Announcing MailCamp: effective email marketing in the public sector

A cross post from Steph’s blog to help publicise this event!

Just a quick one to pimp MailCamp11, a free show + tell event about email marketing in the public sector, now confirmed for 12 May at the Dept of Communities and Local Government.

MailCamp

Everyone’s on a budget, and wants to make their digital channels work harder. Social media matters, but nothing drives traffic and reminds people what you’re doing like a good email newsletter or alert. But we’re all busy, and optimising our newsletters and email alerts often isn’t top of the list.

The long-promised spin-off event from UKGovcamp, MailCamp is a one-off show & tell event on 12 May for people interested in how the public sector uses email marketing, newsletter and alerts to engage its audiences. Come along to a free afternoon of ideas and stories, bringing your own examples, tips and questions.

To find out more and register your interest in coming along, check out http://mailcamp.ukgovcamp.com. And spread the word!

The need for micro-participation

A theme I’ve been returning to on a regular basis in the talks I’ve been giving lately has been about the need for government to make participation easier.

I’ve blogged in my usual half-assed manner about the participation deficit before, and it strikes me that this is an important issue that is both not going away and also is probably going to get worse.

I tend to highlight myself as an example of the problem here, in that despite being one of the very few people in the world who actually find government interesting, I never actually engage myself. I’ve not been to a council meeting, responded to a survey or questionnaire, and never given feedback through another route.

Why is this? It’s not that I’m lazy (keep quiet at the back), nor that I don’t care. It’s mainly that the instruments of local democracy just don’t fit in with my lifestyle.

The most obvious culprit here is the meeting. It strikes me that the dominance of meetings pretty much means that anyone with a family and a job (or perhaps even just one of those) is excluded from the process.

Read the boy a story before bed time, or go to the town hall to talk about a planning application? Not a difficult choice, but the answer means that participation is always going to be low.

Perhaps there’s an opportunity here to learn from the micro-volunteering that is becoming increasingly popular. An easy, quick way to get involved in civic activity that fits into people’s lives the way they are lived now, not fifty years ago.

After all, I may not be able to give up two (or more!) hours of an evening to attend a council meeting, but I’m sat in front of a computer almost all day, and could easily take 15 minutes or longer out to get involved, perhaps by answering some questions, providing ideas, or identifying problems.

Even better, with a smartphone and a bit of geo-tagging, why not tell me how I can contribute from exactly where I am?

Getting involved and participating shouldn’t be a chore. As I mentioned in my post about councillors, we need more people doing less, rather than the situation we have now where only a few people do far too much.

I don’t think this needs massive upheaval, or some kind of revolution in local democracy (although that might be nice). A bit of tinkering around the edges would, I’m sure, go a long way.

What I’m doing next: launching Kind of Digital

It’s a new financial year, and that seems an appropriate time to share my plans for the future.

Following a really enjoyable couple of years at Learning Pool, we’re going to reshape my role as Community Evangelist to enable me to focus on some other stuff.

In particular, I’m launching a new business.

Kind of Digital is that business, where I’ll be putting into practice everything I have been writing about here for the last few years. In other words, answering the question “how can we use the internet to make government more interesting?”

Services

How will I be doing that? Through a mixture of training, strategic advice and development work.

The training I see as a real priority at the moment. In many ways the arguments for more engaging use of the web by public service organisations are accepted by most – but the skills to get the strategy right, and to deliver it effectively, are all too rare.

I’ve got a range of training programmes designed which include face to face training and online support – and if you’re interested for your organisation, whether for staff or politicians, please do get in touch.

On the strategy side, if you need help putting together your organisation’s approach to digital engagement or just need some ideas for a campaign, I’d love to help out.

Developing new tools and engaging sites is another area of work I’m keen to get stuck into – with work already started on a couple of interesting projects that I’ll be able to discuss shortly.

Projects

It’s not just client based work though, I’m also looking to get involved in delivering some cool projects, exploring innovation in public service delivery. Again, conversations are underway on a couple of things and I’ll talk more about those soon.

If you have anything in mind though, it would be great to collaborate!

It’s not just Dave

Last time I worked for myself, I was pretty much a freelancer – it was just me. This time though, inspired by the time I spent hanging out with Mary and Paul at Learning Pool, I’m wanting to build a scalable, sustainable business.

As we’re just starting out, I’m going to be doing a lot of the doing to begin with, but I’m hoping to add people to the team to deliver projects in the future. If you’re interested, particularly if you can work on an associate basis, do get in touch.

