Why don’t we reward committed stakeholders?

I’ve been having a Facebook conversation with a colleague of mine, Erin Browning, regarding a recent post on this blog.

As our conversation has unfolded, it’s dawned on me that we seldom – if ever – directly reward stakeholders for being committed participants

Think about the typical public involvement for a typical infrastructure study, for example.

If you attend every public meeting, visit the project website regularly to stay updated, take all the surveys, go to outside information sources to learn more, what do you get?  Bupkis.

So now I’m wondering what would happen if we rewarded people for outstanding participation in a project or campaign?   Perhaps it could be something as simple – and powerful in terms of building an informed, engaged group of stakeholders – as detailing in advance a participation path along which you could promote yourself from the public to something more substantive like a topic advisory committee.

I realize I’m begging some really critical questions like how you’d measure the quantity and quality of involvement, but…..

Pew survey highlights/hides Twitter implications

There’s significant growth in the “use” of Twitter, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project and its release of a new report on Twitter and similar sites.

In fact, Twitter use has nearly doubled, particularly among younger and mobile Internet users, according to the report, which also provides updated demographic information about who is using Twitter and other social media.

But it pays to follow the links to the entire report to uncover some “buried” nuggets, like the Harvard Business School report that suggests that 90 percent of all Twitter traffic is actually generated by onlt 10 percent of its users.

Stakeholder engagement programs win KC PRISM awards

Last night’s PRISM Awards Gala was a great night for coalition builders.

My dear friend, Jackie Clark, was honored as the Roger Yarrington PR Pro of the Year at the annual event hosted by the Greater Kansas City chapter of the Public Relations Society of America. Jackie’s career has been spent building coalitions around effective resolutions to complex problems, and it was gratifying to see her recognized for all she has done.

Additionally, I was lucky enough to win three awards for internal, government relations and stakeholder engagement efforts:

• A silver award in Special Programs for “The HNTB Kansas City Office Strategic Plan Open House.” The internal communication event, developed in partnership with Jan Ruemker, engaged HNTB staff in developing our office strategic plan through information stations, surveys, quizzes and face-to-face brainstorming with office leadership.
• A PRISM award in Special Programs for “The HNTB Infrastructure Day.” This top award in the category was also won in conjunction with my friend and colleague, Jan Ruemker.  This day-long program of tours, presentations and face-to-face interaction helped brief key Congressional staffers on our region’s transportation challenges and opportunities. The goal of this government relations program was to help members of the area’s Congressional delegation become even stronger advocates for the interests of Greater Kansas City.
• A silver award for Internet Communications for development and implementation of the Johnson County Gateway Study website.  This group stakeholder engagement effort featured the hard work of many individuals, most notably Robyn Arthur, HNTB, and Kim Qualls, the Kansas Dept. of Transportation. The project and website are designed to engage thousands of local residents and “thru travelers” in developing a long-term solution to improving a large-scale, complex set of interchanges in Johnson County, Kansas.

Online meeting strategy for coalition building wins kudos from Missouri Governor

An online public meeting strategy developed in partnership between the Missouri Dept. of Transportation and HNTB’s public involvement group was honored by Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon on Oct. 15.

The Governor’s Award for Quality and Productivity recognizes State of Missouri teams that excel in the areas of excellence, efficiency, innovation, technology, process improvement, customer service and employee development.

MoDOT and its partner, HNTB Corp., an engineering firm, held Missouri’s first-ever electronic meeting to meaningfully and cost-effectively get input from the public on rebuilding Interstate 70 with lanes separating cars and trucks.  This innovative public involvement tool is believed to be only the second such online meeting in the country.  Due to this innovative approach, up to 10 times as many people attended the online public meeting than had attended previous face-to-face meetings.  MoDOT has since used virtual meetings for other projects as a way to broaden the agency’s outreach efforts and get more people involved in its decision-making process.

Representing HNTB at the award ceremony were Betty Burry and Michael DeMent, APR.

The online public meeting was honored earlier in the week as 2009’s best public involvement approach in the nation at the 2009 National Transportation Public Affairs Workshop. NTPAW is a national organization representing public affairs, public involvement and communications professionals at the nation’s departments of transportation.

Is the “Hi Howdy” open house the wrong way to go?

The Frontal Cortex has an interesting piece on the “rewarding properties” of information (see below) that suggest all of us might be going the wrong way with the all-too-common introductory – or “hi howdy” – public meeting.

The experiment described in the post suggests that people will respond best to meetings that have more information, particularly information about what’s coming down the pike.

Yet how often as coalitionists have we felt compelled to acquiesce to engagement processes that start with a meeting that is just an aggregation of very little information and a meet-and-greet with a study team – or that have very basic update meetings at milestones.

