Monthly Archives: May 2014

1 Case Study 1: Hope for the Future

This is the first of a series of posts about my work for clients.  Several of my first projects are coming to an end and so I shall be posting about them and what I have achieved.

Assessment

This project was an assessment as promoted on my site.  Hope for the Future planned a campaign within the churches throughout the UK in the run up to the General Election in May 2015.  The plan is to persuade churches to write to the candidates in all the parliamentary constituencies about their climate change policies.  They want climate change to be a major issue during the General Election campaign.

I intend to follow their progress to see how they implement my strategy.  Circumstances will change as they respond to a developing campaign but hopefully it will be possible to see how the assessment has been helpful.

I am going to say very little at this stage about my recommendations.  The campaign has its plans and it is not for me to reveal them.  I shall say more as the campaign goes public and plan to develop further and publish some of the tools I’ve developed for their use.

This client was remarkable as I had almost nothing to do with their website.  I never had access to it.  I have made recommendations for changes to the site and at the time of writing these have not been implemented.

Resources

In common with many similar small groups and campaigns, Hope for the Future is very short of resources.  They number 4 or 5 volunteers working in two Anglican Dioceses.  They have 11 hours of paid administration and very little more.  One of the things the Internet can do is amplify the voices of a few people, so long as they use their resources effectively.  There are plenty of stories of one-person businesses that have accessed a massive market, for example.  Is it possible to launch a nationwide campaign from such a small base?  Yes, it is!  Will Hope for the Future do it?  We shall see!  If they are successful it will be through many hours of hard work carried out by a few dedicated people.

Today I shall outline the assessment’s content and in future posts, as the campaign develops, I shall explain some of the elements in the assessment in more detail.

Report

The assessment is a report with six appendices. The report suggested a new approach to their campaign.  One problem was getting feedback from my clients.  I started with a questionnaire and then drafted a few documents.  Getting feedback for these first drafts was difficult and this is something I need to think about in the future.  Towards the end I had a very productive one to one meeting, that actually transformed the assessment.  It was an example of a generative conversation.

Appendices

The six appendices were tools to enable Hope for the Future to carry out the report.  I drew not only on my understanding of online marketing but also my experience as a community development worker and working nationally with mainstream churches.  The appendices included:

1. A template for assessing potential partners.  A campaign like this, with very few active volunteers needs to build networks of partners.  So they needed a ready method to find and assess partners.  This template will help them select the most productive potential partnerships and name key contributions they might make to the campaign.
2. Guidelines for rolling out the campaign nationally.  Sheffield Anglican Diocese is the pilot for the campaign but it needs a strategy to cover four nations and all Christian traditions.
3. A review of the website and recommendations for changes.  This included some wireframes, new and rewritten copy and an outline script for a video.
4. Recommendations for the campaign in local churches.  The campaign was already accumulating experience in local churches and so there was not so much to do here.
5. A campaign schedule, particularly for the website.  It is crucial to be ready to add new material to the website as the campaign develops.  By planning ahead it is possible to ask partners to prepare website content as the campaign develops.  The schedule shows the campaign how to plan ahead; they will need to fill in the detail as the campaign develops.
6. A task list enables the planning team to identify the work that can be completed in-house and the tasks for partners.

The report showed how these various documents can be used together to support the campaign.

Testimonial

Finally, here is a testimonial from Revd Michael Bayley, who was my main contact with Hope for the Future:

Chris’ great gift in helping us work out how the website could work for our campaign most effectively was to ask the really searching questions about what we wanted to get out of it. He questioned us persistently and skilfully until we had really sorted out in our own minds what we wanted and was then able to suggest ways in which we might do this most effectively.

He used the technical questions of website design to make us think about the fundamental questions and he was also good at asking questions from “outside the box”. In one instance this led to a radical and extremely fruitful alteration to the way in which we organised the campaign.

We valued Chris’ careful and thoughtful approach; the way he listened carefully to what we wanted; the way in which he pressed us to make ourselves clear about what we wanted. We were grateful for his help which enabled us to develop the website much more quickly and effectively than would otherwise have been possible.

If you are running an online (or offline!) campaign, would this approach help you?  I’d like to hear from anyone who thinks I may be able to help.

0 Setting Up your Post-Sign-Up Email System

Last Thursday I described how to encourage site visitors to sign up to your email list. This week I shall describe, your post-sign-up email system, the things you need to prepare once they have signed up.

