Say what you mean – succinctly.

I’ve been doing a bit of research lately for a client who’s about to launch their first mobile game. (The game is fantastic and has the added value of raising awareness and contributing to an important social issue – but more on this soon).

During the hours I’ve spent surfing the web for background on gaming trends and communications, something very interesting and surprising occurred to me. Having not spent much time previously on tech and gaming websites, I had the very stereo-typical impression that communication (especially online) about wireless games, devices and other personal tech would be, well, techy. But I found, reading through gaming blogs, sites and app store copy, some of the clearest and most well-written, targeted communication that I’ve seen. They simply say what they mean - succinctly.

With the gaming world being such a fast-growing and competitive industry at the moment, a lot of effort is put into writing content for game websites, app copy and blogs. The success of a game could depend on how quickly people engage with a written description of the game, before they even click to download and try it out.

To say what you mean is often very hard - especially when you have less than 25 words or 25 seconds to share.  For example, in non-profit marketing you have very limited time to spend on ‘pitching’ to engage people to support your cause. How much time does it take to fully describe the issue your cause is addressing, what someone’s support would achieve and the good it will create? Generally more than 25 words. 

Spending time creating the right message and narrative and getting it to a succinct set of points that means something is so important - especially when you have a product that’s a choice, not a necessity. When you’re creating your messaging think about these 3 things:

• Say what you mean – what is the product or issue about, what do you want me to do? 
• Make it intriguing – do they want to know more?
• Ensure it takes just seconds to say/relay – can you pitch it in an elevator ride? Can you pitch it in a tweet?

Take a leaf out of the gaming world’s book and say what you really mean – succinctly. Catch them before they choose not to download. 

Three hints to do this are:

1. Have a tagline that means something. If the minute I land on a website, pick up a brochure or read a tweet and see a catchy line that I relate to, I’m likely to read more. Sometimes taglines can be tacky but as long as they say what you mean and mean something to your audience, it can be the difference between click on or click away.
2. Mix it up over social media. Twitter has provided the opportunity to catch people’s eye and describe your cause or product in lots of different ways, as many times as you want (though it’s best not to overdo it). As long as you remain consistent with your brand and always say what you mean, this can be an effective way to grab your audience’s attention, encouraging them to find out more. Just one click into your home page or Facebook is the start of the download process, giving you that extra chance and time to pitch.
3. Make it sharable, stand out with words that are fun – tell a joke? Most people are receiving messages to do, buy or support something hundreds of times a day. In addition, we’re all engaging with our family, friends, colleagues and twitter acquaintances, sharing and receiving new ideas and messages with them. We often subconsciously choose which messages we take in and definitely what we remember. Although I’m one who can never remember a joke, I do remember things that I want to share with friends. Even though I’m one who likes to do good and get involved, it’s usually not the plea for support or detailed description of a world problem that I share with friends. Hit your audience with something that instantly intrigues them or that makes them laugh or ask a question. They’re far more likely to first read it, and then share it. 

HO HO HO it’s Social Good Santa (@socialgoodsanta)

 Steve’s social good Christmas Wishlist 

Clever Conversations

I recently attended a great roundtable discussion put on by John Hopkins University Communications (@JHUComm). The three panelists Henri Makembe (@Henrim), Beth Becker (@spedwybabs) and Malaka Gharib (@MalakaGharib) talked about using social media for non-profits. For me, the main takeaway was ‘conversations’. 

I believe that whether you’re engaging people over social media or using more traditional public relations, the principles are the same. Especially when your goal is to influence behavior or engage people in actions to support a cause. The rise of social media has made it easier to have this conversation, but remember the principles of effective community engagement and treat your online community, the facebook liker and the @twitterer with the same approach. Here are a few tips that relate:

