I’ve just returned from a week thoroughly ‘unplugged’ with my family at our favourite campsite – just a couple of miles from the extreme westerly point of mainland England. It’s just a perfect place to unwind and take in the stupendous land and seascapes; not least, the spectacular Cape Cornwall. Time for some experimenting with the Hipstamatic app.
Here’s a link to the photo set on Flickr.
Ben Matthews invited me to contribute to the CharityComms 2020 project, which he has announced today. The result is an insightful collaborative presentation…
where key figures in charity communications have teamed up to produce a snapshot of the most significant communications trends of the coming decade.
So, these are my five ‘future practice’ trends:
Here’s the deck.
I have huge respect for all those who contributed their thoughts here, so consequently it’s very interesting to see where there is common ground – especially in the areas of integrated communications, personalisation, storytelling for impact, greater openness and transparency, and a ‘back-to-basics’ approach to forging real connections and relationships.
Kudos to Ben and CharityComms.
This was the title of a talk I gave at the end of February and I think it is important, and frankly, worth repeating over and over.
It needs to be said that ‘digital’, and all the new stuff that we call ‘social media’, isn’t really the point; relationships are the point. Same as it ever was.
And yet so much has changed. Charities now need to reach out to people in a way that isn’t just ‘marketing’ and catch people ‘in motion’ – when they are ‘goal-orientated’; meeting people where they are, in real-time (or near real-time), around what is interesting to them. It is no longer a question of simply delivering content to people; it’s about your convening power to help people discover each other to help make the change you both want.
The trouble is, by treating social media as just another ‘channel’, in-house departments are often completely unprepared when people ‘answer back’, and struggle to make the required change in tone and posture. With a few exceptions, our sector does not have a great track record when it comes to distributing trust to staff and many organisations have created a bottleneck as communication is funnelled via a handful of staff. Social media has become just another silo.
We really need a much broader (and deeper) organisational alignment around supporters. I want everyone who works for a charity to be seen more as assets and advocates than as cost streams to be subsidised. This seems to me to be even more sensible as we are challenged to do more with less; charity leaders have a passionate community right under their noses: their own staff.
I agree with Will McInnes who is convinced that eventually…
every member of staff [will] need to have some level of responding power and be empowered to use social media to communicate and build relationships with the people around them.
I think that this is inevitable and irresistible, but is your charity ready to create new roles, re-train, and reallocate resources and budgets?
This post was originally published on the Because it’s Good website on 4 March 2010.
Today is her Beth Kanter’s 53rd birthday and she is asking her trusted network to join her to raise funds for the Sharing Foundation, and help send some young people to school, where they belong. In Beth’s words…
Many children in Cambodia do not go to school because their families lack the $10 for a uniform, required for school attendance. And even though $10 may seem like nothing to us, it can make a world of difference for a Cambodian child. We have hundreds of kids who need uniforms – so let’s help as many as we can.
I’ve met Beth in person only once – in February 2007 – but we have collaborated a number of times. I’m just one of a whole bunch of bloggers writing posts today about Beth, her cause, and her influence. (Amy, Stacey… great idea).
I’ve donated. Not just because of Beth (and her family), but because Cambodia holds a special place in my heart, too. Twenty-one years ago I managed a small team at Oxfam UK which coordinated (with the BBC) The Great Blue Peter Bring and Buy Sale for Kampuchea (as it then was), which raised in excess of GBP 1 million.
If you can, please donate to Beth’s cause on Facebook.
And Beth… thank you for leading by example.
Photo of a school in Siem Reap, Cambodia licenced under Creative Commons by Charles ChanThis is a story of a blog. It’s a story I really ought to have shared long before now, and I am truly thankful to my good friend Ron Mader for (politely) badgering me to tell it.
A long, long time ago (in internet time)… in fact, exactly six months to the day before the first ‘tweet’, a Category Four hurricane they inappropriately named Wilma slammed into the Caribbean coast of Mexico. In a matter of a few hours, most of Cancún’s resort beach had been sucked away and dumped on the sea bed. Serious stuff.
It was around midnight on Friday 21 October 2005.
Three weeks later, on 14 November in London, I spoke with Gabriela Rodríguez Gálvez, Tourism Minister for Quintana Roo, the state that is home to Cancún, Cozumel, and the Riviera Maya. As I wrote later…
We discussed the challenges ahead. I expressed my belief that traditional PR and marketing methods are losing their grip on customers as we take recommendations from each other.
Secretary Rodríguez seemed to agree, and she stated:
You cannot predict the future but you can be prepared.
