Stephen Hale

G2G, a social experiment, and why I like Yammer

I might have been part of a ethnomethodological study last week. I was part of a panel at the Gov2Gov event at Canada House, talking with a flock of geeks about how social media is changing society, government and international relations.

It was a good event with lots of interesting people in the room, well organised and run by Dominic Campbell, Lovisa Williams, and Chris Heuer.

It was the hashtag (#g2g) that made me feel a bit like I was part of an experiment. Participants were encouraged to use the hashtag to talk about the event online before, after, and particularly during the event, and the live tweets were projected onto a huge screen in the room during the discussions.

But from where I was sitting, I couldn't see the live coverage. So as I spoke I was aware that some of the audience were providing live commentary to the web, and some were following the commentary as it was projected behind me, rather than my wise words as I spoke.

Now I reckon that speaking to a room full of people can be difficult enough. But people being amusing and clever in real time - literally behind your back - could make a man paranoid.

Reading them now, the tweets from the event make unremarkable reading. But the experience made me think about the difference between what people say, and what people say on the social web.

There's no doubt that some tools can embolden the author. That's almost certainly true of Twitter, particularly if the author posts anonymously (or without it being clearly apparent who the author is).

It's also made me think about when digital can augment physical engagement (by queuing questions, rebroadcasting, or offering an alternative opinion in this case), when it is just a fun sideshow, and when the choice of digital tools could alienate a wider audience.

For the record, I am not active on Twitter. I decided that the always-on, 10-opinions-a-day nature of Twitter suits my objectives and my personality less well than other tools. I think the macro blog suits me better than the micro.

I do realise that we may already have passed the point at which Twitter is an essential business (as well as personal) tool. I might already be missing out on conversations that aren't taking place anywhere else. But for the moment I use search.twitter more than I use www.twitter. I'm a Twitter lurker. I keep my micro-thoughts to myself.

Having said that, I do like to micro-blog. We're using Yammer in the Foreign Office, and I'm loving it. Private micro-blogging tools like Yammer seem to me to be a perfect tool for medium sized (and distributed) networks like Digital Diplomacy Group. Email is no good for informal knowledge sharing; Yammer seems to solve a problem we didn't realise we had.

One of the things I like about Yammer, is that it is all clearly attributed. So it fits with the Foreign Office model for digital engagement, in which we always try to be open and transparent, and explicitly clear about who is talking.

Attribution is often less clear on Twitter. People don't always say who they are (and sometimes they appear to, but aren't). That's why I'm more excited about John Duncan's use of Twitter - which is clearly attributed and seems to be providing useful opportunities for real engagement - than I am by our corporate channels, which we largely use to broadcast (even though I know that a corporate Twitter channel is unlikely to heckle me as I speak).

Posted at 12:49 30 June 2009 by Stephen Hale  |  Comments[0]

An interview with a real digital diplomat

If our digital diplomacy project is to really succeed, we need to demonstrate that diplomats and policy officials can use the tools of digital engagement to help deliver foreign policy objectives. 

We won't have succeeded if all we achieve is the clever integration of the latest social media tools into nice looking web content.

That's why I often cite John Duncan as our best example of digital diplomacy in action. John is the UK Ambassador for Multilateral Arms Control and Disarmament, and he uses digital engagement tools to help him do his job. He blogs (and microblogs) about his work, and he is an active social media consumer.

John has been in London this week, to take part in an Arms Trade Treaty event. I took the opportunity to ask him about his experiences as a digital diplomat. Here's the video:

Transcript: 

Stephen Hale: I am here in King Charles Street with John Duncan. He has agreed to talk to me about being a digital diplomat. John is an an ambassador. He does a serious job. But he writes a blog. He updates his Twitter followers using his iPhone, and I want to find out why.

Caption: What do you do? 

John Duncan:  I'm the UK Ambassador for Multilateral Arms Control and Disarmament, based in Geneva. But it's roving ambassador role so I work right across the world from Dublin to Wellington to New York. And so I've used digital diplomacy as an addition to what we do in a traditional sense and found it to be a real multiplier.

Caption: Does this replace traditional diplomacy?

