marketing bootcamp – tough love for leaders

Last week was the first Marketing Academy bootcamp…

Inspired. Exhausted. Thoughtful. Excited. My #marketingacademy boot camp feelings!

— Laila Takeh (@spirals) May 24, 2013

What is a marketing bootcamp?

I was lucky enough to be selected from around 600 applicants as one of 30 Marketing Academy scholars. The selection process was rigorous; written application, employer endorsement, showcase piece, telephone interview, four psychometric tests and a panel interview!

There are three bootcamps in the 12 month scholarship. The other elements of the scholarship are mentor meets, lunch and learns, faculty days and coaching.

The bootcamps are two or three intensive days of active learning with all scholars in attendance. This first one was mostly led by @thelivingleader but we also heard from @gailgallie, @olibarrett and @petermarkey.

What did I learn?

Lots and lots and lots. Here’s a few of the easy to share bits:

• Leadership: A real leader is one that develops other leaders. Authenticity is key.
• Communication: Giving info isn’t the main leadership communication style; other key ones are seeking clarification, supporting, building.
• Networking: Don’t ask what someone does – find out about them as a person first. You can spot something useful to share by email later.
• Personal development: Focus on what you want to grow, if you focus on the negatives they will grow.
• Your vision: If you vocalise your ambitions as if they were already true – it makes them easier to achieve.
• Confidence: You can’t control how people feel, only how you treat them. So focus on what you give, not what you get.
• Pull and push: When leading there are times to push, and there’s a moment to switch to pull. If you keep pushing results will diminish.

It’s going to be an amazing year of learning – I’ll try to share it with you along the way.

digital team structures – hub and spoke or dandelion?

I first wrote about the hub and spoke model back in summer 2011. Since then I’ve talked to a lot of people about it.

I’m a raving advocate for the model. The cultural changes needed to realise the benefits of digital are only really possible through an integrated approach driven from a single focal point. This is why I’ve often pondered how this model could work at a global scale for an organisation.

Local autonomy is important. I’ve been one of those ‘HQ people’ working with local offices, and now I am part of a ‘local office’ in a global organisation. So I know how important a certain level of independence is. Without this you can’t adapt to local market or community needs, innovation and motivation is stifled, and you risk not being able to capitalise on local opportunities.

Dandelions might just be the answer I was looking for. Jeremiah Owyang posted about social business models recently and described this model as:

Multiple hub & spoke “Dandelion” notice how each business unit may have semi-autonomy with an over arching tie back to a central group.

Reflecting on this – I recognise this model from my current and past workplaces – it’s nothing new. Yet it’s strange how giving a name to something means you can examine and discuss it more easily. Examining it leaves me agreeing with the points Jeremiah makes and adding a few of my own;

• too much internal comms = noise; but an internal social network delivers the power of discovery and self-filtering.
• decentralised cross- team working is critical; but it’s tricky for central hubs to empower and be sufficiently in the loop to add value.
• focus on the bright spots; understanding the strengths and weaknesses of each hub gives strategic opportunities for spreading learning.
• apples and pears aren’t the same; a common language and frame of reference (eg terminology) makes it easier to identify and share insights.
• sharing needs to be incentivised; to motivate teams to share it needs to return local results or at least recognition.
• people trust people; there’s nothing like face to face to build trust and communication, with video meetings there’s no excuse.

twestival two years on

For the past few months or so there’s been a worldwide team quietly working away to bring back Twestival. Since 2009, Twestival has raised $1.75 million in support of 286 charities. With this relaunch there’s also a new twist, this time it’s not just a single day of the year, but any day a local organising team chooses.

I got involved a couple of years ago and wrote about my experience and what I thought charities could learn from networked working. This year I’m part of the Global Social and Community team. We’re still using networked approaches but the tools are much better now; Asana for project management, Google calendar for our social rota and Google Docs are the main ones we’re using.

Reflecting on what else has changed in two years I think the most striking thing is that networked collaboration is happening more and feels more normal. But where I’ve seen this most is outside of workplaces.

Technology might have moved on but workplace behaviours are still catching up…

 

what makes a perfect employee?

Today we had a session at work on well-being and employee engagement. Lots of interesting management theory and practise was shared. At one point during discussion I drew a diagram to explain a point I was making. It seemed to explain things pretty well and someone even said I should write a book

I’m not going to write a book, I imagine someone has already beaten me to it, but I thought it might be useful to share here.

I wanted to explain the delicate balance between skill, passion and organisational need in creating the right mix of team members. It’s particularly relevant to a disruptive industry like digital.

There’s lots of people who have passion for digital, but that doesn’t mean they have the skill/s, or that the organisation needs the particular thing that individual is passionate about. How many times have you had to gently remind people that ‘shiny new’ digital idea in isolation is less likely to get results? Or how many bad videos by keen hobby videographers have you sifted through?