“Definitely,” I nodded. So I encouraged them to start a blog. Tell people what’s happening, I said.
I wasn’t hopeful. I decided there and then to have a go myself (what was I thinking? I lived 5,000 miles away in the SW of England… or “Little Mexico”, as we like to call it). I even ‘mapped’ out some basic ideas on the train home after speaking with the Minister. I wrote down what the purpose of the blog would be, which would later become the about page when we went ‘live’ on 12 December 2005.
Four days later, Secretary Rodríguez was quoted in a CNN.com article as saying:
…it’s very important that the tourists know exactly the status of Cancún, because we don’t want them to expect something else and then have frustrated tourists.
No blog was forthcoming; just a megaphone. Wait for it: The Mexico Tourism Board pumped US$5m into a gimmicky glass-sided “Promobus” filled with sand, palm trees and bikini-clad beachgoers which roamed the wintry streets of 21 US cities, interrupting Christmas shoppers with the message “Cancún is open for business”.
Well, it was a plan. After all, they had always done it that way.
I got to work. I viewed every photo uploaded to Flickr tagged “cancun”, “playa del carmen”, etc., and invited people to add images to a Flickr group. I cross-checked the documentary evidence with the news I gleaned from hotel concierges or plucked from the wires. And yes, it became an obsession. Over the next five months, I estimate I dedicated over 500 hours to updating the blog.
And I guess that’s the first lesson: never ever underestimate the lengths that some people will go to collaborate with strangers to uncover the real story!
The blog became the only source of information on the beach reclamation project and you need only scan a few of these comments to see how keen people were for the clarity they were not getting from their hotel or tour operators!
So what else did we learn?
A big part of being prepared for future storms (or for that matter, any ‘crisis’ event) is to establish – in advance – the best way to inform people what is happening. This way, search engines will already have picked up the blog before any crisis kicks off. Speed is critical. Blogging in this context is a continuous record of facts and corrections of errors in near real time. Questions need answering quickly and accurately (truthfully) to slow speculation and knock down rumours convincingly. You can always add detail as it is verified. The State Tourism office went into damage limitation mode and instead relied on the webmaster to upload woefully inadequate information onto a web page.
The ‘audience’ (I’m reaching for a better description) is integral to the story. How about inviting half a dozen smart people (who can write a bit) to blog through the hurricane season. Digital cameras were commonplace four years ago, but cheap point-and-shoot video cameras were certainly not. They are now increasingly ubiquitous. I can only imagine how this would have been amplified many times over had Twitter existed in October 2005,
I would have liked those working directly in the travel industry (hotels, tour operators, etc.) to have taken advantage of the blog – connected with it, and participated in the conversation. I was pretty well known to the Mexican tourism authorities, having been presented with a writing award by the Tourism Secretary in 2003. I contacted over twenty representatives in London and in Mexico. I met with a wall of silence. Not one reply. Not a single acknowledgement of what we were doing. Whatever you do, reach out to those who seek to be your advocates.
The job of PR was changing fast even back then. They can have a conversation with their customers – and potential customers – via comments and posts to bulletin boards. They can enjoy the value that comes from listening to what people have to say. Marketers need to understand that their job is more than simply ‘bums on seats’ and selling ‘product’. They are now marketing ‘conversations’, and they need to join in themselves. Participation is marketing.
Indulge me for a moment and allow me to use a travel metaphor: To fully understand the value and culture of social media, it is best to participate as a ‘traveller’, and not as an occasional tourist. It can be uncomfortable at times, but less so if you are well-prepared. Know before you go, and if the expertise does not exist in house, ask for help.
Not necessarily. I recall one hotel which sent me a photo of some of its staff with their backs to the Caribbean Sea. I was able to locate a photo taken from almost exactly the same spot (on Flickr), but pointing in the direction of the hotel, which was badly damaged. Even those hotels which escaped with only minor damage, or none at all, should have said as much on their websites. Otherwise, we’ll just assume the worst.
In the words of Dan Gilmour:
Tell the truth. Tell it quickly. Tell as much as you can. People crave a genuine, human voice in times of crisis.
Thousands of people visited the blog. Very quickly it became clear that many were not going to be put off from travelling to Cancún for a holiday. I believe that this was the greatest failure of the travel PR people. They failed to grasp that by encouraging conversations about on-going developments (which was in fact largely a positive story following the disaster of Katrina), the blog meant that people travelled better informed and with sensible expectations. By their absence, the tourism authorities in this particular story turned a drama into a crisis.
