Your starter for ten

For all the lofty strategic stuff I really ought to be doing, I do enjoy a bit of tactical, opportunistic digital engagement.

Right now, we’re chewing over the problem of what to do with big policy documents. You can make documents commentable, but that kind of feedback isn’t  useful at every point in the policy cycle. You can shoot case study videos but the plays are often low and the costs quite high. You can (if you’re brave) get the policy team blogging, which might have the greatest impact long-term but is not a task for the faint-hearted or people in a hurry. So for fun, we’ve tried something else.

Last week, my new partner in crime flagged that a white paper on consumer rights was being published on Thursday. On Monday, we met with the team and brainstormed a range of ideas to promote the launch online in a way that engaged people with the policy. On Tuesday, one of them sent through a list of ‘killer facts’ - interesting stats about consumer rights and credit. From that, we thought a little quiz might be fun - showcasing under each of the killer facts what the white paper is committing to doing about the issue. Objective: to get people who would never normally tackle a 100 page PDF to understand a bit more about the detail of what is being presented, and what it means for them, in concrete terms, with minimal ’spin’ either from Government or the media. And from my new boss, a steer to ‘use more pink’.

By Tuesday evening, my colleague Rhys had mined the draft white paper for nuggets which we could use for our our questions. By Wednesday lunchtime, we had some working code (free to adapt/reuse) to display the questions and keep score, and by end of the day we had signoff from the policy team. The tool went live at 10am this morning, seeded via Twitter and embedded on the corporate site and social media news release. External cost: nil; staff time: approximately 8 hours in total.

We’ve been tracking the stats in Google Analytics and bit.ly, and the initial figures look respectable - 300 bit.ly clicks or so in the first hour, 500+ unique visitors most of whom seem to have gone through most of the quiz. Plenty of RTs (thanks @downingstreet and @tom_watson!) too. Big thanks to the agile BIS team who made it happen, particularly Neil, Kevin, John and Rhys.

It’s not the answer to deliberating policy online, of course, but it’s another tool in the toolkit, right?

The Egg and Spoon Race

Photo credit: Higgott

Not for the first time, I find myself working on a project which feels like it could be ended at any moment if one of the various people involved were to get nervous and pull the plug. It’s given rise to what my colleague described today as my ‘egg-and-spoon race theory’ of digital engagement:

Creative use of digital is a fragile thing: untried technical innovations are easily broken, often cobbled together, and at constant risk of being crushed when put under pressure (like Twitter c.2008; doesn’t mean it can’t be sorted out in time if it proves to be worthwhile).

Quite a few of us in the race are ‘amateurs’ (though we’re practising secretly): the nice thing about amateurs is they are generally good-humoured, supportive, open and willing to learn. But it means that we often simply don’t know if idea X or Y is going to work. Time will tell.

You have to watch the egg AND the finish line: another colleague of mine challenges me to decide whether I’m a strategist or a delivery person. The fact is, I still think you need to be a bit of both, able to watch the egg like a hawk and keep it stuck on the spoon, and make sure you’re aiming in the right direction.

Getting there takes space, steadiness … and a fair bit of speed: it’s important to have a bit of elbow-room to experiment and freedom to find out how others are doing it; it’s vital to keep on trying and give pilots and experiments a chance; and being able to respond rapidly to opportunities and requests makes a big difference.

Get it wrong, and you’ll end up in the sack race. Only kidding.

Building Britain’s Future: the next step to better policy discussion online

Today saw the publication of ‘Building Britain’s Future‘, a wide-ranging document covering the Government’s approach to economic recovery and much else besides.

Rather lower profile was the supporting website, which is a fair crack at how we might present big policy documents online. To me, this is one of the big challenges in digital engagement right now: we have a fair number of tool options for consultations, and are getting better at applying the ‘classic’ social media tools of Twitter, YouTube and Flickr - but the practicalities and small-p politics of presenting large documents in anything more than a downloadable PDF are still daunting. Like Digital Britain or New Opportunities, BBF is not (primarily) a consultation, so has to struggle with the thorny question of what to do with feedback and whether to solicit it at all.

There’s lots to like about the BBF site, ably put together - I believe - by the Cabinet Office web team. The design is clean and fresh, it breaks the introductory text down into bite-size chunks and illustrates the content with a lot of fresh video content and case studies with comments enabled. There’s a Twitter account, a live stream of the PM’s launch speech, a blog and a Google-maps powered overview of the follow-up ministerial roadshows. It looks like it’s hosted on the Cabinet Office Umbraco CMS installation and the blogs use the BlogEngine.NET platform used by DirDigEng - both open source tools which show .NET can be low-cost and agile too. Interestingly, the team didn’t try and publish the whole document in HTML, which I think was a good call. If you want the delivery roadmap, you’ll download the PDF.