But at the same time; meeting an organisation need and having the right skill is often not helpful unless the passion is also there. While digital is still evolving you need passion in order to keep up with industry changes and / or to have that moment of inspiration that makes your delivery different or better.

being a leader who gets digital

A little while ago I was extremely flattered to be asked to say what I thought every charity leader should know about digital as one of around thirty ‘opinion leaders’. There’s some great content so I thought I’d repost it for anyone who hasn’t yet seen it. I’ve also got some additional thoughts to add to my points (slide 33) so I’ve expanded on them here.

Silos don’t exist externally, don’t let them exist internally

Digital is breaking down walls because of the required ways of working, but the silos shouldn’t have been there in the first place. Recognise the organisational change your digital staff may (or should) be driving and create space for it to happen.

+ Personal responsibility is something every leader strives to embed in their whole team, its good business sense. The same is true with digital, it should be everyone’s responsibility to embrace and explore the opportunities and challenges. Leaving it to the digital staff alone can slow change down and re-enforce siloes. This also means every leader taking the time to explore how to integrate digital into work (and life) too. While existing work approaches are effective they might be bettered… you don’t know what you don’t know.

Your brand has always been what people say about you – you can just see it more

The risks of social media aren’t much bigger than those you already have when a member of staff picks up the phone or knocks on a door. Put the same effort into social media training and guidance and you should be covered.

+ Designing enablers for others to use your brand is the other critical component. Providing easy tools, guides and ways for audiences to use your brand is a proactive way to manage brand. After-all we’re all pretty lazy

Focus on outcome, not sparkle 

An app may be on-trend but you need to do the basics (search, email, website) brilliantly first. It’s a better investment. If you’re not up-to scratch in these areas your other promo activity will be less effective.

+ The opposite side of the coin is also useful to keep in mind (sorry it’s never simple!). Sometimes the sparkly things will get you the outcome you’re looking for. Build a culture that can be experimental at low risk with low effort, at the right time! An example is our UNICEF pinterest experiment, here’s an interview with Beth Kanter about it.

Evidence based decisions rule

Why guess when you can test. Next time you’re agonising over a headline, colour, layout or something else equally subjective remember this. You can test run your work – taking the guessing and the internal politics out of the situation.

+ This is another double-edged sword to be aware of. The old saying is true – if you fail you should try again. So much can influence a result that you need to be sure your test was valid. Too many definitive decisions could limit your options too soon.

Mobile is already here, and it’s not going away

If you’re redesigning your website, emails or anything else, including how you interact in face to face activities – design for mobile devices first. This should also concentrate the mind on ditching any unnecessary-ness.

+ Mobile web is still in evolution. It’s right to invest but worth considering slightly more short-term solutions until the technology starts to settle down more.

Charity Digital Leaders Report from LasaCharity

do we need a new label for online giving?

Thanks to the Marketing Academy I saw Rory Sutherland speak this week. It was an excellent talk with lots of things to take away. One of them was the importance of language in creating social norms.

Rory talked about the phrase ‘designated driver’ and how it was born out of anti-drink driving campaigns. He told us how the label was seeded into TV programmes and other media to get it accepted into mainstream language. And how this new label meant ‘not drinking’ went from being unsociable to acceptable.

It got me thinking about how we might apply this learning in the charity sector. With my digital focus the first thing that came to mind was the difference in adoption between ecommerce and online giving.

For commercial organisations, ecommerce is often a higher proportion of their income than online donations are to many charities. I stand by my previous statements that charities might be behind because of the available technology. But reframing the question using this case study from Rory provides some interesting thoughts.

We need a new language for online giving, a label which makes it more of a social norm than it is. There’s a strong case for this, particularly if you are an endorser of CAF’s research into the giving habits of younger generations.

Looking back at the language around charitable giving I’m not sure its changed that much in the last few decades (please tell if you know different!). If this is correct it’s not surprising that online giving is not aligned with the modern media environment or younger generations.

So what could that new label be?

disintermediation: is it really that new?

The folk at Spring-giving asked me to give a perspective on their disintermediation study. It’s not been an easy task, hence why this is appearing much later than the event.

I think that’s because I’m not sure how new it feels.

A proportion of individuals have always given directly to someone in need without needing intervention from a non-profit brand. Rewind the clock and you can see that’s how charities started (and continue to start).

Of course, technology is now a part of the journey, and that is new(ish). The convenience of crowd-funding platforms is a real enabler. Yet, that feels new mostly because we’re just in another tech adoption curve; we’ll move past the spawning of many platforms to a small set of reliable platforms that become the way to get something done.

We don’t know if disintermediation will result in more philanthropic giving than pre-internet – it just wasn’t tracked or published before. For example, I recently heard a charity praise their crowd-funding website for giving visibility of the fundraising by their local services. I’ve also pondered if the big successes in crowd-funding are simply aggregating money that would have been involved in smaller informal giving.

