Stephen Hale

How to train a digital diplomat

We have digital diplomacy staff based in Washington, Singapore and New Delhi, as well as London. It's rare that we're all physically in the same place, but we were all in London last week for our annual bout of knowledge sharing, training and brainstorming.

Because it's so rare that we're all together, we try to pack a lot in when we do meet, sharing experiences from the last year and planning what's next. It's exhausting, but it's my favourite week of the year.

We spent a lot of the week doing and talking about training. We currently run 3 training courses for Foreign Office staff: 2 aimed at people who publish web content (which are really about how to use our content management tools), and a new course about digital campaigning.

They're all important, but it's the last one that I'm most interested in. At the moment we manage several campaigns out of our London based team. But we want people around our network to deliver digital diplomacy. There are 16,000 staff in the Foreign Office network, in 150 countries. If we're going to make the the most of digital diplomacy opportunities, we have to spread the word.

Our new digital campaigns course aims to do just that. It is aimed anyone who will be responsible for digital campaigns (which tends to be policy teams rather than web editors).

So how do you train people to embrace digital diplomacy? We try to cover a bit of theory (short), a workshop (using a real example), some case studies (recent things we've actually done), some practical help, and space for discussion.

I think that the key to the success of the course is to keep it rooted in the real world, avoiding hypothetical scenarios. We don't want to run an academic course on the theory of digital engagement - others can do that. We want the people we train to go back to their jobs and begin delivering practical digital diplomacy activity.

In practice this means using:

• real case studies (things we have actually done, or even better, digital diplomats talking about their work)
• real scenarios (so our workshop is introduced by a policy officer with a problem that needs solving, with the aim of developing real working solutions that the participants can then go and actually implement)

Having spent a week participating in expertly run sessions, I know there are lots different ways to share knowledge. I'm interested in finding the best ways to remove the novelty from digital engagement, so that the Foreign Office can make the most of opportunities to use digital diplomacy methods and tools. It will start with our brilliant digital diplomacy staff and our digital champions, but if we're successful, we'll spread the word much wider. 

Posted at 17:23 29 July 2009 by Stephen Hale  |  Comments[2]