Webchat – what next for digital engagement? 10th November at 11am

It’s been a while since I’ve run a live chat, so it’s probably a good time to do another.

As for a topic, I think it would be really interesting to have a look at digital engagement and where things might be going in the future. After all, we are all pretty comfortable with doing commentable documents, online surveys, Twitter chats and the like – but what’s the new thing? How can we make this really useful?

If you’re interested, the chat will be happening on this page, on 10th November at 11am and will last for about an hour.

If you visit the webchat page, you can sign up with CoverItLive to get a reminder nearer the time.

Look forward to seeing you there!

Get your levels of engagement right

When I delivered the Civil Service Learning digital engagement for policymakers course with Steph Gray, Steph put in a really neat slide which explained that different people have different needs from any one engagement exercise.

Some people are happy to just know a bit more about what is going on. Others want to be able to have their say. Some people don’t want to be bothered about it at all!

This is an important thing to remember when trying to engage people with your policy, campaign, event or service. A single digital solution will put off as many people as it attracts.

Planning a digital engagement exercise needs to include consideration of each different audience, what their needs are, and what they are able to offer.

For those that just want to know more, try a clear English version of your policy to help people understand what you are trying to do.

For those who would like to be involved but perhaps don’t have the expertise to contribute in a major way, provide some kind of interactive quiz or exercise to allow them to give their overall view without getting bogged down in detail.

Then, for those with deep knowledge of the policy area you are engaging with, provide easy ways for them to be able to share that knowledge and their views – through a nice survey or commendable document, say.

The important thing is to do the research and planning to begin with – who will have a view on this? What will they want to do? How much understanding do they have?

Once you’ve done this, it ought to be much easier to design engaging tools to help make it happen.

Need some help getting your digital approach right? Join me at my Achieving Digital Transformation workshop in December!

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.

Successful digital engagement course launches

Today my new online course, successful digital engagement, kicks off over at School of Digital.

I’m excited, and nervous. I’ve not done something like this before. I’m pretty sure it should work, from my experience working at Learning Pool and all the reading I’ve done recently about online education.

It ought to work because it is focused on a small, well managed community of learners; gives them space to explore, talk and reflect; focuses on learners’ specific needs; and provides one to one mentoring as well as general training across the whole group. The one thing it misses is the enthusiasm that emerges from being in the same room – but hopefully the flexibility makes up for that.

We’ve got 10 paying customers on the course, which is good going for the first of its kind. I’m going to be learning as much as anyone else on this particular course.

My initial feeling on the first day is good. I get the content and can see how it all slots together. Key will be maintaining the interest and enthusiasm of the learners.

What next though? I will definitely be running successful digital engagement again – what what other topics would work well for this format?

Strategising digital engagement

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!.

How online community management could really matter for public services

One of the key skills (or roles) that I bang on about a lot when I am delivering training to customers is community management. I talk about it a fair bit on this blog too.

One of the first things I ever did online was start up and manage a community – a simple forum for people who like reading books. It’s still running, in a sort of half life, which isn’t bad given that it was started back in 2003.

It turns out that the community was managed – largely by accident – fairly well. Rules were kept to a bare minimum (something along the lines of “don’t be an idiot” was the main one) and a healthy culture of respect and friendliness emerged over time. Membership was always fairly small, certainly compared to some of the huge book related boards out there, but I suspect that the tightness of the group contributed to its success.

Anyhow, these days I’m more concerned about public services – with my own particular fetish of course being local government. How could good community management practice help in this context?

I’ve written before about bringing local panels up to date with an idea about a mobile solution combined with a bit of micro-participation (go read the post – it’s really good!). An organisation could however do something similar by developing a community – whether one of its own creation or perhaps by engaging with an existing one.

Many interactions between, say, a council and citizens tend to be one off affairs – a question is answered, a consultation response received, some feedback provided, and then that’s it.

For a lot of folk, of course, that’s just how they like it. An ongoing conversation with their local authority would probably fill them with boredom, if not dread.

But perhaps by facilitating a space in which local issues are discussed on an ongoing basis, solutions could be teased out. Often when digital engagement takes place on what feels like a one-off basis, it’s too easy for people to drop in, be negative, and then leave again. By taking a long term approach, results might be a lot more constructive.

Also, it ought to save time and therefore money. After all, why rebuild communities or groups or even just lists of people, every single time you have a new campaign to launch, or a new policy to consult on? Why not keep adding people to your community, who can dip in and out of issues as suits their interest?

The kingpin of online community development is Rich Millington, who I seem to namecheck every week on this blog. In a recent email newsletter (sign up for it here), Rich outlines some success factors for online communities:

Start small
Start interesting discussions
Engage in micro-interactions
Encourage off topic conversations
Create a sense of identity for members

A lot of this is about letting go and allowing the community to manage themselves. The facilitation role is about seeding discussions, encouraging activity and recruiting members. This takes time and needs resource allocating to it – which is why Rich advocates that successful communities need full time managers.

That might be difficult to swing in these straightened times, but if you’re serious about your digital engagement, it’s a role that needs filling, and activity that needs doing.

Succeeding or not on the internet

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

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

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.

Introducing Kind of Digital’s digital engagement training library

Quite excited about this!

Affordable, scalable digital engagement training for your whole organisation.

Get access to over one hundred instructional videos on how to use digital tools to engage with citizens and communities. From getting started with Twitter and Facebook to publishing open data and developing a social media strategy. We offer the best value and most scalable way of training your staff in using social media.

It’s the ultimate digital engagement reference guide.

Here’s an example for you to take a look at for free: how to build a simple online dashboard, using Addictomatic:

If you can’t see the embedded YouTube video, you can try downloading the original video file.

The benefits

Whether used as a reference tool by experienced staff, or as a way of upskilling large numbers of employees in the benefits of online engagement, our huge library of high quality videos will get everyone up to speed in no time.

Each video is short, to the point and designed to get the information to the viewer as quickly, and as fuss-free as possible.

What videos are included?

Our extensive library, which will include over 125 videos, takes your staff from the very beginnings of their digital engagement journey, right through to building a sophisticated strategy. Videos include:

Getting started with Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn and other tools
What hashtags are and how to use them
Building an online monitoring dashboard
What type of Facebook page is right for your purpose?
Finding influential Twitter users to follow
Engaging with online communities
Creating a blog and writing your first post
Creating videos for YouTube
Measuring social media impact and influence
Developing bespoke digital engagement tools
Designing a social media strategy
Publishing open data
Mashing up data with Yahoo! Pipes and Google Fusion Tables
Building a community online

You can download a complete list here (.xls format). What’s more, we’ll be adding videos every month, expanding the library to cover emerging technology and issues.

Here’s another example. It’s a quick guide to generating a QR code:

If you can’t see the embedded YouTube video, you can try downloading the original video file.

What about updates?

Our video training is a yearly subscription, and we host all the videos for you. This means that whenever we update a video, it will automatically be updated for you. You’ll also get any new videos we record as soon as they are published, as part of your yearly subscription cost.

How much does it cost?

There are two ways to get access to our library of videos:

Publish the videos on your own intranet or learning management system with our embed codes for just £1,000 + VAT per year
Get your own branded video training portal to host the videos, any other content you would like to add and create your own digital engagement community for only £3,000 + VAT per year.

If you would like to purchase the library for access by more than one organisation, please contact us for a quote.

Next steps

If you would like to enquire about purchasing a subscription to the video library, just email hello@kindofdigital.com or call 020 3286 5186.