Notes from Barriers to Engagement event in July 2012..

Aim: how to “dismantle the barriers to people engaging in a city”

Or “how to make our institutions more like us/ work for us”

Apathy = "without pain"

Learned helplessness  = learned rationally not to try

• Map out how the “engagement” process looks like from a user point of view..?
• What are their motivations for attending..?
• Can we use “volunteering as staff development?”
• “choice based architecture”
• Teach the problem away

Sortition – representative community democracy (on the hawkesworth estate? Major of hawkesworth?) 20 people drawn lots on how the city progresses.

 

Driven by citizens

Driven by structures

Engagement

Or association

Mapping out entry points:

• Networks socially mapped
• Growing social capital
• Skills, relationship

Barriers to Engagement list:

1. past experiences
2. beauracracy/ staff structures
3. local communication methods – noticeboards
4. capability and capacity of staff
5. no time ticking on an issues (chronic rather than acute issues)
6. cynicism
7. don’t understand the decision making structures
8. suspition of certain institutions
9. specifics groups harder to engage (younger/ BME)
10. cronyism – usual suspects
11. lack of a strong cause
12. jargon
13. cultural barriers over processes
14. time to engage
15. measureing progress
16. the way we are viewed/ boxed in
17. assumptions of identity

Drivers of engagement	Engagement forcefield	Barriers to engagement
Politics		Cuts
innovation		Confidence & capability
Lack of cash		Travel
Deprofessionalisation of orgs		Money
Cronic health & social lcare		information
Better services in tough time		Culture of host orgs

An irreverent history of the institution of the National Trust..

I'm not really interested in stately homes, so I'm not suggesting this is the definitive truth, but i want to look at where our national institution is going in context of a brief biased history. If this is not for you try the book on the right.. ;-)

• 1893 formed by an odd marriage of social reformers and establishment elites.
• 1930s gets given land from early enthusiasts
• 1960s gets given country houses in lue of death taxes
• 1980s spends millions renovating land and buildings
• 2000s gets commercial and offers days out for masses

So where next?

There will always renovation needing doing, but much less than previously as the large scale stuff is done, and without new acquisitions (with happen but won't be on the scale of previous ones) and maintainance costs comparatively are low with the current sound business model.

So?

1. There are some interesting ideas going round about relevance (more on this later, but have a look at soho stories)
2. the next 10 years will be bumper years as more people retire early and relatively affluently enjoy their leisure time and are able to volunteer for the organisation. They are also likely to have assets on death which can be offered as legacies.
3. the commercialisation, professionalism and branding of the organisation has polarised the previous core. the old trustees, the old guard are unhappy with the streamlining of trustee boards etc
4. the new membership may see membership as an entry ticket more than membership. Brand profile shows diminishing recognition for the logo, and increased perception of the brand in certain contexts. But it may mean we have fewer members who buy membership every year for life. and we will see people who visit Historic Houses association instead (alternating years is quite popular)
5. a shift from country living to urban living. penetration in urban areas is much lower. immigration means more people in cities, and more of the type of demographic who don't visit old crumbling stately homes. if these are the future. Current models of engagement like school visits, and previous projects with BME orgs (for example) may not have the sense of relevance to sustain new audiences.
6. we may see a dip in interest in the old towards the modern sometime over the next 15 years. once everyone has had their fill of 18th Century furniture, and family trees etc..

The biggest danger imho is that this institution becomes irrelevant. It is incredibly powerful right now, and is doing some great things. I am interested in how it acts as a platform for others deciding its future. I think it needs to be built on people's passions. I think it is changing from an organisation to  a movement, and in which case its needs to change what it does as well as how it is perceived. I think it is doing both..

This is a long term game.

Stuart Lee's mixed thoughts on the National Trust

Here's Stuart Lee's mixed thoughts on the national trust in 2011 - i've been a bit selective on pulling bits out (its basically having a go at the talking benches), but there's some interesting things in there.. 