1. Know who you’re talking to – general audience identification on social media is vital but so is identifying those online influencers and community leaders. When you go into a community to promote or discuss an issue, you don’t stand in the street, microphone in hand and spruke your message. First you identify who you need to talk to, whether it’s 1 or 100 people, and you begin a conversation with them that will flow on to be heard by the community.
2. Get your timing right – address influencers and community leaders at the right time. Just like you would check what’s going on in a community before running a local engagement exercise, the same should be done when engaging people over social media. Research what is on your target audiences’ agendas – are most people tied up at work, has a major story just broken, is everyone sitting down for thanksgiving dinner? Launch a conversation when you believe you are most likely to connect with your audience and avoid competing with major events. But you can also be creative and effectively use those big occasions, like the upcoming holiday season, to draw people into your conversation.
3. Find the angle – rather than simply telling someone you want to connect with on twitter or facebook about you and your issue, ask their opinions and find out about their motivations first. Make them feel part of the story and have a role in telling it. When you hold a public or stakeholder meeting, it helps if someone prominent in the community introduces you and generally you would allow for more than just one speaker. So why not do the same when you address big audiences online?
4. Let opinion flow – don’t shut down the twitter conversation or the facebook post, even when it gets hard. You wouldn’t demand someone sit down or leave a public conversation just because they voiced a different opinion or asked a tricky question. Be prepared and let the conversation flow.
5. Follow up and reconnect – you want communities of people online to stay engaged, particularly if you need some kind of community agreement or to influence public opinion. Just like when you invest time and money into events and other offline community engagement activities, you want those people who have participated to stay involved. There’s no point in reaching out to a community once and then never going back. So it’s important to find interesting ways to keep those online influencers and audiences connected. Play to your audiences’ motivations, follow up on issues, ask and respond to questions, and most importantly use a mix of on and offline PR to generate participation from partners and individuals. 

Social media is an opportunity to have a clever conversation, but relies on the core values of effective PR first.

If I share with you my story would you share your dollar with me?

Storytelling is an ancient art. This post is not about the ancient art of storytelling.  It’s about playing the supporting role in other people’s stories.  
 
Take the example of Nike Plus. By setting up an online platform, Nike played the supporting role in millions of people’s stories about how they were losing weight and becoming better runners. This was a story that their audience desperately wanted to tell so with the opportunity to share their story, people were also happy to ‘share their dollar(s)’ with Nike by buying their products. Read How Nike’s Social Network Sells to Runners for more on the success of this campaign.
 
Kiva.org is an excellent example of a not-for-profit organization that has built a beautiful platform for sharing stories - entrepreneur’s from the developing world share their stories with Kiva (and their partners), then Kiva publishes those stories online and their platform allows people to become part of this story by investing in those entrepreneurs.  Kiva then continues the story by providing updates to the investor as the entrepreneur pays back the loan and experiences success.  
 
The story of how, by making a small investment as an individual, you can effect meaningful and ongoing social change in the developing world is compelling and it is a great story to tell to your friends and family “I invested $25 dollars in an entrepreneur from Ecuador, to help him buy inventory for his store - he’s paid it all back now and has employed 2 new staff - I’m going to re-invest that money in an entrepreneur from Kenya’.  Having heard this compelling story, those family and friends are much more likely to share their dollars through Kiva and then tell all their friends and family about it. By building a platform that brings people together to share in a story, Kiva has created the perfect conditions for those same people to share their dollars and Kiva’s story.

In this way, playing a supporting role in story-telling can be a powerful tool for organizations and nonprofits to engage more people in their own story. When devising your communications strategy don’t just think about the story you want to tell, think about the story your audience wants to tell and how your organization could support them to tell it. You don’t need a big budget to build a platform, think about ways you could utilize your existing platform, blog, email newsletter or social media updates to support your audience to tell their story with you in the supporting role.

As an aside, I got the title of this post from the intro to ‘How to Make it in America’ which I’ve got a bit addicted to - but it illustrates the point well - New York City plays the supporting role in millions of peoples stories and this is what makes it the subject of so many stories!

How To Make It In America Intro from Bert Stragier on Vimeo.

The Nonprofit Rooster!!

I was recently trying to write an explanation about why nonprofits should invest in social engagement. The most obvious point that came to mind was fundraising. When individuals or partners are more engaged they’re more likely to donate regularly and invest more in your cause. 

 
But when I started to visualize the relationship between raising funds and engagement and how these interact or which comes first, I found myself thinking about chickens and eggs!

Either way it’s clear that engagement and dollars connect people with projects and the cause.

It might also be clear then that the nonprofit is the vehicle that makes both these things come to life– is the nonprofit a rooster?!  

Social Games, Social Engagement, Social Good

Every morning, I have such good intentions of getting up as soon as my alarm goes off, doing some morning exercise, eating a healthy breakfast and reading the news while drinking a coffee at home before putting on the shirt I ironed the night before and strolling out the door (having turned the all the lights off).

Unfortunately, a typical morning for me usually goes more like this: alarm goes off at 7am,  I hit the snooze 5 times before finally getting up, brush my teeth in the shower, throw on a slightly crumpled shirt and dash out the door, grabbing a coffee on my way into work.   

So, what would motivate me to turn my good intentions into actions?  

A common theme at the recent Social Good Summit was “if people spend hours and hours playing games like Farmville why shouldn’t we be able to achieve the same level of engagement with social causes!?”