JD: Well I think that there are things that we would do normally. I'll give you an example. In multilateral diplomacy there's a lot of coffee shop diplomacy, where people will go and ask: "what's the UK position?" and they want it quietly, not in the public speeches that may last 10 or 20 minutes, they want a quick snapshot. And what I've used the blog for is to actually have that conversation virtually. So people have become used to going to the blog to find out what is a snapshot of the UK view in the way that we might have a coffee shop conversation. So it's replacing something that we actually do, and I probably have less coffee shop conversations as a result, but I think that's quite productive.

Caption: Do diplomats read blogs?

JD: I think now people are much more familiar with this sort of technology. It's true that there are some traditionalists who would still prefer to have that coffee shop conversation. But I don't think it replaces the working lunch longer conversation. It's a very quick snapshot: what is the UK thinking on this particular issue?

Caption: Who reads your blog?

JD: Well it's always difficult to get a feel for that. It's interesting that it's being used as a public information tool by people rather than for comments. There are the cognoscenti who come in and ask very detailed and complex questions. But most of the readers I'm aware of are colleagues, both in the Foreign Office but also in multilateral communities. I'm aware that many delegations from Iran to Ireland are reading it regularly. And if I get something wrong they will pick it up and say "you didn't get that right" so they are using it as a public information tool.

Caption: Do you read other blogs?

JD: Well I certainly read the comments, although I said there aren't that many - its much more a push factor rather than a pull factor. And yes I do read other blogs and I've used Twitter as a way of finding through into people who are saying interesting things on the issues that I'm following professionally.

Caption: Is Twitter appropriate for diplomacy?

JD: Well it's a very new tool and I think it's finding it's own way. There are people who seem to spend their time explaining what they're doing like "I'm stuck in a lift". I'm not sure that's a particularly useful use of the medium. What I've used it for is as a marketing tool for the blog and it's been spectacularly effective in terms of going into the press. I've had press interviews as a direct result of that, I've had media comment which is quoting Twitter, worldwide. So as a media tool and a marketing tool for the blog, then yes I think it is effective.

Caption: How do you find the time?

JD: Well I think we all have moments of the day when we have down time. It can be when you're in the car or on the train. Or even when I'm in my meetings or listening to speeches - of course many of these are written and I can read a speech in 5 minutes and it probably takes 20 to speak. And then what am I doing? Well I can use that time. I can go on to my laptop or the iPhone and find out what other people are saying and also comment on the issues that interest us. So I'm using the down time more productively than I could do otherwise.

Caption: How can we help others do this?

JD: Well I think we have presumed competence as ambassadors, but I think that we do need to get some training on this. I'm quite prepared to take risks and explore this with the digital diplomacy team. But I'm very conscious that it's easy to make mistakes, particularly easy to make mistakes if one is using Twitter because it's much shorter and snappier. And you have to preserve that authority of an ambassador, you can't undermine it. So I think some training on mistakes and things to do and how to actually use this new medium in a productive way, I think that's the best thing the Foreign Office can do.

Posted at 13:09 17 June 2009 by Stephen Hale  |  Comments[0]

Managing websites

"If you run a website you’re expected to know so much stuff: editorial, design, technical, social media, evaluation, resource management. But that doesn’t mean you’re an expert on each (how could you be?)."

Well, I reckon the new Managing Websites blog can help. The blog is the brainchild of Liam King, who's one of the most effective and clear thinking web practitioners I know. It includes posts from Liam and Paul Hosking at the moment, but I know that Liam plans to recruit a squad of bloggers to share their experiences.

The blog is focussed on providing practical advice to people who run websites, using real examples and experiences. It's a welcome antidote to all the blog chatter about vague digital concepts, offering real help to people who run websites.

If you're responsible for managing web content, and have high expectations and limited resources, this blog will become required reading. 

They've been really generous with their tips so far including giving away Liam's trademark devolved editors tracker. 

And while I'm on the subject of other bloggers, I'm really looking forward to the blog-off between the Ronaldo and Kaka of UK government digital engagement in the new super team at the Department for Business Innovation and Skills.

Posted at 10:37 12 June 2009 by Stephen Hale  |  Comments[1]

More on London Summit evaluation

I've blogged before about evaluation and our London Summit digital campaign. We've now published the detail: Evaluation of key performance indicators.

