brainstorming
Is a 16% response rate good or bad?
Here’s the story. A colleague posted a note on Twitter about an organization that got a really low response rate when they sent out a subscribe request to people who had done a paper sign-up for their announcement email list. Their webhost requires that list recipients opt-in via email, and so the organization sent their subscribe request to 586 people and 94 chose to opt-in to the list for the second time. My colleague was disheartened for obvious reasons – a 16% (did I do my math right?) response rate, while not bad, isn’t really something to shout from the rooftops either. I started to respond via twitter, but decided to move from the twitter-verse to the broader internets because I think there’s something here that’s worth unpacking.
First, some assumptions I make when it comes to communications – these are based my experiences working with community organizing groups, and while somewhat critical, are said with love:
- most people don’t read
- there is a strong tendency in community organizing groups toward verbosity
- additionally, groups tend to under-analyze their audience
- the clearest manifestation of this is evidenced by a difficulty in articulating the value of a particular communication to the recipient not the organization
Now, I’m not suggesting that the second and third assumptions are at work in this case. Still, in the case of this organization, they can view their responses as 492 people who don’t see any value in their communications and feel bad. Or they can see that they have 94 people (almost 100!) who do see value in receiving their updates and use that as their base to build on.
Fundamentally, it comes down to goals – at PTP, we call this the BIG WHY. Why does the organization want an email announcement list? What do those goals suggest about what they send via the list and who they target with it? Maybe a survey of the 94 is in order to see how those folks would like the organization to improve their communication so it better meets the needs of the people that want to hear from them. And for the 492 that don’t want email, what about blast faxing them with the urgent/one-page flyers as necessary? I suspect that a combination of approaches would accomplish the organization’s goals while at the same time making their different audiences much happier with the communication they are receiving.
Finally, I think is a great reminder that no matter what we’re doing and who we’re communicating with, it is really unlikely that a significant portion of any list is going to opt-in to receive more email. As email has become more and more spam filled and overused, many people just aren’t going to agree to yet one more message in their inbox. It demands that groups look to other mechanisms for contact including blogs, RSS feeds, and text messages while also reexamining older technologies like faxing, paper mail, and phone trees. It also demands that groups answer the BIG WHY and use that answer to target their efforts. In the end, while these approaches may take more work at the front end, if more people hear and act on your messages, it’s a clear win.
nice list of knowledge management "quick hits"
I think there's a lot of value in the knowledge management field that we can use when we think about how organizations can use technology more effectively. This is a nice summary of the low hanging fruit on the path to more deliberate engagement with how we know what we know and how we share it.
Knowledge Management: Finding Quick Wins and Long Term Value
knowing and sharing what we know
over the last few weeks, I've been circling back to a pretty simple question: how can PTP staff do a better job of tracking and sharing what we know about the groups that we work with? It seems pretty simple on the surface - we just use our database, or some sort of database at least.
you're probably not surprised to hear that the question is a fair bit more complicated than it might seem on the surface. We currently use our database to track most of this information, largely through entering notes of conversations we have with groups. This information is accessible when you're looking at an individual contact - you can pull up notes from prior conversations and get a feel for what's transpired between PTP and that individual. Similarly, when viewing an organization's record, we can see a list of recent contacts with all individuals at that organization.
this is all fine, and works well to give us information on the history of the facts of the relationship, but tells us very very little about the meaning of those facts and doesn't contribute to an overall picture of the current state of the organization, its relationship to PTP, or the technology developments coming out of the group and their implications for our program.
What I'd love is some way to look at the aggregate of what we know and use that to help take the pulse of technology use by community organizing groups. I don't even mind needing to do some reading or digging to get there. The problem is that the current system just doesn't seem to really lend itself to that application of what the database holds.
twitter: am I the only one who sees some real potential here?
Twitter's had quite a bit of buzz lately. If you haven't heard of it, maybe its because you've got better things to do with your time than subscribe to a service that enables you and other twitter users you know to update each other on the minutiae of your lives via the web, cell phone text message, or rss.
But wait, maybe, just maybe there's something else here. Stay with me for a moment here:
Take twitter, not as potentially annoying social phenomena likened to the latest form of cat blogging, but instead as a communications platform that does a few things really well and really easily:
- enables short text posting through a web form, from your cell phone, or through an instant messenger account
- publishes that short message on the web
- pushes that short message out to your network of subscribers via: web site, rss or cell phone text message
Do you see it yet? How about some scenarios:
- GOTV work? GOTV staff posts a "remember to vote" message on twitter 1 week, 3 days, 1 day, on the day, and then every hour for the last 5 hours of election day. Could this get annoying? Maybe, maybe not depending on constituency. Include a link or phone number to find out where to vote/get a ride/or for election protection info for extra points.
- do you do lobby days? spend a chunk of your state's legislative session at the capitol? Twitter just became your best bet for super fast updates to supporters and to your website.
