Stephen Hale

Can I have a new website?

If you work in a digital team in a big organisation you'll be familiar with this scenario:

Someone you haven't met before phones you and says something like:

"I'm working on [insert strategy/product/policy/event]. We'll need a website. How do we get one?"

Your instant reaction might be "No chance. How about using the extensive web presence we've already got?"  but you don't say it quite like that. You say something like: "That's interesting. Tell me what it is you want to achieve?"

How do you turn this scenario into an outcome that satisfies everyone? It's not something we've always got right in the Foreign Office in the past. Here are some ideas:

1. Have a coherent online strategy

You need to do this before you receive the phone call. But if you don't have a positive vision for how you intend to use the web as an organisation, you're not going to be able to convince anyone to follow your advice.

So set it down. And make sure it's ambitious.

If you work in UK government, the Transformational Government website rationalisation programme actually makes it pretty hard to set up new government websites. But you need to offer your excited policy team more constructive reasons to follow your advice than saying "the Cabinet Office won't let you".

In the Foreign Office our digital strategy, policy and guidance is all published on our digital diplomacy website. This includes our vision for digital engagement and outreach into other spaces, as well as explaining how we benefit from a single web domain for all our official sites.

2. Don't say no

It's likely the people that want new websites are exactly the people you want to be working closely with - finding people who have ambitious ideas about how they might use an online presence should be a blessing for any digital team.

And maybe their definition of "website" is actually compatible with your vision of an integrated online presence.

So find out what it is they want to achieve. They might present a compelling case. You might be able to offer them something much better. But you need to work with them - saying no isn't a good way to start.

3. Demonstrate what you can offer

In the Foreign Office our web platform is home to 255 official sites in 40 languages. And we've delivered effective digital campaigns that mainly make use of online spaces that other people run. We've thought very carefully how to present the work of the office online. So we can usually demonstrate what can be done by showing what we've done already.

So for example, we have already thought about how to present foreign policy campaigns and big cross government campaigns, partnerships with NGOs, and policy engagement on subjects that aren't really campaigns, and content about the UK and one other country, and content about multilateral organisations. We have plenty of good precedents, and we have case studies, evaluation reports and a whole bunch of people we've worked closely with in the past to draw on.

4. Share your methods

However good your internal comms, it's likely that a lot of people in your organisation don't really understand what the digital team actually does.

In the Foreign Office we spend a lot of time explaining what we mean by "digital diplomacy". We know that staff don't understand what a digital campaign manager does in the same way that they understand what a press officer does.

So you may need to demonstrate what your team actually offers. For us that means talking through our digital diplomacy method (listen, publish, engage, evaluate), offering to run workshops for policy teams, and demonstrating what we've done for other teams or campaigns.

5. Offer to help them produce a wider digital strategy

Sometimes people think they need a website, but actually just need some help thinking through how they might use the web to meet their objectives. Sometimes a request for a new website might turn into an online marketing strategy, or a blog, or a set of digital partnerships.

As a digital team you should be able to offer them something better than they imagined. By combining their enthusiasm to do something and your expertise you'll be well on the way to doing brilliant work.

You can help them to work through this by developing a comprehensive digital strategy for their project. It doesn't need to be long. We use a set of 5 headings for our digital campaign strategies: Context, Objectives, Audience, Activity, Evaluation. 1 side of A4 is usually enough.

6. Be realistic about resources

The person making the request for a new website might not have considered the resources it takes to maintain it.

And you might find that by sharing all this expertise and good practice, you end up with a long list of tasks to deliver yourself. You might be very happy with this, but if you have other priorities you'll need to decide how you're going to deliver them all.

You don't need to take all the actions yourself. Some campaigns will need full time staff to deliver them - if you want to run an online community then you'll probably need to recruit a full time community manager. If you want to update web content every day, then you probably need to train some new devolved editors. If you're recommending personal digital outreach or blogs then you need to be clear about they time it will take for staff to carry this out.

Digital engagement often comes with no technology cost. We often run big ambitious digital campaigns in the Foreign Office without spending any money on technology. The main resource is usually staff time, and you shouldn't underestimate the amount of time it takes to deliver successful digital campaigns.

7. Set up a new website

If you're done all of this and you conclude that it's the right thing to do, then you should set up a new website. That's exactly what we did for our London Summit campaign, and it's kind of what we're about to do with our cross government Afghanistan content, although both sites make use of existing platforms and are part of wider engagement strategies.

So there you go. A 7 point plan to avoid your heart sinking at the moment that you ought to be delighted by a new opportunity to work on something brilliant. I'd be interested to hear what you do when you take the "new website" call.