It's a full evaluation of the performance indicators we set for the London Summit website back in January. It uses survey responses and metrics from our own web platform and Google Trends to test how we performed against our own objectives.

The highlights:

• 4 objectives
• 13 KPIs
• 3 were fully met
• 4 were partially met
• 4 were not met
• 2 could not be assessed with the data we have
  

Details in the report.

Posted at 16:50 20 May 2009 by Stephen Hale  |  Comments[2]

Digital engagement offline

I was away last week, working in a wi-fi coldspot. It's really odd not to be able to rely on a connection to the internet. It makes doing simple things really difficult, or just impossible. I resorted to using Notepad to draft wiki content to post later, and emails to send when I could get online. I suppose it's liberating to be disconnected occasionally.

We can take our always-on internet connections for granted now. But that's certainly not the case for everyone, and I know that we need to adapt our approach to Foreign Office digital campaigns depending on our audience - live chat won't work if you can't be sure of a connection, video streaming only works if your audience has the bandwidth.

Anyway I gave up trying to connect in the end and as a result I missed the announcement of Andrew Stott as the new Director of Digital Engagement for UK government. I don't know Andrew so I don't have anything to add to the comments from others in the UK govt digital blogosphere, except to say that I'm looking forward to working with him.

Posted at 23:39 19 May 2009 by Stephen Hale  |  Comments[0]

2 new digital diplomacy jobs

We've just advertised for 2 new jobs in Digital Diplomacy Group:

• User Experience Manager
• Digital Campaigns Manager
  

Posted at 17:51 01 May 2009 by Stephen Hale  |  Comments[2]

How do you want to receive our content?

The Foreign Office has more than 200,000 subscribers to our web content. But do we give them what they want? And what more could we do to make our content available to subscribe to?

Magazine editors spend a lot of time thinking about how to attract - and then manage - their subscribers. They have to because the ongoing success of their magazine depends on how well they do it. Subscribers are a guaranteed audience. They pay for 12 editions in 1 go, and renew their subscription by direct debit. You don't have to win their custom every month. They keep your readership figures consistent despite the tactics of your competitors, and high enough to attract advertisers.

We don't have a magazine to sell at the Foreign Office, but we do have subscribers. Our subscription service allows people to subscribe to the parts of our web content that interests them. Some subscribe to receive our news releases by email, some want our travel advice updates for specific countries, others might have a particular interest in our human rights content.

I've thought for a while that we should treat our subscribers it bit better. After all they are an already engaged audience - they have made it through our unwieldy subscription process, and they've actively requested to receive updates when our web content changes.

Rob Pearson has been doing some great work for us to find out what we can do to improve what we offer through subscription. I've been quite surprised by the results. A survey sent to a random selection of 10,000 of our subscribers not only got a far higher response rate than we expected (10%) but also revealed that our users seemed pretty pleased with with the current service.

We’ve found that we have a really engaged audience who like a lot of things about email alerts. There’s room for improvement: the irrelevance of some updates ("...the next ambassador in yangon is frankly irrelevant"), the division of information between the alert and the site, and problems in changing subscriptions or unsubscribing were quoted as problems. But our users said that they liked the convenience, timeliness, accuracy, and impartiality of current email alerts.

Now that doesn't mean we'll leave things as they are. An endorsement from existing subscribers doesn't tell us anything about the people who tried to subscribe but couldn't, or about those those for whom only SMS alerts would be useful. We know there's plenty we can do to improve our offer to potential subscribers.

I'm not a representative user, but personally I'd rather take an RSS feed than subscribe to an email alert. And I know that brilliant digital campaigns provide multiple ways for users to subscribe to their content. But our survey clearly shows that, while there's some appetite for alternatives (see graph below), our existing subscribers want to stick with email alerts.

We’re considering some new ways to distribute alerts. Tell us how likely you’d be to make use of the following:

In Digital Diplomacy Group, we think that the future for Foreign Office web content will be less about our corporate websites and more about brilliant content delivered in whatever format our users find most convenient. But I think we'll do well to listen to our existing subscribers, and provide them with what they are telling us they want now.