That’s not to say the third sector isn’t feeling a little bit unsure and perhaps even at risk due to the concept. You only need to look at the number of events and articles that have started to crop up to know that.

The perceived challenge is the fit with the way many charities currently work. Established charities have processes that help them comply with legislation, to manage reputation and brand, and to ensure investment in long-term sustainable impact as well as the short-term. All things that crowd-funding appears to handle very differently, if at all, at the moment.

But, there will always be people who just want to ‘do their bit’ without too much thought of who is handling the processing. For most, philanthropic acts are only a small part of their life. Based on the hypothesis that this has always happened and it’s just more visible now, what we’re really talking about is not a total shift in behaviours but about finding a way for both to work together better.

I think what we might need to adopt within charities is the Amazon approach; provide a user driven ‘marketplace’ alongside the brand. Provide choice transparently where the charity is facilitator. From what I’ve heard, Amazon’s business was strengthened by this rather than weakened…

social media week september 2012

Last week was Social Media Week so the team and I tried to cram in as many events in as possible to maximise the free learning opportunity. Here’s a few of the key things I thought interesting to share:

Crowd-funding (from event by good innovation)

• It’s community fundraising by another name.
• Funders are often motivated by return incentives (think kickstarter perks) and/or that beneficiaries know more directly who provided the funding.
• The best results come when the community is already interested and networked.
• Cancer Research UK ‘My Projects’ raises a higher average total per page than they do on event sponsorship pages.
• Action for Children ‘My Action for Children’ bridges the divide between local service managers and volunteers doing fundraising and the work of the fundraising team.

Social media engagement (mostly from events by @wearelikeminds & @barcampnfp)

• If you cover lots of topics as a brand, fragmenting your social profile might help you increase engagement if the sub-group sizes justify the separate effort needed. More focused streams can allow you to focus the tone and content more.
• Images drive higher levels of engagement. Hopeful images particularly. But if you heavily copyright you are restricting sharing potential, look at creative commons.
• Influence is about driving an outcome, not just the conversation. Sometimes the most effective influencers are sometimes the least expected who suddenly have a reason to comment on your brand.
• Social media can help organisations blur the divide between staff and supporters. But you need to invest in educating the whole organisation in digital.

Data (from all over the place)

• Lots of people lie on registration / data capture forms, and thats the ones that don’t just click away. Social logins reduce both bounce and ‘dirty data’.
• People update their personal details on their social profiles before they update it anywhere else.
• Some employers are using Klout / Kred scores within their recruitment processes (yes – I’m very dubious too!).

Innovation (event by @nfptweetup)

• Innovation is not just about the ‘shiny stuff’, everyday innovation is too often overlooked and focus on purpose why you’re trying to innovate is needed.
• If you innovate in the hardest places, it should be easy to translate and scale the successes in the easier contexts.
• Innovation is about knocking down doors, painting yourself in creosote or couscous (you had to be there), but mostly attitude and persistence.
• Finally… UNICEF is hugely inspiring, I am constantly in awe – see innovation preso

Finally, finally … my week was brilliantly rounded off with drinks to celebrate UNICEF UK’s top spot in the Social Charity Index. More on that another time.

digital stats – integration’s worse enemy

I love digital analytics, but the perceived concreteness can lead to some tricky situations…

Unless you’re only using one channel to showcase your brand (if you are I’m intrigued to hear why!?) your audience is almost certainly seeing you in more than one place. This creates a challenge for Google Analytics and other similar tools. While its easy to generate ‘last-touch’ reporting this doesn’t give you a true sense of why someone responded.

We talk a lot about this at work. We were quite aware during our East Africa emergency activity that integrated channels and messages perform best.

So we’ve been building up our understanding of multi-touch attribution, including using tools like Ignition One. But this doesn’t help if/when you include offline in your media mix. You still can’t fully understand what the impact of the full mix is.

The tricky situation this puts you in is particularly relevant if you’re still trying to build the business case for integrating digital. Individuals can interpret last-touch reporting in terms of ROI (return on investment) on a purely channel by channel basis. This can mean investment is skewed, and integration completely overlooked.

Unless you invest in regular market research studies I’m not sure there’s a real-time answer (until we all get micro-chipped!). So next step for us will probably be considering what ‘closest guess based on historic data’ models we can devise and use.

Where are you with your attribution models? Be great to compare notes!

building a digital team

So, it’s been a little while since I last posted. Don’t worry I’ve still been living all things digital (twitter and instagram prove that) but I’ve been faced with immense writers block. So this is me breaking it quickly and concisely.

Since I last wrote I’ve been to a few digital events, perhaps too many, many are on personal time so that’s one excuse I’ve been using for my lack of blogging. I’ve also spoken a couple of times on the digital transformation work I’m leading at UNICEF UK so here’s the presentation via slideshare.

Building sustainabledigifr laila-june2012

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