I’m delighted that I’m being joined at Kind of Digital by Catherine – otherwise known as @davebriggswife. To say that she is the brains of the operation whilst I am the mouth is an understatement. Catherine will be helping me out with all the stuff I’m terrible at – admin, the financial stuff, project management, making sure stuff gets done. I’m incredibly relieved that she’s on board!

Kind of Digital and Learning Pool

All this doesn’t mean I’m abandoning Learning Pool, just that I’m going to be doing (even) less work there in the future. It’s not the sort of team that is easy to leave – and nor would I want to. I’m dead chuffed to still be working on various projects with LP, and I’ll always be happy to promote their products to the people I meet.

In fact, there are already a bunch of projects where KoD and LP can collaborate to provide a really great, unique service to public sector organisations to help them innovate using technology.

I also know that Mary and Paul’s considerable business brains will be a great asset to me as I build up the company – their advice will be vital if I’m to make a success of this thing.

And finally…

Obviously, given the business I’m in, there’s plenty of social media action going on with Kind of Digital. You can connect to the company by subscribing to the blog – RSS or email – or by following us on Twitter or Facebook. In fact, anyone that does so with either of those channels over the next two weeks will get entered into a draw to win some awesome KoD goodies, including t-shirts, pens, laptop stickers and other tat Catherine has ordered from the internet.

Am I bribing you to follow my company on social networks? You bet I am. In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s a recession on…

Bookmarks for February 23rd through April 4th

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

You can find all my bookmarks on Delicious. There is also even more stuff on my shared Google Reader page.

You can also see all the videos I think are worth watching at my video scrapbook.

Civil sector learning event: Exeter, 8th April

Learning Pool, in collaboration with Cosmic, are running an event in Exeter on 8th April to talk about how civil sector organisations can meet their training needs in this age of austerity.

Paul McElvaney will be showcasing My Learning Pool – the ludicrously cost-effective new service from Learning Pool that delivers over twenty high quality learning modules for a bargain £25 per year – a price that goes down with bulk purchases.

Julie Harris from Cosmic -the ethical IT company – will be giving details of a brand new service from Cosmic for VCO’s and Social Enterprises.

Find out more details and book your free place here.

Future of local gov IT strategy

Gotta love blogging local government types. Great post here from Warwickshire County Council’s Jim Morton about their developing IT strategy.

My favourite bit:

1. Embrace the practice of using ICT as a Utility: It is now possible to consume software, development platforms and infrastructure from the cloud which can potentially lead to many benefits. We need to understand where working this way will help save us time and money as well as avoid extensive development in re-inventing the wheel where a product or service can be used off the shelf. As an example our open data site is already provided using the Ruby on Rails platform as a service provider Heroku.

2. Warwickshire as a service: This is a (hopefully) catchy way of saying that we need to expand our initial work on open data to include as many of our data sets and services as possible i.e. build an open API for the organisation. The vision is that both internal and external developers will make use of the same building blocks for creating services applications and web sites.

3. Rational approach to information management: We need to overcome the historical and technical silos that we have built up around information to build single sources of the truth and gain a clearer understanding of the context around our data and documents. This will allow us to build more useful, accurate applications and web sites as well as providing clear understanding of which information must be kept safe and secure.

4. Use the web to extend the organisation: We need to move from an arms-length model of interacting with the public web via a curated web presence and individual point solutions for deeper interaction to becoming an organisation that is engaged with the web at a cultural as well as technical level. Staff at WCC need to merge the web into their everyday work-life in the same way that they do in their personal lives.

Update: just come across this illuminating interview with Socitm President Jos Creese:

The direction of travel has nevertheless been predetermined by irresistible trends on which central government cuts are a powerful catalyst. Networked citizens have high expectations of digital services. Professionals have realised that open data, open standards and transparency are incontestable requirements of the networked age. Digital innovation, joined up services, citizen-centricity and wide collaboration are all emerging quite naturally as every possible actor, from public and private entities to all kinds of people, are thrust into ever greater immediacy by the internet.

What is happening to local government is a form of coagulation. But it is happening slowly. It relies on internet infrastructure, so it must wait until local authorities have finished building their bits of the Public Sector Network, and the public sector as a whole has established a competent way of formulating open standards of interoperability.

Webinars a-go-go

Two more upcoming webinars from Learning Pool to tell you about – both free of course.

Closing the third sector skills gap

New for 2011 is My Learning Pool – a suite of over 20 online courses that have been designed for community and voluntary groups, small charities, social enterprises and others in the third sector.