I'll report back on how we get on with this work, but I'd be interested to hear what others are doing to keep their subscribers happy, and to reach out to new subscribers.

(By the way, a by-product of the survey I mentioned is that we now also have 478 subscribers who have said that they would be happy to take part in further research. Thank you - we'll be in touch.)

Posted at 18:30 30 April 2009 by Stephen Hale  |  Comments[7]

London Summit digital campaign evaluation

So our website is now a historical record - the debate has moved on. There's still plenty to do of course, and for many the summit marks the start of a new debate. But our digital campaign is over, and we can take a step back and assess how we did. Did it deliver what we intended? And what lessons can we learn and share?

We'll publish all our evaluation on the London Summit website itself, including all the numbers, measurement against all our KPIs, and the independent evaluation of others. But it's been a couple of weeks now, and I think I have enough distance and data to reflect on what we did.

We started this work with a degree of confidence. We've been thinking about - and practicing - how to do digital diplomacy in the Foreign Office for a while now, and as a result we were pretty confident about our methods in January. The lead up to the summit seemed like the ideal opportunity for digital engagement. I published here the performance indicators we set for ourselves at the start of the process, but if I'm honest, I really didn't know whether we'd deliver them all, or how much of an impact our digital campaign would have.

So did we succeed? Well, I'm not sure yet.

There are bits that I think we did well. I think we made good judgments about the ambition for the London Summit website, and the tone of the content that appeared there. We did well to ensure that the site aggregated content from around the world, and provided space for a range of voices. Some of our partnerships with other web platforms and forums worked really well. We produced a lot of video and photo content, which helped bring the debate to life. We provided good authoritative content on the purpose of the summit, an efficient service for journalists and accreditation, live streamed video throughout the summit, and lots of structured ways for people to contribute to the debate.

We've learned a lot about how to deliver intensive digital campaigns. We had a great team working on the campaign, and we relied on the expertise of others across government, the FCO network and our partners. We published new content many times a day which enabled us focus our work on the narrative of the debate as it emerged.

We also learned a lot about the FCO web platform, about delivering content to a global audience with a huge concentrated peak of traffic. And we learned a lot about citizen engagement, how and when to encourage debate, and when to just take a step back and reflect what's going on elsewhere.

There were plenty of things that didn't work. As you'll see from the performance indicators below, there are some things that we set out to deliver, but just didn't achieve. Some of our ideas were never realised and some of our partnerships just didn't come off. We hosted and commissioned a lot of debate, and we listened to what others were saying online, but we didn't often actively participate ourselves other than in delivering messages, aggregating, or summing up.

Our website was a destination for authoritative content and specialist debate, but of course other websites provided alternative places for the popular global debate to take place online. And our success in encouraging debates in some countries, wasn't matched with all our target audiences.

Of course, this is all just subjective, and I'm possibly not in the best place to judge. So we'll publish all the bits of evaluation that we and others produce on the now frozen summit site, and I'll highlight the best bits here.

But I promised to report on our performance against the original KPIs. So here you are (we'll publish the full version of this on the summit site):

1. The focal point for engaging and shaping global opinions

- http://www.londonsummit.gov.uk most authoritative site for "London Summit" according to major search engines.

Met. Our content was well optimised for search so we were quickly at the top of natural search rankings for our key terms. Having said that, we found that other terms were far more widely used that some of the initial key terms that we identified.

- influential sites in every target country link back and quote from http://www.londonsummit.gov.uk

Partially met. Of the 23 countries targeted, influential sites (those with a Google page rank of 6 or above) from 12 countries linked to the London Summit site.

- all visitors find it quick and easy to find the info they are looking for

Our user survey will provide more data here.

2. Authoritative provision of in-depth briefings on Summit

- all unclassified policy papers accessible from londonsummit.go.uk in web friendly form

Met. We published everything we had, including communiques, transcripts, summaries, video. And we didn't resort to PDFs.

- only the highest-quality content goes on the site based on the content guidelines. If it doesn't help to achieve an objective is doesn't go on

Partially met. We wrote good copy, kept to our content guidelines, and had a clear process for clearing policy-sensitive content. But I know we sometimes published in a hurry, and corrected later.