Confirmation Page

So, someone enters their email address into a form on your webpage. The confirmed opt-in email will appear in their inbox. This might take a few minutes. What should happen is when they press the button, they jump to a confirmation page. You give your email provider the address of the confirmation page. It should not appear in your site’s navigation.

What do you put on it?

Connect your blog to your email service

Your email service provider will provide instructions about how to do this. You can set it up to send an email every time you post or else you can send summaries once a week or at whatever frequency you like.

2 Conversations in the Marketplace

Conversations in the marketplace are likely to take place between people and about real things. This contrasts with transactions through images of the real online.

I don’t want to get too hung up over the question whether it is possible to encounter something new online. A better question is how we make best use of our machines. We need to understand them and learn how they help or hinder. The problem is we make assumptions and project them onto all our creations.

The interesting thing about idolatry in the Old Testament is that it applies equally to images of other gods and images of the God of Israel. They understood that any image is immensely seductive and will divert us from paying attention to what is actually there.

The Internet is all image and if we are not careful we converse with images, ie representations of the real but not reality itself.

Conversations Between People

Ultimately, the Internet is a means of communication, of conversations between people. Relationships build the foundations for communication.  As trust grows it is possible to communicate more. So, the role of the marketplace is primarily building trust.

So, the question is how to establish a presence in the marketplace to enable buying or selling. There are three types of things we can buy or sell, online or in real life: products, services and causes. In the next three posts, I shall look at these in turn.

The challenge is how to do this with integrity.  Do you have any ideas or experience?

4 Features and Benefits

So, you have designed your avatar! You sit down to write your first email to your new imaginary friend. You can use your avatar to distinguish features and benefits.

The point of the avatar is to humanise your writing. Have an image of a person in mind. Write to them as you might write to a real person. Your writing will come alive when people who share the characteristics of your avatar read it. So, if your avatar is a twenty year old woman, your writing might appeal to other twenty year old women. But hopefully, as your writing will be more human, ie free of jargon, it might appeal to sixty year old men as well!  So, if your avatar is not very clear, don’t worry too much, focus on writing to a human being and not a committee or a machine and your writing will be much improved!

Examples of Copy Using Features and Benefits

Here are two extracts from imaginary copy – the avatar is a twenty year old woman who likes frogs.

“Amphibiana Plus provides a system dedicated to the welfare of the garden frog. The pond meets the latest industry standards in spun polyester pond linings. It comes in several designs and provides security from predators …”

“You have been delighted at the recent plague of frogs and knowing how these beautiful creatures can control pests and enhance the interest of your garden, Amphibiana Plus has some exciting ideas. Just imagine sitting beside one of our beautiful ponds, with a unique design, watching the frogs swim around, knowing they are safe from cats and herons.”

Comparison of These Examples

Now, I’m not necessarily the world’s greatest copy writer so don’t be too critical! Do you see the difference between these examples?

1. I wrote the second with a twenty year old woman who likes frogs in mind. I’m not a twenty year old woman and so this may be a bit odd but hopefully you can see the difference it makes.
2. The first passage is about Amphibiana Plus and its product. It is copy based on features, what the product is like. There is a place for this, once the customer has decided whether they are interested.
3. The second is about benefits: frogs control pests, enhance your garden, the pond is something to sit by, frogs are entertaining and you have peace of mind that cats and herons aren’t going to get them.
4. Note the language of the first is objective, describing a product in the third person. The second is in the second person. This feels a bit strange at first but it seems this style does connect with most readers. If nothing else, using ‘you’ means you are addressing your avatar!

You need to be clear about the difference between features and benefits. People buy benefits, whether by paying money or supporting a campaign. They respond to the benefit. This may be a benefit for themselves or for some other group of people with whom they have sympathy.

People sometimes talk about WIIFM – “What’s in it for me?” This may seem crude but why should anyone be interested in Amphibiana Plus? I’ll buy a frog pond if I can see the benefit to me, not Amphibiana Plus!

How do you respond to copy online? What makes you buy?

2 Participatory Appraisal

Participatory appraisal is the first of the mutual methods I’m planning to explore in detail.

I’d be interested to hear from anyone who can recommend a course in participatory appraisal (PA) in the UK. Some years ago, a group called Hull DOC (Developing Our Communities) offered an excellent 5 day course. Hull DOC is still going strong but does not appear to offer the course today.