"I joined the National Trust in a spirit of class hatred, and keep my membership card on a shelf next to my CD reissues of the first four Crass albums. I used to be breathless with pleasure at the thought that these massive country piles no longer belonged fully to the bucktoothed scum who inherited them, living in poverty in one wing while Daily Mail readers stamped dog muck and Shippams paste into their carpets. The professional posh man Julian Fellowes last week identified such prejudice as the last acceptable hatred. Hostility he and his oyster-guzzling friends experience would be unacceptable if directed towards the poor. But making jokes at Fellowes's expense is quite different to mocking the disenfranchised. Like all posh people, he was utterly delightful and entirely incapable of deliberate malice. Why, one could listen to them for hours, going on about what they imagine life is like.

"I have mellowed over the years, and now part of what lures me to National Trust properties is not hatred of the posh, but the sadness of these places and their stories, their quiet and dignified tragedy. Fellowes says he believes that the quest for social equality is a pointless folly. Certainly, the cultural and political achievements of the denizens of the Trust's inherited homes, understood through the artefacts they left behind, would seem to reveal them as our natural betters, if only because they had the resources to pursue finer things for their own sake.."

www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/05/national-trust-stewart-lee

What can we learn from the London games about volunteering..?

So LOCOG tells us 40% of 250,000 people who applied to volunteer for the 2012 games had never volunteered before. 


Think about that. 


And compare it with hundred of volunteer recruitment campaigns over the last 10 years. The London volunteers were prepared to pay for their own lodgings, travel and much more. The people who put together this programme were prepared to spend £1,000 a head. Not £8 a head on a Christmas lunch. Whatever you think of this - we are entering a very different world on volunteering. So why the marked difference between the do-gooding, and the feeling-part-of, the obligation and the celebration?


Ok, the pull of the games is different from the pull of helping out at a hospice, running a scout group or being a trustee of a user led organisation. I get a bit nervous working for the national trust that volunteering is a bit of fluff, that its not life-changing, wondering round some garden, or explaining conservation techniques in some peat bog. Also i find LOCOGs triumphalism a bit nauseating. So lets find somewhere between.  

• There are a large number of people who, when they volunteer their time, want to do something with more impact than holding a hand, or keeping a church door open. 
• Lots of these people don’t currently volunteer and beyond the baby boom bulge of the next 10 years (and increase of people with time on their hands, and in good health) 

As far as I know the national trust is alone in undertaking huge research into the motivations of its volunteers. When we know what they want, we can hopefully build a better offer. But lets not pretend we can sidestep a lot of the existing volunteer centres, and volunteer recruitment campaigns and succeed overnight. Lets stop asking people to put their hands up in obligation, lets get the data on what motivates people, give them more of what they want, and build a fun sense of mutualism that fits better with the 21 Century. 

My book reviews of Nudge, Tribes, & Here Comes Everybody..!

Nudge: Nudge is the science of how people actually behave - not how we want or think they behave. What about collection tins shaped like seaside games, bins that thank dog walkers for clearing up mess, or reduce the public flow round certain parts of properties based on nudges in behavioural patterns..? Could this help us normalise and positively reinforce pro-social behaviour, which could help us mainstreaming volunteering beyond the 30% civic core. 

Tribes: Thinking in Tribes creates self motivated subcultures. The tribe decides where the end goal is and how to get there. Leadership can come from anywhere, with the facilitated role of “keeping the balloon in the air”. Is it ok if everyone isn’t on-board right from the beginning..?

Leadership plain & simple: Can be summarised as: Think, Talk, Do.. ;-)Do you think "we are up to something together"..? Test your Leadership muscles:

1. ×          What's your shadow of a leader?
2. ×          Build BIG relationships
3. ×          Analyse the gaps between yourself "just surviving" and "at your best". then look for the trigger points

Here comes everybody: My favourite book in the whole world. Clay Shirky expanded on it with a video called “organising without organisations” which is 20 mins of brilliance! Has links to microvolunteering, mass-amateurisation, and crowdsourcing. Lots to think about in how we create a movement from hundreds and thousands of individual parts.Does this offer is new forms of non hierarchical collaboration with massive disruptive potential..?

