Stephen Hale

Digital diplomacy campaigns - what are they then?

We've changed the way we describe our work on the web in the Foreign Office. We used to mostly talk about managing websites. Now we mostly talk about running digital diplomacy campaigns.

The approach is significantly different. Before, we might have worked with policy teams to make sure we presented their work in an clear, engaging and useful way. Now we ask policy teams what they're trying to achieve, and then help them to make use of online culture and tools to solve their policy problems.

Of course, we do still manage websites (255 of them in 40 languages), but increasingly we are focusing of our work around high priority foreign policy issues, rather than managing a set of tools.

We have a campaign methodolgy (Listen, Publish, Engage, Evaluate) that we think we can apply to any problem. But the digital activity that we suggest can vary hugely depending on what it is we're trying to do.

So we run some big public-facing influencing campaigns, which might involve setting up new official online spaces, or work in partnership with others to reach broad audiences. But we also run less publically-visible engagement with small target audiences which involve us helping diplomats to collaborate with, or influence specific groups.

Some of our campaigns have a natural home on our official websites. Some of them are entirely delivered elsewhere.

To do all this we've recruited digital campaign managers who have a slightly different set of skills to typical web staff. We wanted campaign managers who could really get stuck into policy issues, and design and lead digital campaigns.

That's the theory. But it'll make more sense if I describe some of the problems we're currently trying to solve, and the campaigns we're working on to solve them. That's what I'll do in the next few posts.

Posted at 16:12 25 September 2009 by Stephen Hale  |  Comments[3]