One interpretation of the experiment, however, is that we would better serve our target audiences’ needs – and information “pleasure zones” – if we ladled on the information ’til they’re overfull, particularly if that information helps them anticipate or predict what’s going to happen next in the engagement process.

Judge for yourself:

“Over at Mind Matters, Chadrick Lane reviews a fascinating experiment that revealed the rewarding properties of information, regardless of whether or not the information actually led to more rewards:

In the experimental design, monkeys were placed in front of a computer screen and were trained to perform a saccade task, in which they learned to direct their gaze at specific areas. The monkeys were first given the option of choosing between one of two colored targets. One of these targets would give the monkey advance information about its future reward. The advance information came in the form of visual cues, one representing a large reward and the other a small reward. Choosing the other initial colored target revealed cues that were randomly associated with reward size, thus possessing no informative value. After only a few days of training, the monkeys showed a clear preference for choosing the informative colored target.

The researchers then tested to see when the monkeys wanted the information. In this scenario, the monkeys were again initially presented with two colored targets. One of these targets had informative value while the other did not. The difference was that the monkeys always received informative cues just before their rewards. The choice each monkey had to make was whether to see an earlier informative cue. Despite always having a delayed informative cue, regardless of which initial target they selected, the monkeys preferred to have advance information as soon as possible. Like high-school seniors waiting on their SAT results, the monkeys wanted to know, and they wanted to know right now.

More via The Frontal Cortex.)

Employers increasingly blocking Twitter, Facebook, MySpace

Building a coalition just gets tougher all the time as challenges to reaching potential allies grow in number and complexity.

The latest is the proliferation of employer-driven policies barring social media usage.

According to a new survey of 1,400 CIOs of companies with 100 or more employees, 54% now completely block employees from accessing social networking sites at work.

Only 10% of those surveyed let employees use social networks however they please, while the remainder all impose at least some restrictions on usage, like limiting it to business purposes only.

The survey, which was developed by Robert Half Technology, is consistent with other recent reports that show companies are quickly moving to block social media in the workplace.

This presents multiple problems for coalitionists.

Rightly or wrongly, many individuals justify tracking issues, initiatives and campaigns as being job-related. If unable to electronically stay engaged from work, they are likely to be far less willing to remain fully informed and involved.

And if they have to shift their efforts to keep up on an issue to personal time, engagement in substantive issues or initiatives may suffer from competition for scarce discretionary time from family, other interests and more superficial social media activities.

Perversely, corporate social media roadblocks may actually backfire. There’s research to indicate that such restrictions actually reduce employees’ time on job and overall job satisfaction – in addition to making life tougher for coalitionists.

How to: Mashable offers social media policies from 80+ organizations

Everybody I know who is in a corporate or government agency position responsible for coalition or network building has had the same horrible experience.

You’re trying to do something simple (like communicate with employees, allies or others in a social media space they occupy) and – Bam! – you discover you can’t do it with out IT/HR/Matlock tracking you down and beating you with the Intertubes.

In those situations, it often helps to counter-argue using the policies and practices of your clients, audiences or peer organizations. I don’t know about you, but to make inroads in my own company, I’m ridden the IBM social media policy pony until it is sway-backed.

So it was heartening to find this bundle of social media examples with which to fight the good fight for me, my group and my clients’ projects. Hope it helps you, too.

Social Media Policies from 80+ Organizations: “

One of the key challenges for modern organizations is to define a social media policy. What’s acceptable? What isn’t? And how should you go about creating such a document for your workplace?

We’ve tried to aid with this process at Mashable through articles such as Should Your Company Have a Social Media Policy? and 10 Must-Haves for Your Social Media Policy. We’ve also published guides like Social Media for Business: The Dos & Don’ts of Sharing.

What’s more, we’ve looked at what happens when these guidelines go to far, like the controversy over the Associated Press social media policy, and a similar situation at the NFL.

If you’re looking to define your own social media guidelines, however, one worthwhile task is to read the policies of other organizations. Chris Boudreaux, author of the upcoming book ‘Social Media Governance’, has assembled 82 such policies on the book’s website. From companies to charities to military organizations, it’s a treasure trove for those struggling with social media guidelines.

We think it’s super-handy: we hope you’ll agree.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Richphotographics, Palto, rtiom

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Reviews: Mashable, iStockphoto

Tags: social media

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(Via Mashable!.)

The Frontal Cortex: Social networks

Here’s an interesting article from “The Frontal Cortex.” It suggests that one way to move a large coalition is to find the small core of the social network that underpins it and try to get them moving in the same direction.

Social Networks: “

I’ve got a new essay on social networks and the research of Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler in the latest issue of Wired:

There’s something strange about watching life unfold as a social network. It’s easy to forget that every link is a human relationship and every circle a waistline. The messy melodrama of life–all the failed diets and fading friendships–becomes a sterile cartoon.