I’ve reviewed online resources and although a few places offer 1 or 2 day courses I have not so far been able to find anything comparable to the 5 day course. So, I’m not able to recommend any of the courses on offer.

Outline of a Course

The old Hull DOC course had three major elements and I strongly recommend you seek courses that offer all three.

1. Background theory (1 day). It is essential practitioners understand PA, so they can test each other’s performance. No-one is so brilliant at PA they cannot benefit from constructive criticism but to do this there needs to be a shared understanding of effective PA. It is a research method that handled properly can help engage with and develop community in a neighbourhood. The joint approach to objective research and building relationships is very demanding.
2. Everyone raves about PA tools (1 day) although in practice they are a small part of PA training. The tools are research methods used to engage with local residents. Most of them are visual, using pens and paper. So, someone may be asked to draw a map of their neighbourhood. Then record the following conversation about the map.
3. The best courses include practical application (3 days), using visitors to the course or ventures onto the street and into community centres, schools, etc. The tools can be practiced and the participants can test their own and each other’s performance.

This is the least I would expect if I was going to use this method in a neighbourhood. Yes, it is expensive both financially and in time taken. It is also difficult to hold together teams of local people for a five-day training session followed by perhaps a couple of months to do the research.  Difficult but not impossible.  Ten years ago this is what we did to develop the Maltby community plan.

The costs are a drawback but where you can get it to work, PA is well worth the effort.

Some Texts

There are very few texts that touch on this approach. The best I am aware of is “Training for Transformation”, edited by Anne Hope and Sally Timmel. This is in four volumes and the first three seem to be out of print although you may be able to pick up second-hand copies.

If you have experience of this method, how effective did you find it?

1 Feedback About My First Video

I’ve had a little feedback about my first video.

Amy

Amy responded with one word, “Ouch!” She went on to say she wouldn’t let me review her website. (I’m not convinced she has a website but that’s not terribly relevant.)

Ouch is actually a good point. Most of my reviews come across as negative. Whilst I’m sure there are some excellent sites around the problem is finding them! The voluntary sector often has poor sites because they can’t afford good advice. The designers who work in the sector tend to be amateurs and few people seem prepared to research the basics.

Last night I attended a talk about poetry.  The speaker talked about criticism and said he always started with positive comments because however poor a poem is, it has soul.  It means something to the person who wrote it.  I think the problem with many websites is they lack soul.  When I look at them my impression is their owners don’t care.

Maybe many owners are overawed by the technology.  Whilst it can be daunting, so much is a lot easier than it was a few years ago.  There’s no excuse any more for an unloved website.  In the end it is disrespectful to those who visit it.  Whether or not they are people with a long term interest in what a site offers, they deserve to at least have a clear explanation of what the site offers.

This is why spirituality is relevant.  The online world is not the preserve of geeks.  It is a marketplace where all sorts of people search for help and for relationships.  A careless website is worst than no website.  If you can’t be bothered to maintain it, then take it down.  But before you do that it is always worth considering whether you can find a way to look after it.  With the right technology it is easier than you think.

I’d like to be write or record reviews of a good third sector websites.  There are plenty of good commercial sites.  So far, I haven’t found anything suitable in the third sector.

So, my question for readers is, can you recommend a good third sector website for me to review. I promise I’ll try to be positive but I want to see improvement and so I do feel obliged to point out weaknesses!

Penuel

Penuel made the following comments:

Observation. You need to make a link for videos now that you have one. Probably would be good to have it linked up to the navigation bar. Also it cuts off you saying bye at the end. If you can extend the video by a second or so that would be good. Other than that it seems very informative and it is clear and gets your point across which is the main thing. But for your next video you might want to change the PowerPoint design. It feels a bit dated. The simpler the better. The colour fade really isn’t great.

I had some issues with YouTube to begin with and they are now resolved. If you go back to the original post, you’ll find it is now a YouTube video. I have a lot of work to do optimising my videos for search engines and it will take me a while to work through this. They will need more prominence on my site once I’ve worked out all the details.

I hadn’t noticed the problem at the end. I had a lot of empty space at the end because I couldn’t work out how to stop the recording! I removed a couple of minutes from the end and perhaps was a bit sharp with the scalpel. I’ll watch that in future.

The colour fade or gradient may be an issue. I’ve recorded the

Mark

Mark wrote:

I have watched and listened to your video – or at least some of it.