- at least four expert bloggers providing authoritative real time content for London Summit

Not met. We ran an editors' blog, Tom Watson blogged from the summit, Stephen Timms posted tweets (#timms), the Foreign Secretary posted blogs, and government economists posts articles on the Vox EU debate. But we didn't have specific attributed expert bloggers contributing to the online debate throughout the campaign.

3. Effective operational functions for 2,000 journalists

- Media centre regarded by journalists as most respected government media site ever

I think we did ok, but our survey of users will tell us more.

- live streaming of all press conferences/keynote speeches

Partially met. We streamed the whole summit. We didn't live stream any other events, but we published a lot of same-day video thanks largely to our partnership with British Satellite News.

- the site is reliable (minimal down time) and meets AA accessibility at all times

Partially met. The site had 99.82% availability, the page templates all met AA standards and have been tested with real users for accessibility, and our key content was always provided in accessible formats. But our content did not always validate as AA accessible (for example, we did not caption, or provide text alternatives for all our content, and when were faced with publishing a video without a transcript, or not publishing it at all, we published the video).

4. Respected Platform for discussion and debate

- seamless integration with all partner engagement sites

Not met. Our referral stats show that user journeys between the parts of our web presence were not common. So although we did some cross promotion through RSS feeds and promos we didn't always deliver reciprocal links, so our users could not move seamlessly between our partner sites.

- clear evidence of link between pre-summit web debate and post-summit outcomes

Met. Our debate issues reflected many of the outcomes. It is less easy to measure whether the online debate influenced - or just reflected - the outcomes, but I hope our detailed evaluation (and the evaluation of others) will provide some data here.

- visitors return to the site, go to other areas of our London Summit web presence or subscribe to feeds/emails

Partially met. 27% of visitors to the site were repeat visitors, and 2,273 people subscribed to receive our email newsletters, but there wasn't significant traffic between areas of the summit web presence.

- the site (and related wider web-presence) becomes a best-in-class example of digital engagement

For others to decide

And some slected numbers (because however much I protest that evaluation isn't just about numbers, I know I can't get away with not mentioning them at all):

London Summit website (29 January - 6 April): 466,159 visits, 1,572,643 page views

London Summit YouTube: 149,580 video views

Live video streaming: 165,000 views on 2 April

London Summit Flickr: 1,065,825 photo views

VoxEU Global Crisis debate (ongoing): 160 articles, 300,000 page views

Yoosk London Summit: 327 questions, 36 answers from public figures

Chosun debate (Korean London Summit forum): 231,832 unique visitors (by 2 April)

I'll post more on the digital engagement, and the other evaluation as it's published.

Posted at 17:22 17 April 2009 by Stephen Hale  |  Comments[1]

Summit bloggers make history

The London Summit broke new ground for digital media. I feel sure that the debate that took place in blogs and forums influenced opinion around the world in the lead up to and during the summit, and that digital debate has contributed to the way in which the outcome of the summit has been received.

We've played our part, running the UK government web presence, but a lot of the debate has taken place spontaneously elsewhere. I've been really excited about the work of G20 Voice, bringing 50 bloggers from 22 countries to the summit venue. I played a very small role in helping to make some connections, so I know that the 50 bloggers owe their place at the summit to the vision and perseverance of Shane, Karina and the rest of the G20 Voice coalition. Their legacy will be that it will probably seem perfectly natural for bloggers to have similar or greater access to the next summit.

And it almost passed me by, but I think there was a historic moment for blogging in the Excel Centre when Richard Murphy - one of the G20 accredited bloggers - was called to ask the Prime Minister a question.

Here he is asking it:

And here he is reflecting on the moment afterwards:

Posted at 01:04 04 April 2009 by Stephen Hale  |  Comments[5]

London Summit: 1 day to go

We're nearing the end of our digital campaign in the lead up to the London Summit.

The foreign leaders are arriving, our debate phase is almost over, and we're now focussing on covering the summit as it happens and reflecting the global reaction.

The summit is everywhere now (in old and new media), traffic to our web presence has soared, and people have taken to the streets of London. It seems silly to think that a few weeks ago, we were thinking about ways in which we could generate interest.