Posted at 13:58 09 November 2009 by Stephen Hale  |  Comments[7]

Digital diplomacy website

We all revert to the tools we know. So it's probably not very surprising that the Foreign Office Digital Diplomacy Group run a website about digital diplomacy.

The site describes what we do, why we do it, and how.

This is not new. The FCO has been using the web to share guidance and best practice with our network of devolved editors for ages. It has tended to sit on intranets or behind passwords, but that's not really in the spirit of the transparent approach we're trying take to our digital diplomacy work. So we've removed all the barriers to access, and made (pretty much) everything public.

The site is really a set of resources for FCO staff,  containing policies, guidance, case studies and help. But it's now also close to a statement of intent for digital diplomacy, describing our ambition as well as our method.

The content is aimed at people inside the Foreign Office network. Much of it is too specific to be useful for a wider audience. But if you're interested in reading the Foreign Office social media policy and guidance, or learning more about our agreement with devolved editors, or our approach to video, you can do it now on the digital diplomacy website.

(We'd welcome any feedback on the site, either by commenting on this blog or by sending an email to Debbie, our Head of Comms.)

Posted at 19:11 14 October 2009 by Stephen Hale  |  Comments[1]

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 do you need to be a web professional in government now?

I've spent a lot of time in the last couple of months in interviews, talking to people applying to join the Digital Diplomacy Group. Interviews can be awkward (and they are clearly an imperfect way of recruiting people) but I've met some really interesting and talented people, and I'm confident that the Foreign Office will really benefit once our new team members are in place. 

But the process has made me question what exactly we are looking for from web professionals in government. A couple of years ago it would have been enough for candidates to demonstrate excellent editorial skills, proficiency as a developer, or a sound understanding of user experience to get a job in a government web team. We are still looking for these skills, but now we are also looking for people who understand the motivation of individuals or groups to contribute online, form communities, and collaborate. And they have to be able to apply this knowledge to the policy process, and be able to persuade (often) reluctant policy makers and diplomats the value of making changes to the way they work. I think we're asking for quite a lot.

The resignation over Christmas of one of the leading web professionals in UK government - citing some of the frustrations of being a web specialist working in government - has begun a debate about the pros and cons of working on digital media from within government, and the recognition in senior positions of web professionals.

I have an ongoing dicussion with my boss about the type of people we should recruit to work on digital diplomacy. I think we need to recruit specialists - people with a deep understanding of the web - who can then apply this knowledge to foreign policy issues. He is more inclined to recruit people who really understand foreign policy, who can then apply that knowledge to the web. Of course, we need people who can do both the web and foreign policy, but I don't think there are that many people out there at the moment with experience in both.

Posted at 13:24 06 January 2009 by Stephen Hale  |  Comments[9]

Why would a diplomat blog - some theory and the future

Back to blogs, and why diplomats should use them.

A large part of what we do offline in the Foreign Office is engage and influence audiences in support of UK foreign policy goals.  Diplomacy is not just about states talking to states. And often the issues we work on (like climate change or counter terrorism) can't be solved by 1 state talking to another.

The internet provides us with the means to engage and influence audiences all around the world. And blogs are 1 tool that diplomats can use to talk informally with their target audience about specific foreign policy issues.

The culture of blogging helps us to talk about our work in new ways. We don't want to use blogs to make policy announcements or deliver official messages (we have other online places to do that). But blogs do allow us to:

• open up issues for wider discussion when we don't necessarily have all the answers
• add depth, context and a personal angle to the issues we're working on
• engage in conversations that we know are taking place elsewhere on the web
  

So that's the theory.

I think that our blogs are delivering some of the above now. But here are some of the things we'll be prioritising in the next few months to use our blogs better:

1. Encourage a wider range of voices on our blogs. Because we want to use blogs to talk about our work in different ways, and with different styles and tones of voice.

2. More niche blogs, with well defined objectives, linked to specific projects or campaigns. Because the web is about niches, and it's within niches that blogs can have real value. We want our bloggers to reach their particular target audiences (rather than to generate general-interest traffic).

3. Blogs that are integrated into active online debates. Because we're more likely to engage in a way that is useful to us on issues that people are already talking about online.

4. More blogs in languages other than English. Because if we want to influence local audiences, it makes sense to do it in the language they speak.

The other thing we need to do of course, is learn from others. So I'd be interested to hear what you think, particularly if you think there should be a 5th or 6th priority that we've missed.

Posted at 14:58 19 November 2008 by Stephen Hale  |  Comments[4]