It is only some way into the video that it becomes clear that these ‘intermediate bodies’ you are talking about are church bodies – rather than other things that might be called intermediate bodies such as CVSs.

You claim that you prefer laughing to crying. Really?

Your phrases about learning from mistakes – a good and valid and perhaps important point, but I think Robert Chambers, in his work on participatory appraisal/participatory learning and action, puts it more pithily and memorably – it goes something like this – ‘we’ve made a mistake. Good. What can we learn from it?’

What fun

Mark’s comments are more concerned with the content. The term ‘intermediate bodies’ is a pain. It says nothing about what they are and very few church people have heard of them. If the CVSs want to lay claim to the term it is fine by me.

If you refer to the cartoon at the top of my website, you will see I prefer a quizzical look to either laughter or tears. My tears will flow in the next, 5 best websites, video. When you see how poor the best sites the intermediate bodies can produce are, most people would weep profusely.

I may use Robert Chambers’ quote in my next video.

That’s all the comments I’ve had so far. What do you think?

1 Setting Up your Pre-Sign-up Email System

Once you have signed up to an email service, they guide you through the steps you need to take. Rather than duplicating their guidelines, here are few things to consider for your pre-sign-up email system.

Confirmed opt-in

This practice is standard for most email services. Sometimes wrongly called “double opt-in”, confirmed opt-in is when someone enters their email address, they receive an email asking them to confirm their application to be on your list.

This has a several advantages.

• It is an anti-spam device. If someone adds your email address to a list, you receive an email with a link. Click the link to confirm you want to be on the list. To decline the request for any reason, ignore the confirmation email.
• If it is your list, the advantage is people will confirm if they are really interested, which means you have a list more likely to respond positively to your emails.
• Some people may want to download your offer but are not really interested and they have a special email address they use for these services. It goes to an inbox they rarely if ever check. Confirmed opt-in is likely to weed out addresses of this type.

Your sign-up form

Most email services offer a form design service. You design the form on their site and upload it to your website. Alternatively, design your own form and attach the email service to it. Both methods are straightforward.

The Main Things to Consider

• What information do you need when someone signs up? The best advice is keep it minimal. You can ask for more information if someone on your list becomes more active. Some people say they get the best results when they ask for email address only. It is worth considering whether you also ask for first name. You can add their first name to an email to make it more personal. I think anyone who isn’t prepared to offer a first name is probably not that interested in your offer and so I don’t think you miss much by asking for it. One word of warning though, if you ask for first names do not include them in the subject line of your emails. Two reasons: (1) it looks tacky, and (2) some people put coded names so that they can identify who has sent the email.
• The text on your form. You need to think about (1) a reminder about what you are offering in return for the email address, (2) reassurance that it will not be passed on to third parties, and (3) something on the button that says more than “Submit” (a really dreadful word that implies some sort of online wrestling match).
• Where you put the form. The two main options (and you can use both) are (1) in a sidebar or (2) on a landing page. For the latter remember you need a good title, minimal text and no videos. If a video is involved, you can use an image on the page and insist visitors sign up to see it. This type of landing page (sometimes called a squeeze page) must have no distractions, ie things like navigation. The visitor either signs up or goes away. Landing pages can be targeted from social media, so if you have a new video, send a link to the landing page from social media.

Follow-Up

Email services do vary in terms of the support they offer.  If you use WordPress you have a number of plug-ins to choose from that offer support in addition to your email service.  I can write about all this in more detail on request.

How do you link your site to email services?

3 Taxonomy of Conversation: Generative Dialogue

This is the final post about of the four types of conversation. I’m asking how we experience each type online. Here is what I wrote about generative dialogue, four Wednesdays ago:

Generative dialogue is where we hear not just ourselves and others but the whole system.  We see ourselves within the whole; the role we play for good or ill.  This can be highly motivating when people experience it together.  This type of conversation can generate something new, an insight that no one person brought with them to the conversation. Everyone leaves with insights that are completely new.

As I suggested earlier, science can be a conversation between the scientist and whatever they study. Scientists make breakthroughs by paying attention to what is there. It is not about number crunching but rather insight through careful observation. Statistical analysis brings new information to light; it does not on its own explain its significance.

What is ‘the whole system’? Breakthroughs happen where scientists include something not previously relevant in their thinking. This is where any model can be weak. Have we included every relevant thing? The danger of a completely online world is that we assume the online world is all there is.