But that’s exactly the point. All that drama obscures a profound truth about human society. By studying Framingham as an interconnected network rather than a mass of individuals, Christakis and Fowler made a remarkable discovery: Obesity spread like a virus. Weight gain had a stunning infection rate. If one person became obese, the likelihood that his friend would follow suit increased by 171 percent. (This means that the network is far more predictive of obesity than the presence of genes associated with the condition.) By the time the animation is finished, the screen is full of swollen yellow beads, like blobs of fat on the surface of chicken soup.

The data exposed not only the contagious nature of obesity but the power of social networks to influence individual behavior. This effect extends over great distances–a fact revealed by tracking original subjects who moved away from Framingham. ‘Your friends who live far away have just as big an impact on your behavior as friends who live next door,’ Fowler says. ‘Think about it this way: Even if you see a friend only once a year, that friend will still change your sense of what’s appropriate. And that new norm will influence what you do.’ An obese sibling hundreds of miles away can cause us to eat more. The individual is a romantic myth; indeed, no man is an island.

Wired also has a series of beautiful images of the actual network data. And if you’d like to learn more about the research, I highly recommend the new book by Christakis and Fowler, Connected. And here’s a much longer article on the social network research by Clive Thompson, which does an excellent job of explaining the different ways in which the scientists try to separate causation from correlation. (Is obesity really contagious? Or did a McDonald’s just open up in the neighborhood?) It turns out that the old warning of David Hume – causation is a slippery concept and a tricky thing to prove – is even more relevant in the age of excess data, when supercomputers can sift through terabytes of social information and uncover all sorts of fallacious correlations. Christakis and Fowler get around this problem through some clever analytics: they show, for instance, that obesity is much more contagious between close friends than it is between acquaintances, which suggests that social networks are the driving mechanism (and that the new neighborhood McDonald’s isn’t). Regardless, it will be interesting to watch this new field evolve in the next few years, as the Humean skeptics do battle with the enthusiastic believers…

Read the comments on this post…“

(Via The Frontal Cortex.)

Online polling plays special role for coalitions

Ken DeSieghardt is one of the best strategists I know when it comes to understanding how to pull together people into coalitions and motivate them to action. 

For example, his firm, Patron Insight, is very successful in identifying, communicating with and moving to the polls those taxpayers who are most likely to support bond issues backed by school districts and municipal government.

Ken and his partner, Rick Nobles,  see a special role in online polling and surveying when it comes to existing or coalescing coalitions. They share it here:

“Online research deserves a spot in the researcher’s tool bag. But, like any tool, you have to know how, when and where to use it if the information you collect is going to be of value.

Specifically, online research provides the most helpful, credible information when it is disseminated as a secondary tool to a captive audience whose members care about the subject matter.

Note the key words in that last statement.

Disseminated: Don’t just stick a survey on your Web site and wait for the responses to roll in. Send the link to people who you want to hear from.

Secondary tool to a captive audience: Online research should never be considered primary data, because those who participate choose to do so – meaning they are already connected to a cause or an issue. It’s ideal for gathering data and seeking input from a coalition of advocates who are already in place (either formally or informally), but should never be confused for primary research of the masses to determine the general mood of the citizenry.

Care about the subject matter: Online surveys work when someone who receives it thinks, “If I respond to this, something that matters to me might change in a way that I like (or might stay the same, if that’s what I’d prefer).”

It’s also important to put a time limit on when you will accept responses, to nudge your target audience about halfway through with a message that says, “If you’ve responded, thanks; if not please do,” and to use the feature on the programs that allows you to limit responses to one per computer.

If you follow this recipe (and, of course, have a well-constructed survey instrument), you’ll get back information that clues you in to the thoughts and ideas of those in your key target audience who took the time to respond.

Like all research, it should be seen as one piece of data in the decision-making process. But, at least you can be confident that what you received was credible.”

Visualizations help stakeholders understand complex issues

Seeing is believing.

A picture is worth a thousand words.

All true when it comes to helping stakeholders and potential coalition members, allies and partners understand the importance of a complex issue.

Here’s a good example.  As the Missouri Dept. of Transportation wrestles with how to rejuvenate Interstate 70, it found that its efforts to keep traffic moving smoothly on America’s Main Street complicated its communication about the dire state of the highway. 

Specifically, resurfacing in recent years had smoothed the ride enough to hide the structural issues underlying the highway – and perhaps mute public interest in fixing the long-term problems with the Interstate. 

So MoDOT developed a clever simulation that enables stakeholders to see how pavement begins decaying almost as soon as it is poured and, more importantly, how there are limits to how many times you can replace existing pavement.

They made an interesting – and thoroughly understandable – visual that helps their audiences get a better grip on an important technical issue: http://www.youtube.com/user/modotvideo