Over the next couple of days you can watch the live stream from the summit, and we'll be featuring other content as it happens on the London Summit site.

I'll post more on what we did, what worked and what didn't, and what we've learned.

Posted at 13:10 01 April 2009 by Stephen Hale  |  Comments[0]

An event: bringing digital diplomacy home

We hosted a digital diplomacy event in King Charles Street today: an invited audience, a panel of digital diplomats including John Duncan, Mark Kent, Philip Barclay, Allex Ellis, David Warren and me, and Rory Cellan Jones chairing.

Others have already written about it elsewhere - and you can watch clips on our Bringing Foreign Policy Home rolling record - so I won't describe it here.

I really like the idea of running physical events for digital champions and bloggers. Bloggers often welcome the opportunity to move from the virtual to the physical. And of course, if you invite a load of bloggers to an event, you do so in the knowledge that they are likely to blog about it soon afterwards. So the event doesn't really feel over when people leave the room.

One of the lessons we've learned during the last 2 years, is that digital engagement has to happen in almost-real-time if it's going to have any impact. But it's a lesson I really didn't need to share today. If our guests were allowed to bring mobile devices into the Foreign Office building, I'm sure the event would have been covered in actual-real-time. As it was, Rory posted an audio blog as soon as he got his phone back, and tweets and blogs appeared soon after.

I hope the people there got something out of it. Personally it was just great for me to see so many of our global bloggers in the same place, sharing their contrasting experiences. But I'm also aware that we've by no means mastered digital diplomacy, and we need to listen to and learn from others. So it was good to hear what people outside the Foreign Office network make of what we're trying to do.

Some other reflections:

• Rory Cellan Jones
• Tony Curzon Price
• Simon Dickson
• Ian Brown
• John Duncan

Posted at 23:33 25 March 2009 by Stephen Hale  |  Comments[0]

What can governments learn from Skittles?

There's been a lot of chatter about the new Skittles website in the last few days. You can read about it in detail elsewhere. But in a nutshell, Skittles replaced their corporate website with a simple widget that directs readers to relevant user generated content on leading social media sites, including Wikipedia, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Flickr.

You would have to have been a real Skittles enthusiast to have visited the official website before. I really don't know what you'd expect to find on the corporate website for a packet of sweets. So on this level the makers of Skittles have delivered a public relations triumph: They've done something novel > lots of people are talking about Skittles > more people will probably buy some Skittles. 

But there's something more interesting in this if the makers of Skittles have decided that there's no longer any point delivering official lines on a shiny corporate website.

Of course, we all know that people don't respond well to marketese on the web. And that web users often value the opinions of other web users far more highly than the opinions of corporately employed web editors. eBay and Amazon recognised this ages ago and put user generated content at the heart of their web content.

What Skittles appear to have done is go a step further and do away with almost all their corporately edited content, relying entirely on user generated content to present information about their product.

This may just be a PR stunt (or a clever market research tool), but I think it highlights some interesting challenges to the way we think about corporate websites and digital campaigns.

In the Foreign Office - as elsewhere - we have recognised that user generated content often has more value that officially drafted and cleared content. That's why we've partnered with Yoosk on our London Summit campaign, it's why our bloggers encourage comments, and it's why all of our digital campaigns involve an element of reaching out beyond our own content.

But the Skittles approach suggests that maybe we don't need a web platform at all to deliver digital campaigns. And that we may not need to employ any of our own web editors. After all, content has always been king, and maybe the most engaging and accurate content is being provided by amateur authors, using whatever social media they find most convenient.

If our "editors" can use the combined content management systems of Wikipedia, YouTube and Delicious, then maybe we don't need to invest in content management systems of our own.

And maybe we don't need to host and manage our own websites at all any more in order to deliver digital campaigns. This could solve the UK government innovation v domain rationalisation debate. As well as putting a few digital agencies out of business.

Right, I'm off to redirect the Foreign Office website to the Wikipedia entry to see if anyone complains.

Posted at 00:33 06 March 2009 by Stephen Hale  |  Comments[3]

Ukrainian president joins Twitter

A quick update on social media adoption by the government of Ukraine: Viktor Yushchenko started tweeting yesterday.