Is generative conversation impossible online?

We need to be cautious. Is it possible to discover something new through conversation online? Generative conversation is seeing something not from someone else’s perspective so much as an entirely new perspective. As such it is a subjective experience. It is not persuasion by a superior argument because no-one is aware of the argument before the discovery.

The danger of working online is we forget the world we operate in is artificial. Ultimately, our life online is not real. It is an aid to living a full life in the world; it is not in itself real. One thing our machines cannot do for us is to experience the world on our behalf.

We can choose to become more machine-like and refuse to allow the world to be seen in a different way. Our machines cannot choose to discover something new. New ideas can be communicated and debated online but they cannot be experienced.

The most significant contribution our technology makes is the opportunities for conversations between people all over the world.  Maybe we can experience new discoveries together.  I would be interested to hear any stories where this might have happened. Over to you!

1 How to Design Your Avatar

I find avatar design really difficult. Indeed, as I contemplate this post, I wonder what I can possibly say that would help the reader, other than “Go and read something by someone who does know how to do it.”  However, before you do wonder off, perhaps there is something I can usefully say about how to design your avatar.

If you are serious about working online you have to make a start and keep going. This applies to just about everything. I’ve been struggling with my avatar(s) for several months now. I know how difficult it is.

One reason it is difficult is if you do find an avatar it needs to be tested. You need to work out how to use it. If you don’t know how to use it, how can you tell whether your latest avatar is an improvement on the last?

So, designing your avatar is part of a marketing campaign that goes something like this:

You may find you need more than one avatar to cover your market and more possibilities may come to light as you market to an earlier avatar.

There are three characteristics you need to think about when designing your avatars.

1. Their primary need or pain, that is the reason they are going to respond to your website. Let’s say your site encourages visitors to write to their MPs about a particular issue. Why might someone do that? Are they concerned about the issue? Or are they motivated by politics, for or against their MP’s political party? You may prefer the former to the latter (or vice versa!).
2. Their secondary perspective. They may share a concern about the issue and support your letter writing concern. But what will really motivate them to sit down and write the letter? Concern about the issue may not be enough. Some people might use an outline letter, so they have less work to do. Others might make a social occasion and write with a group of friends. Some may have a distinctive view, that builds on (or undermines) yours. Clearly, you want someone who agrees with the issue but once you look at what will get them to write a letter, you may find you have a number of distinct groups of people.  They share the primary need but will respond to different approaches to getting them to write a letter.
3. The third characteristic is: what makes your avatar a distinct human being? This covers things like age, sex, nationality, religion, sexuality, health, family … These help in two ways. First, they humanise the avatar. You will in time name them and have an image of them in your mind as you write for them. So, even a fairly arbitrary characteristic might help the avatar become real for you, so that your writing has more life in it. Also some of these characteristics have consequences. So, a younger person might write via social media and be less willing to write a letter on paper, find a stamp, etc. A few young people might enjoy an afternoon with a group of older people, writing letters and eating cake! Your question is whether such a person is typical. Such younger people do exist, but do enough of them exist to make a dedicated avatar worthwhile?

My first avatar is in the pipeline, not quite ready to go public yet but I will keep you informed. In the meantime, do you have one or more avatars? How did you build up a picture of them? How do you use them?

4 Mutual Methods

This Mutual Methods category describes participative approaches with the values of self-interest, mutuality or co-operation. The sequence describes several approaches in the context of community development, exploring resources for learning more about them. I shall return to this category as I find new methods using a mutual or co-operative approach.

These methods are best learned by doing. Consequently, there are limits to what you can learn from books, videos or websites. However it is equally important to understand these methods. It is too easy to drift away from a mutual approach.

Perhaps learning resources are most helpful for those who are already practitioners to help them reflect on their experiences. I’ve found Praxis to be a useful concept. Briefly, Praxis is “action-reflection”. I act, reflect on my action, adjust what I’m doing and then act again. This is a cycle or circulation. It avoids the twin errors of activism (action without reflection) and intellectualisation (reflection without action). There are any number of action-reflection models around.

Here are the first six approaches I shall describe in the coming weeks.

Participative Methods

There are other approaches and I welcome suggestions for future topics. If you have used a method and would like to write a guest post about it, let me know. Otherwise I’ll follow up your suggestions as best I can.