During the webinar you will receive a guided tour of the training available on www.mylearningpool.com and learn how the bite sized chunks of learning can help improve your organisation or yourself from as little as £25 per subscription.

To find out more about My Learning Pool you can follow @MyLearningPool on Twitter, visit the Facebook page or log on to www.mylearningpool.com.

Find out more and sign up here.

#Walsall24 – an experiment in local government radical transparency

Join Learning Pool’s Dave Briggs and Walsall Council’s Dan Slee for this exclusive free webinar discussing Walsall’s groundbreaking Twitter experiment – #Walsall24.

Over a period of 24 hours, Walsall Council tweeted a cross section of what they were doing, providing a unique snapshot of the daily activities of a local authority.

Dan will discuss how the project came about, what the barriers were to making it happen and how they were overcome, and what the Council has learned from it.

Find out more about Walsall 24 at http://www.walsall.gov.uk/walsall24.htm.

Find out more and sign up here.

Digital local resources – and a bit about Your Square Mile

Continuing the posts about local digital communities, here are a couple of links to interesting research and publications on the subject, which I’ve been giving a re-read recently.

Of course, there has recently been a very interesting move in this space with the announcement of the Big Lottery funded Your Square Mile project, which has very close links with the wider Big Society agenda, and which involves some kind of relationship with the social networking platform SocialGo. David Wilcox blogs comprehensively here.

I’m not sure anyone has access to enough information about this to make a proper judgement, however, some alarm bells are ringing in my mind:

  • As per the comments from Will and Manny highlighted in this post, government sponsored online community development does not have a great track record. I appreciate this is at arms length – but Your Square Mile is heavily linked with the Big Society Network, and therefore the current government
  • People will drift towards the funded option, and if (and I emphasise if) SocialGo is the mandated or preferred solution from those with the cash, we are going to be in a one platform fits all situation, which doesn’t really work
  • Objectives are important. Right now, I don’t fully understand Your Square Mile or what it is setting out to do. Hopefully internally they know exactly what they aim to achieve – because if it’s just a vague ‘we’ll get people to talk to each other on the internet and they’ll self organise themselves to do wonderful things’ then that might not work so well
  • What about those organisations that have being doing this stuff for the last few years? Are they just going to be steamrollered by the beast?

I think my real worry is that the one thing that has become apparent, from conversations I have had with people about this stuff, is that with online local communities, in the majority of cases, you need the community before the online. It’s what brings sustainability to the online effort.

Online elements certainly bring visibility to the community’s activities and spread reach, and enable more people to be involved. But a square mile, online or off, is going to be pretty empty if there isn’t the desire or will to keep it going.

Update: just seen this post from Kevin Harris, featuring this lovely line:

There is a study to be done of the damage caused by highly persuasive people who seem to feel compelled to impose template social ‘solutions’ on others.

Collecting stories of interactive government

As mentioned previously, I’m writing a book. The best books, apparently, have good stories – and so I need some good stories.

At the same time, I’m seeing loads of requests for examples of effective use of the web, social media and other related stuff in public services. What’s needed is a nice resource full of good stories…

ReadWriteGov

Back in the day, I ran a little event in Peterborough called ReadWriteGov. It was meant to be one of many, but that didn’t really happen. I’ve been sat on the domain since, wondering what to do with it.

So what I have decided to do is to start collecting stories of interactive government – the most comprehensive description I can come up with for using cool internet stuff in public services.

Right now, there’s not a lot there, except for a link to a survey. If you have a great example of use of digital engagement in public services, please fill it in!

(Yes, I know it’s SurveyMonkey. But it was quick, and easy.)

Maybe you have managed an awesome council FaceBook page. Perhaps your youth service website rocks. It could be that you ran a superbly integrated public safety campaign.

It could be internal or external. One organisation or several in partnership. It could be a time limited project, or ongoing work. You could be a council, central government department, a quango, a police service, a fire and rescue service, part of the health sector or a community group delivering a service.

Whatever it is, as long as it has a connection with public services and online innovation, I want to know about it!

What I will then do is read through what you’ve send, write it up as a case study for publication on the proper site (once it’s done). I’ll send you a copy for checking first, so don’t worry.

This way we will build up a high quality collection of great examples of digital engagement, with the associated learning, all accessible online. All the content will be categorised and tagged, so you can find stuff easily, and we’ll keep the comments turned on, so conversations can take place about the stories.

Also, I’ll take the best of the stories, phone the authors up for a chat, maybe visit them, and then re-write them for inclusion in my book.

Again, here’s the survey link. Please complete it if you can, or if not, pass it on.

Thanks!