to change some pretty fundamental stuff: how people hold those in positions of power accountable; who they rely on to provide the services they need to live healthy, happy lives; or how they make a difference to something that affects them

And so, under the technical lights of the Caledonian Saltire centre in Glasgow, 6 ideas were investigated, brainstormed, developed and coded in under 48 hours, then pitched to a dragons den style panel. The winners were awarded a start up fund, branding workshops and free development time.

Mypolice was the winner, a back of the envelope idea I had months ago after a friend didn’t have an independent and fair channel to express her feedback to the police. Furthermore, she had suggestions for how her experience could have been improved, but again felt there was nowhere to express this.

So my team at sicamp came up with Mypolice.org. It is a web-based service that fosters constructive, collaborative communication between communities and the police forces that serve them. We offer the public a platform to tell their stories about their experiences with the police and suggest ways for their local police station to improve. We use mapping tools to geographically organise the information, so you can find out what your community is talking and concerned about.

Design can help us in the public services to be more innovative. We need to be conscious that today’s problems are just not going to be addressed by yesterday’s ideas and yesterday’s solutions; because the problems that we’re now facing, and the problems that we’re going to go on facing for the next five or ten years, are not going to be solved by the better delivery of more responsive services certainly if we do that in the traditional style. We need responses which are much more joined up, which are much more about influencing behaviour; we need a whole new approach to public policy over the 10 years – Sir Micheal Birchard, Chairman, Design Council

We will be taking an approach to our project which uses various design tools and techniques to help us make informed decisions. We are hoping to work on a regeneration scheme in Glasgow where we will be holding focus groups and interviews with the community and observing their environments, then use this as a case study to approach police stations. We want them to work with us and get involved in some co-design workshops with the public to really get to grips with how mypolice could work best for both sides and move forward our current idea. We want mypolice.org to become a valuable tool for the police and help them to improve and address issues within their policing areas. Through these steps, we also want to come up with other ways in which mypolice can be accessed, so we’re not alienating users who are not digitally engaged.

To be honest though, it really is an uphill struggle. First of all, we’re talking about using ‘social media’ tools that at the moment a majority of police organisations don’t quite understand and aren’t using yet. We’d like to change this and show them what all this web 2.0 malarkey is about; That social media doesn’t just mean youtube or facebook and pictures of teenagers drinking underage but that there are a whole variety of tools out there to help us connect, organise, collaborate, vote etc in more inventive ways than ever before.

It’s going to take a while to do this convincing but we’ve been talking to some interesting people already, including the head of the Scottish Police Federation and members of the Neighbourhood Policing Improvement agency. What we create needs to work with the police, not against, so we’re being very careful that the site doesn’t become a floodgate for insult. We want the feedback to be constructive, including a space for thank you comments which will act as a great morale booster. We want to remain independent from the police, but we don’t want to alienate them so we will be offering mypolice to them as a service they can buy into, similar to how the NHS Patient Opinion model works.

It is an exciting push in the direction of using social media within a public sector organisation. We’re not just using social media because it is the latest hot topic in the government. We’re using the tools to empower citizens to collectively make decisions on how their local area should be policed.
If we can convince the police that our idea can add value to their service, reduce the time they currently spend ‘engaging’ with the public and improve relationships with the communities they serve, all at the same time, we’ll be looking at some pretty big changes and perhaps a step towards giving more power to the people.

New technologies are changing the way we engage communities, deliver our public services, participate in government and campaign for change, are such an institution who are so policy heavy ready for it?

Sarah Drummond is project managing mypolice and is a recent graduate of the Glasgow School of Art. Her expertise lies in design thinking and designing services for both private and public sectors. Sarah has worked as a designer with Skills Development Scotland, leading the design process and project from beginning to end to create an educational online platform ‘My Learning Pod’.   She will be undertaking a Masters at the GSA with SDS this year.  She has also been recognised for her design skills winning most promising GSA Product Design student in 2008 and the first Medici Service Design Medal in 2009.

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