My Ukrainian isn't up to much but it looks like it's regularly updated, and being used to promote content on the official website. Good stuff.

Posted at 20:11 25 February 2009 by Stephen Hale  |  Comments[0]

Proving the value of digital campaigns (and why Twitter won't take off in Ukraine)

I met a delegation of Ukrainian government officials the other day to talk about digital diplomacy. It's one of the perks of my job that people outside the UK are interested in what we do. They provide a challenge that I don't necessarily get from my peers in the UK digital community. (Who else is going to tell me that Twitter won't work as a tool in Ukraine - because you only get about 3 Ukrainian words for 140 characters?)

We talked about the online campaigns that we've run recently in the Foreign Office, the way we manage and present web content, and some of the tools we've been using for digital engagement. I think I surprised them (and myself) by how excited I got when they asked how we evaluate our work in Digital Diplomacy Group. But the fact is I am very excited about proving that digital engagement works. And more than that: I think we have a responsibility to measure the actual impact of digital campaigns, rather than get carried away with the ease with which we can develop new tools.

Of course, web practitioners are notoriously lazy about evaluation because everything we do on the web produces numbers. Stats are almost always interesting, and it's easy to present them as evaluation. But they're not enough. The Foreign Office web platform had 2.5 million unique visitors  in January. But so what? I know that I could significantly drive up traffic to the Foreign Office YouTube channel by posting a film of 150 ambassadors line dancing (I'm sure they'd be up for it). But traffic doesn't deliver foreign policy objectives. It just delivers traffic.

Our approach to evaluation was developed by Liam King, who is even more excited than I am about evaluation. It's not complicated - this is what we aim to do:

1. Insist on setting objectives and identifying target audiences for everything we do on the web.

2. Pick something that we can measure that will give us an indication of how well we met our objectives and and reached our target audience.

3. Measure it.

We do use stats, and we welcome independent evaluation (the Hansard Society are evaluating our blogs and our London Summit campaign at the moment), but we concentrate on providing evidence that tells us something about what we set out to achieve. This approach means that all the evaluation we do is useful for the people we're working with (because we are very clear about expectations right at the start), and it's useful for us (because we can use it to improve what we do).

I've pasted below the objectives and performance indicators that Liam and Paul set Digital Diplomacy Group in January for our work on the London Summit website.  Our approach will develop, and we'll measure KPIs for each of our engagement exercises over the next 6 weeks. But the original performance indicators won't change - once the summit is over we'll be able to say with authority whether we delivered what we set out to.

London Summit website objectives and performance indicators:

1. The focal point for engaging and shaping global opinions

• http://www.londonsummit.gov.uk most authoritative site for "London Summit" according to major search engines.
• influential sites in every target country link back and quote from http://www.londonsummit.gov.uk
• all visitors find it quick and easy to find the info they are looking for

2. Authoritative provision of in-depth briefings on Summit

• all unclassified policy papers accessible from londonsummit.go.uk in web friendly form
• only the highest-quality content goes on the site based on the content guidelines. If it doesn't help to achieve an objective is doesn't go on
• at least four expert bloggers providing authoritative real time content for London Summit

3. Effective operational functions for 2,000 journalists

• Media centre regarded by journalists as most respected government media site ever
• live streaming of all press conferences/keynote speeches
• the site is reliable (minimal down time) and meets AA accessibility at all times

4. Respected Platform for discussion and debate

• seamless integration with all partner engagement sites
• clear evidence of link between pre-summit web debate and post-summit outcomes
• visitors return to the site, go to other areas of our London Summit web presence or subscribe to feeds/emails
• the site (and related wider web-presence) becomes a best-in-class example of digital engagement
  
  

I'll report back on how we did against these in April.

Posted at 13:29 19 February 2009 by Stephen Hale  |  Comments[5]

FCO bloggers the best in the world

Great to see our Zimbabwe bloggers listed in the Sunday Times top 100 blogs in the world. It's well deserved recognition for Philip and Grace (alongside Paul Daniels, Paris Hilton and Richard Madeley among others)  who've been telling stories that only they could tell from our embassy in Harare for the last year.

Posted at 14:18 15 February 2009 by Stephen Hale  |  Comments[1]