digital engagement – Dave Briggs

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

October 8, 2014

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

September 29, 2014

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

July 3, 2014

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

May 13, 2013

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

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!.

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