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.

0 Producing a Screencast Video

I shared my first screencast video last Friday and today I shall write about the technical side of video production.

Video is a lot easier to produce than it used to be and if you plan to offer quality information on your website, it is worth considering using it.  The people who use it say that the best way to improve the quality of videos is to produce them.  So, my advice is strive for a good video but don’t worry if your first efforts fall short.  You will improve.

I’ve just started and today I’ll write about my experience and encourage you to experiment.

There are two main types of video, screencast and live action.  The latter is where you have a camera and film somebody or something.  This is more complex than screencast because you have to think about technical issues such as lighting .  I shall write more about it when I try it.  Screencast is the type I used.  This is where you record what is happening on your computer screen with a voice-over.

If you have a modern lap top or tablet you have almost everything you need.  The only extra bits of equipment I used were:

I knew what I wanted to say, rehearsed a couple of times and then got going.  Camtasia interfaces with PowerPoint and so the first part of the video was straightforward.  Camtasia than offers the option to leave PowerPoint and continue the screencast.  I lined up the five websites on a browser and moved across.  I cut out the transition.

Once the video is complete it needs to be produced.  Camtasia takes care of production.  I’m still ironing out a few issues, particularly the interface with YouTube but overall it was not too difficult.  I can see video production will become easier now that I’ve made a start.  The main constraint is finding time!

I’m happy to answer questions and try new things, so do ask if you want to know anything about video production.

1 Set Up Your Email List

Last Thursday I introduced email list management.  To set up your email list, it’s to use an email list service because they:

They charge for their services but given your list is likely to be your most valuable asset, this is money well spent.

A Point about Terminology

If you are running a complex organisation, you will have more than one list. For example, you may have a prospects’ list that records people who sign up from your website. If one of them makes a purchase, you can programme your site to take them off the prospects’ list and add them to your buyers’ list. Also you may have members and various committees, all with their own lists. For simplicity, when I use the word ‘list’ I mean the total of all the lists you have with your email service within the one account. If I want to distinguish between lists within an account I shall refer to the list by name, eg prospects’ list.

Choosing a Provider

There are several email service providers. The two most common used MailChimp and Aweber. There are high-end providers, such as Infusionsoft that provide a complete business service. These are more expensive.

MailChimp is popular among small voluntary organisations because it provides a free service. Aweber does not provide a free service and may be slightly cheaper once MailChimp starts charging. Some people think they offer a better service. I don’t think there’s much in it.

MailChimp’s Free Service

If you opt for MailChimp’s free service remember it is, apparently, quite difficult to change provider. I know people who’ve done it, so it is not impossible. However, you may want to consider where your organisation is heading when you make this first decision.

The free offer is up to 2000 email addresses. So, if you have multiple lists and some addresses appear on more than one list, then they will count to the 2000 total more than once. You can send up to 12 000 emails a month. So, if you have 2000 on your list, you can send 6 emails per month.

If you exceed these targets, they start to bill you. So, if you’re happy to pay once you exceed the target, there’s nothing to worry about. Most small organisations find they can operate quite happily within these constraints and do so for years.

The big drawback is you can’t send email sequences. If you want to send sequences, then you pay for your membership whatever number of emails you have on your list. You can upgrade at any time, so if you don’t want to send sequences immediately, you can sign up for the free service and upgrade later. However, if you’re going to start with a paid service it may be worth comparing prices with other providers.

Using Your Email Service

Most email services offer the following services. You will need to check out which services you must pay for with any given provider.

If you’re undecided between two providers, try to find out more about the quality of their support services. If they run a good responsive support service the chances are they provide an all-round good service.

Do you have experience of using these services? What advantages have you found?

0 Taxonomy of Conversation: Reflection

Reflection is the third of four types of conversation. How do we experience each type online?

Here is what I wrote three Wednesdays ago:

Reflection is where we listen from inside and hear ourselves reflexively and others with empathy.  It invites the listener to try on the insights of the other person to see if they might work for them.  It invites a more subjective understanding of unfamiliar points of view.

Is this possible online?

Any learning experience that encourages participants to apply their learning must do this. Learning new skills and applying them always involves reflection.

Some online marketers claim marketing and learning are the same.  Their model is reflective conversation. They don’t always achieve it and their results vary because learners vary.

A simple example.  I find as a coach to people designing and writing content for their website, they need to put themselves into their readers’ shoes. When someone visits their site, how do they experience it?

Plenty of tools enable online conversation and a big advantage is conversations can take place across great distances at low-cost. Here are some examples:

Of course, all these tools and approaches depend crucially upon content.  A webinar for 1000 people will be less reflective but it still depends upon its content. It is not adequate to simply explain how to do something. It is important to be inspirational, in the sense of inspiring viewers to take action. This does mean you must encourage participants to try something new.  Learning from experience is central to reflective learning.

Participants can share results and the outcome can be shared discovery and not so much debate.

Can you share an example of reflective online learning or conversation?  Is online learning ever as effective as real life learning?  Can online and offline learning be combined to support reflective learning?

4 Your Avatar

Your avatar describes your potential customers.  When you design your site for customers or activists, for the people who are going to buy your products or services, or support your cause, it helps to have a specific image in mind.

How do you design a site, especially its content, to build relationships with potential customers or supporters?

Avatar is a technical name for what most people call an imaginary friend. This is someone whom you imagine; s/he is not a real person although you may base your avatar on one or more real people. The more you know about your avatar, the better. Work out what would motivate them to respond positively to your site and then write for them.

It is important to think of your avatar as a friend. If this person were your friend, how would you write to them? This is not a reason to be over-familiar but it is a reason to avoid jargon and corporate–speak.   If your copy reads like a letter or an email to a friend, the chances are it will appeal to your site visitors.

You can have more than one avatar. You may find you have a number of potential markets, eg if you want people to write to their MP, you may need an older and a younger avatar. Older people might be more likely to write, they may be prepared to send a letter by post and be better able to relate to their MP. Younger people may rather use email or social media, they may be more reluctant or sceptical about writing and more forthright in expressing their views.

You might offer different incentives and resources to these avatars. Of course, you’ll have to work out how to get the right visitors to the right place on your site. So, a landing page for people who access through social media might suit younger people whilst a page accessed via flyers handed out at meetings might be designed for older people. But note this is not an exact science.

You could of course ask whether your visitor would rather use email or send a letter. As always, the rule is make a start and then figure out how to improve what you’re doing.

Do you have an avatar? How did you design him/her? If you have more than one, how do you manage them on your site?