Those are just two examples. There are many many more, and I hope that you're thinking about and planning to use some of them. Twitter's not perfect - far from it. Currently, the site can be painfully slow as the number of users outweighs the resources of the server twitter.com is sitting on, but I'd be surprised if that didn't change soon.
What is really cool about twitter is that it is totally permission based - you can't just collect someone's cell phone and and spam them with sms text messages - they have to register at twitter and ask to receive your updates. It may add a layer of complexity, but it means that folks that do subscribe to your updates probably really want to hear from you.
From an organizing perspective, it would be very cool if twitter supported groups, but given how many people are clamoring for this functionality, I hope to see it soon.
What are your thoughts about where and how twitter could be used in community organizing?
musings about blogs
well, not so much about blogs themselves, but more about how to talk to people about blogs.
Specifically, this musing is a request for your thoughts about how you'd go about designing a session for a training program for community organizers about the blogosphere, how it works, its potential value for community organizing groups, and how to engage bloggers around the issues community organizers are addressing.
I've been working on this idea for the past few weeks, and will start to get some ideas up here in the coming days, but I wanted to get this idea out in the world before the weekend in hopes that some of you are thinking about this very thing right now and want to share your thoughts.
Weekends tend to be good times for me to think about things like this, so if you're inclined, please share your thoughts and help start this conversation.
skype’s click-to-call Firefox extension and online databases
the latest version of Skype includes an option Firefox extension that automatically transforms phone numbers in webpage into buttons that you can click to initiate a Skype call.
Here's an example of what it looks like in action:
(Click for a larger image)
This example is taken from PTP's database - Salesforce - but would work the same with any other online database out there.
As you can see, the possibilities are pretty intriguing - imagine setting up a phone list with entry fields - a caller could sit at a computer, clicking and calling their way down the list, entering in response directly on the page and therefore directly into the database. This could be pretty darn cool.
COaTI recipe software riff #2
this will make sense after you read the first post about COaTI recipes.
It just occurred to me that it would be really cool if I could define "nutritional requirements" for a COaTI. Think the food pyramid, but more like this: 1 serving of data merge skills, 2 servings of peer to peer story sharing, 2 servings of hands-on practice with queries, etc. Then, I'd be able to indicate on each recipe what "nutritional requirements" it fulfils, and the menu function of the software would help manage and keep track of those requirements ensuring that each COaTI met its nutritional requirements.
This probably all sounds a bit crazy, but if you've ever managed a large curriculum with multiple goals, seriously give this idea some thought. I really don't think its that far off what I do when I design and manage the COaTI curriculum... at least not far off what I'd like to be able to do.
recipes for COaTI
this morning I was thinking about the upcoming COaTI and the work that I'm doing now to try to weave together the different curriculum strands into clearer themes running throughout the three sessions. All the elements are there, though as always some need more work to get them to a place where I'm happy.
I'm a very visual person, and I love notecards, so I was thinking about writing out a shot description of each session on a notecard and arranging them all on a big table so I could see the whole program and have the ability to move things around to see how the flow worked. As I was imagining this, my brain thought "hey, this is kind of like having a box of recipes on notecards." Followed shortly by "hey, I wonder if I could use recipe software to manage COaTI curriculum."
It would work something like this: basically, each session would be a recipe. Every recipe has a title (session title), description, ingredients (materials needed), and instructions for cooking (methodology). When its time to assemble the facilitation plan, I'd just select the recipes I wanted in the order I wanted them, and the software would produce:
- the "menu" - a list of the sessions and a description of each which would be agenda we send to participants.
- the shopping list - the materials we need to assemble for the COaTI.
- The list of recipes - in this case the facilitation plan for that COaTI.
I think it just might work. What do you think?
Is Drupal really the best tool for the job?
as part of PTP's Community Organizing and Technology Institute (COaTI) Program, we use a Drupal powered intranet website to help participants stay connected and share information and resources between sessions and after the program is over. And lately, I've been wondering if Drupal is actually the best tool for the job.
We went with Drupal because we didn't really know what was going to happen, and Drupal seemed to give us the most flexibility in terms of being able to do things that we hadn't anticipated.
Three COaTI programs in, I find myself thinking that maybe Drupal isn't the right choice as the program moves forward. Mostly, this is because the actual usage that has evolved is much simpler than what is possible with Drupal. I don't know this for sure, but I suspect that we could do what's needed with a simple online forum/bulletin board system.
So, what's needed? here's the list I'm working from - anyone who's participated in a COaTI, please jump in and suggest changes/disagree with me/etc.
- ability to post questions and get answers from other COaTI participants - past and current
- ability to attach documents to posts
- ability to upload and share images/graphics
- ability to see a list of members along with some information about those members
- connection to email - you can email in posts
- connection to email #2 - posts are also sent out via a listserve, from the listserve you can respond on list and the email is connected back to originating post.
That last requirement is actually the one that has been most important, and its the one that I think only Drupal does (still).
This is filed under the brainstorming category. Please share your thoughts.