There are a few quibbles too, naturally - it’s not clear what the map is for since there’s no obvious way of answering the questions posed; there’s no RSS feed for news; and there’s no obvious link to the  press notice or anything for bloggers/online media. A deeper criticism might be that the digital engagement exists in a slightly isolated way, with few Twitter followers and a blog which doesn’t quite feel like a discursive space yet. It’s a new microsite trying to build an audience from scratch, which is ambitious, yet it has relatively few links back and forth from related initiatives (certainly, the launch caught me a bit on the hop), and not very much pick up yet online in the blogs, tweeters and forums which might have something to say about housing, democratic renewal, low carbon and so on. But to be fair, it was only announced at 3.30pm

We’re all learning in this space, so I’d commend the team behind the site for an impressive piece of work, turned round I suspect in a very short space of time on a virtually zero budget. Nice work, guys.

Hold the front page

Imagine - hypothetically - you go to work on a Friday morning, and by 5pm (after a busy day of coffee and muffins), your organisation technically doesn’t exist any more.

After the initial flurry of rebranding, you decide you need a holding website of some sort, to tell people about the newly-branded organisation while you sort out the heavy wiring.

Puffbox’s work for the Wales Office showed that Wordpress can handle simple corporate government sites. My own experience with it on our Science and Society consultation convinced me it worked well as a mini-CMS as well as a blog, and that it’s flexible enough to re-engineer into something quite different as and when you need it.

So the new digital management at BIS are predictably rather keen on Wordpress, both from the former BERR and DIUS sides. When we decided as a group on Monday lunchtime that a holding site was the way forward, we had a rough wireframe together within the hour, a fairly robust approach to hosting in train that afternoon, and a working prototype site in Wordpress within about 12 hours. From idea to live site took less than 72 hours, including signoffs - a thoroughly enjoyable collaboration between former DIUS and BERR people, led by Neil.

bis.gov.uk is explicitly a holding site while we sort out the back end infrastructure. It’s got branding, press releases and an about page, but a few nice extras too:

Starting with Wordpress accelerates the development process massively. Find a theme close enough to the wireframe (in our case, Straightforward), and then just tweak styles and templates. Because it’s Wordpress, you have built-in RSS for everything (e.g. our announcements), full site search, helpful categorisation and tagging, and widgets to make your sidebars easy to populate with HTML and incoming RSS feeds.

Dapper + Pipes: I wanted to get two sets of speeches into a single RSS feed. Snag: one of the sites doesn’t have a speeches RSS feed (and neither - outrageously - does our new NDS press releases page). Dapper to the rescue: create a new Dapp, point it at the speeches listing page, click on the parts of the page which compose the RSS feed fields, and Dapper generates the RSS feed for you. With Pipes, you can merge two feeds into one, and sort them by date. A Wordpress widget then displays the latest items from the combined feed in your sidebar. It’s the beauty of that Heath-Robinson combination of disruptive tools that I find so exciting; a seemingly impossible task takes about 15 minutes.

Civil Service Jobs Online: the cross-government recruitment site was quick to rebrand BIS jobs, and their API lets you get structured XML from their database. So with less than a hundred lines of PHP (<- feel free to use and adapt however you wish), we can get all the BIS jobs they list, generate an RSS feed or simple web page list, and put it into a Wordpress sidebar widget. Lovely.

Google Custom Search Engine: two legacy websites mean two separate sets of searches, right? Not with a Google Custom Search Engine. Like Dave Briggs’ LGSearch which searches local authority sites, in about 5 minutes you can set up a bespoke version of Google which returns results from just the sites you want - in this case DIUS and BERR. Their new AJAX widget displays them on-site in a rather neat way.

FriendFeed: Though rebranding Twitter accounts was thankfully fairly quick, it’ll take us a little while to get round to fully merging two sets of social media channels. For now, Friendfeed lets us set up a simple way of aggregating all the BERR, DIUS and now BIS channel content in a simple way with aggregated RSS feeds.

It won’t win any design awards, and the downside to Heath Robinson web development will no doubt be some quirks in reliability. But happily, we can say we haven’t spent a penny on external web development or licencing costs, and we got something up within 3 days. Compared to the static, hand-coded site DIUS had for the first 18 months of its life, it’s a start, and a little bit innovative too.