So that’s the story. Nearly four years on, I remain enormously proud of what we achieved together. To be totally frank, looking back over the comments left on the blog brings a lump to my throat.
The web truly became social for me over those few months.
My only regret is that although I still visit Mexico (with family and my camera) every 18 months or so, I’ve not written a single article about Mexico since mothballing After Wilma. I’ve moved on, I guess.
Cue sunset.
Do you work for a charity? Do you use Twitter?
I’ll put the question I posed in the title another way:
Do you ‘tweet’ ‘under the radar’… or seek management buy-in before you start?
This is one of the questions we’ll be asking on Thursday (the 24th), when it will be the turn of my friends at Breast Cancer Care to host the fourth NFPtweetup.
When the very first nfptweetup was held in November 2008, you could pretty much squeeze everyone who ticked both the ‘charity’, and ‘Twitter’ boxes into the cosy upstairs room in the Coach and Horses in London’s Soho.
Less than one year later, and you are too many to mention. Many UK charities (or at least many individuals within charities) have adopted Twitter and like me have no doubt been surprised, confounded, and delighted in equal measure.
There are many great examples of Twitter success; I signposted a few good examples in a short and sweet piece I wrote for London Twestival earlier this month. Beth has done better elsewhere.
On Thursday I’ve agreed to facilitate a group break-out session around convincing colleagues of Twitter’s value?
Tweeting charity CEO, Gary Williams of Sound Seekers is in no doubt. He told me (in less than 140 characters)…
[It] has to be about organisational goals. Specifically, it has to be about building a richer conversation with stakeholders, potential supporters.
So, there you have it.
But what if you’re not lucky enough to have someone like Gary as your CEO and want to get internal buy-in? Should you go under the radar of management in order to first build a compelling and coherent business case (rather than a vaguely-defined idea) and make your ‘apology’ afterwards? Or do you prepare a 20-page strategy document – as Neil Williams did to convince civil service colleagues of the value of embracing Twitter. (Neil’s PDF template is well worth downloading by the way).
Now for me personally Twitter is the best thing since sliced bread (with the possible exception of Flickr and meeting my wife). It’s of enormous value to me. I’m with Danah, who I think described Twitter as “a social filter, flushing good stuff to me.” That’s it right there.
But what problem does Twitter solve if you are a charity? And how do you capture the value from the relentless flow from people who would like to connect with you. It’s certainly more than a numbers game. As Joanne Jacobs points out:
Social media influence is best measured by network effects analysis, not popularity.
Takes a bit of time and effort then.
So do you plan or improvise? Can you plan *too much*? Arguably, you cannot nail down a strategy in an environment of such accelerating turbulence. You have to be ready to jump on opportunities (if you’ve left some slack in your budget). Maybe just trust your instinct and use some basic principles as a guide instead.
If you do run up against the buffers trying to convince ‘non-believers’ in your organisation to experiment with Twitter, we can all learn from Katya Andresen’s wise list of tactics to employ (written with social media in mind, not just Twitter)…
A pretty good list – even if I do balk a little at kowtowing to “your boss” quite so much! I’m hoping we can come up with our own list on Thursday.
I’ll give Neil Williams almost the last word on this. Neil says one of the benefits of having the [20-page] document in his armoury is
To get buy-in, explain Twitter’s importance to non-believers and the uninitiated, and face down accusations of bandwagon-jumping.
After all, microblogging is a low-barrier to entry, low-risk and low-resource channel relative to other corporate communications overheads like a blog or printed newsletter. And the pioneers in corporate use of Twitter by central government… all started as low-profile experiments and grew organically into what they are today.
Anyway, if you’ve registered for Thursday’s event – I’ll see you there. If you haven’t (and it’s already fully booked), you can follow the proceedings online.
Once again, the event is being sponsored by JustGiving (see Jonathan Waddingham’s summary of the nfptweetup story to date) and Beautiful World (who’s co-founder, Rachel Beer came up with the whole idea in the first place).
You had better believe it when I say of all the events I attend regularly… this is my favourite. I get a chance to spend some face-to-face time with some very good ‘online’ friends.
Thanks to Brian Kopp for the photo (licensed under Creative Commons) and to Tony Hsieh for the insight.
I captured this awesome cloud during a short family holiday in Northumberland last week. I like it a lot.
I guessed it was cumulus congestus but checked with Gavin Pretor-Pinney of The Cloud Appreciation Society:
“Yes, indeed. With a crisp summit like that, it had yet to mature into a Cumulonimbus, at which point the top freezes and looks more blurry. It’s a beauty.”
Feel free to use the larger version for presentations (or whatever).