So, why is it that people devote so much time to Farmville? Social games like Farmville expertly employ something called ‘Game Mechanics’ to keep people engaged, performing actions and even spending money (on things like virtual turnips)!

Game Mechanics, at the most basic level, employs competition, rewards and social feedback to create an incentive for players to perform certain actions.  To get a feel for the way they work, I highly recommend reading SCVNGR’s Game Dynamics Playbook and watching Jesse Schelle’s Talk (embedded below - it’s about 1.5 hours but it’s highly entertaining - why not watch 15 minutes a day while you eat a healthy breakfast for a week? Leave a comment about it below and you’ll earn 10 points!).

Returning to my typical morning - what if:

• each time I hit snooze it cost me a dollar?;
• each time I went out and exercised and ate a healthy breakfast I earned points doubling for each consecutive day I did it?; and
• each day I forgot to turn the lights off all my friends would see that I was wasting power?

These are simple yet powerful motivators for me to change my behavior from intention to action.

A number of organisations have cottoned on to this potential and are using them to promote social good.  For example:

• Snooze by LetGive is an iPhone app that you can setup to donate money to charity each time you hit the snooze button;
• HealthMonth is a game that’s designed to help you lose weight, cut your caffeine addiction, start reading more, and otherwise do all sorts of things that will help you lead the life you want.
• SimpleEnergy is designed to change how utilities engage customers by making saving energy social, fun and simple.

If your organization wants to use game mechanics to turn people’s good intentions into actions that support your cause, think about these three things:

1. What behaviours do we want to change?
2. What actions do we want people to take?
3. What motivators can we use to get them to take these actions?

The behaviors and actions can be a simple as you want.  For example what motivator could you use to get people to tweet out a link to one of your blog posts each day for a week?  Could you create a points system for taking certain actions and reward the highest point scorers with a VIP invite to your annual event?  What non-profits and social good organizations do you know of that have used game mechanics to change behavior or increase engagement?  Hit us up in the comments.

http://gamification.org/wiki/Game_Mechanics
http://www.lostgarden.com/2006/10/what-are-game-mechanics.html
http://artofgamedesign.com/cards/
http://socialmediatoday.com/david-amerland/372998/risks-over-gamification-social-media-marketing
http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2011/09/social-gaming-engage-patients-improve-wellness.html

The movement to connect socially

Is SOCIAL the new buzz word? We hear a lot about social good, social change, social media, social marketing, social business, corporate social responsibility, social entrepreneurship! How is your organization keeping up with the movement to connect socially?

While connecting through social media and marketing can be as easy as writing a few blog posts, posting your events on facebook or writing interesting snippets of commentary on twitter, the fact is, there’s much more to it! And consumers of social media and marketing are often just as savvy as the ‘experts’ transmitting the message. So how do you get edge in your social strategies?

The first best thing you can do is have a plan! Something that helps you to set your communication goals, to define your brand and what you want to say, and to work out who you actually want to talk to, how and when. While social media activity is fast-paced and ever-changing, it’s still important to ensure you are strategic – and then you can be more confident in taking advantage of all the social interaction on offer. Here’s a few pointers to remember when developing your plan:

• Make sure it’s targeted and action-based.
• Focus on who you want to connect with, when, how and why. It doesn’t need to be long-winded – I’d suggest leaving the pages of background about your organization, your research etc in your business planning.
• Review your current communications and marketing activities and, if they’re effective, make sure you integrate them into your plan and build on successes.Check out your market and your competitors – how are others connecting and what is working best?
• Determine what your target audiences’ motivations and barriers to being involved in your cause are. List any tactics you can think of that might help to strengthen their motivations or overcome their barriers.
• Break up your strategy into 2 or 3 one-year phases and have at least one measureable objective per phase so you can track progress.
• Be mindful that not every tactic out there works for every organization! If you’re not careful, you can end up spending all of your time connecting, without much time left for effective program implementation or to really drive social engagement. Change tactic or approach when things aren’t working. Your plan should always be living!

It’s also important to acknowledge that you’re busy implementing your programs, dealing with Boards, applying for funds AND managing partner relationships, When people are busy (which these days is most of the time) effective and regular communication and social networking is often one of the first things neglected. So, be sure to carefully prioritize your social marketing activities. As part of your planning, I always suggest developing a manageable annual social marketing calendar (starting with year 1 and evaluating progress and effectiveness of your tactics before setting your next year of activity). Link this annual calendar with your meeting calendar or print it out and display at your desk – this will help remind you to connect, even when you’re busy!