So what do *you* do?

At some point, there always comes a new Big Cheese. Could be a new senior manager, a potential client… or even a new set of ministers. If you’re in the lucky position of having a slot in their diary to win them over to the joys of government 2.0, you want to make the most of the opportunity.

I’ve frequently failed to do this successfully, so, in the spirit of sharing - and quite possibly, therapy - I thought I’d share some of my many failures with you here. This is a guide not so much to the content of what might say, but some tips on getting the most from the format in which you could say it:

1. Don’t count on your slot: expect to get squeezed to half the allotted time, or bumped altogether. You might even get more time if they’re interested or the next meeting is canceled. On one occasion, I remember waiting for a minister to arrive, late, and hiding one slide for every minute he was delayed - I think half the presentation disappeared. Make sure you have a bunch of material from which you can tell stories selectively, rather than needing to build a grand argument slide by slide. In Powerpoint, you could have a structure which lets you jump to slides from a master page using hyperlinks. But a tool like Prezi might work better, letting you lay out your evidence and examples on a big canvas, and zoom around between them as the time allows, as Con Morris’ lovely example demonstrates.
2. Plan the space. Recce the room if you can; get there a bit early if you can’t. Think about seating positions and views, and what the dynamics of the conversation will be. Will you be dangling at the other end of a long table with people in between, or sitting sideways-on next to the Big Cheese? (better, IMHO)
3. Check where they’re at. Two minutes in, I’m making the case for social media and how the world is changing. The minister looks coldly at me and goes: “Do I look like the kind of person who need to be convinced about this stuff?”. I gulp. He’d set up Google Alerts the moment he started the job, had more than one personal website, and was a devotee of his iPhone. Somehow, I’d missed these points by failing to ask, up front, (or better still, of his office beforehand or from a bit of prior Googling) what he already knew about these issues. It’s easier to talk than ask, but the best presentations are always conversations.
4. Quick quick, slow slow: don’t force the pace. Presenting to an audience of one is a tough job: rush through and you’ll lose them; spend too long on the build up and they’ll get fidgety. Fidgety is Bad. Though opinions differ, it’s an argument for handing out paper copies at the start - they know how much there is to come, they can flick through quickly to get an overview of what you’ll show them, and by turning a page they can give you a gentle nudge to move on. But be prepared to bin your material and just have a chat if that’s what they want to do. You can always come back to a particular slide if you need to illustrate an example, but the bottom line is that this is a meeting, not a technology demo, so above all be passionate, interesting and human.
5. Stories, Strategies, Screenshots. People take in information in different ways and it’s unlikely you’ll know which best fits your Big Cheese before you sit down with them. So mix up your materials a bit to punctuate strategies with stories, bullet points with screenshots. See which ones seem to seize the attention, and emphasise those.
6. They’re human (honestly). Big Cheeses have nasty diaries out of their control, often work through lunch and have to sit through an awful lot of bad Powerpoint, day after day. They get hungry, tired, bored and, even, titilated on occasion, as do we all. Within the constraints of the room you’re in and the slot you have (and good professional manners, of course), try and empathise.
7. Watch the eyes and fingers. In the same way that it’s hard to ask questions when you’re in talking mode, it’s hard to observe when you’re in presenting mode. But if you take the time to watch your Big Cheese’s reactions and follow their attention, you’ll stand a better chance of spotting what’s interesting or bothering them, knowing when to move on when they’re bored.
8. Never trust technology. If you work with com-poo-ters you’ll know never to trust one, especially for a big presentation. Have your presentation in three places at least (on the laptop, on email/web, on a memory stick). Check out the room for wifi/sockets, and take an extension if you need it. Make sure you’ve got screenshot backups if you’re planning to demo a live internet tool. Plug the projector in and make sure it works before you need it. And for the love of God, take enough usable paper copies with you.
9. Take something for the homeboys. Big Cheeses don’t travel alone; there’s usually a note-taking, clock-watching PA, Private Secretary or three with them, and they’ll be useful to you in the future. Take some spare colour copies of the presentation to give them a break from scribbling notes, and to help them quote you accurately in the write up.
10. Tell them how they can help. An easy one to miss while you’re telling your stories and setting out your strategy - ultimately, you’re not there for a pat on the head. Near the end of the discussion, make it blindingly obvious what seemingly trivial actions your Big Cheese can take to help you turn the glorious vision you have set out into a reality.

Good luck.

Photo credit: Juliebee