10 Ways to Sell Your Ideas the Steve Jobs Way.. (By Michael Gass)

10 Ways to Sell Your Ideas the Steve Jobs Way.. (By Michael Gass)

Plan your presentation with pen and paper. Begin by storyboarding your presentation. Steve Jobs spent his preparation time brainstorming, sketching and white-boarding before he creating his presentation. All of the elements of the story that he wants to tell are thought through, elements are planned and collected before any slides are created.

1. Create a single sentence description for every service/idea. Concise enough to fit in a 140-character Twitter post. An example, for the introduction of the MacBook Air in January, 2008, Jobs said that is it simply, “The world’s thinnest notebook”.
2. Create a villain that allows the audience to rally around the hero—you and your product/service.  A ‘villain’ doesn’t necessarily have to be a direct competitor. It can be a problem in need of a solution.
3. Focus on benefits. This is important for ad agencies to remember. Your audience only cares about how your service will benefit them so lead with benefits rather than agency credentials and capabilities.
4. Stick to the rule of three for presentations. Almost every Jobs presentation was divided into three parts. You might have twenty points to make, but your audience is only capable of retaining three or four points in short-term memory. Give them too many points and they’ll forget everything you’ve said.
5. Sell dreams, not your services. Steve Jobs didn’t sell computers. He was passionate about helping to create a better world. That was the promise that he sold. For example, when Jobs introduced the iPod in 2001, he said, “In our own small way we’re going to make the world a better place.” Where most people see the iPod as a music player, Jobs saw it as a tool to enrich people’s lives.
6. Create visual slides. There were no bullet points in a Steve Jobs’ presentation. Instead he relied on photographs and images. When Steve Jobs unveiled the Macbook Air, Apple’s ultra-thin notebook computer, he showed a slide of the computer fitting inside a manila inter-office envelope. Keep your agency presentation’s that simple.
7. Make numbers meaningful. Jobs always put large numbers into a context that was relevant to his audience. The bigger the number, the more important it is to find analogies or comparisons that make the data relevant to your audience.
8. Use plain English. Jobs’s language was remarkably simple. He rarely, if ever, used the jargon that clouds most presentations—terms like ‘best of breed’ or ‘synergy’. His language was simple, clear and direct. So don’t use agency speak when presenting, “integration, proprietary process, etc.”
9. Practice, practice, practice. Steve Jobs spent hours rehearsing every facet of his presentation. Every slide was written like a piece of poetry, every presentation staged like a theatrical experience. Steve Jobs made a presentation look effortless but that polish came after hours and hours of arduous practice. Agencies often are forced to rely on spontaneity to provide creative energy for a pitch because they have spent all of their time on putting together the presentation and leave little or no time for rehearsal. Most unrehearsed pitches end up falling flat.

By Michael Gass.. 

http://designtaxi.com/article/101046/Steve-Jobs-Presentation-Tactics-for-Ad-Agencies/

knocked off brand pictures.. (try and take some of these to the olympics) #london2012

http://thechive.com/2008/12/03/name-brand-knock-off-fail-30-photos/

A culture change at the national trust..?

Here's some quotes from the national trust strategy document Going Local (and the reason i joined the organisation - to work on volunteering & community invovement):

"This strategy means nothing less than a cultural revolution for the Trust. It demands a new mindset and a new way of working."

1. A small, determined pressure group has evolved into today’s mass movement. It belongs to you whether we’ve paid a subscription or not.
2. We were founded more than a century ago for the benefit of the whole nation, including those who still feel that the National Trust is for some reason ‘not for people like us’.
3. we want wherever possible to make our answer ‘yes’ not ‘no’.
4. Each property must nurture a web of human links.
5. We must challenge the perception that we are some sort of exclusive club for connoisseurs.
6. we will change our mindset from owning places for people, to owning places with them.
   We must renew these relationships to foster a greater sense of shared ownership.
7. Some people still feel that the Trust is exclusive or remote. We will involve them in our decisions and challenge our own tendency to act as proprietors not facilitators.
8. We’re developing open dialogues with local communities about new uses for our properties.
9. We are rethinking how we use our land in a more creative way.
10. By the early 1990s the village school, shop and pub in Cwmdu, near Llandeilo, Carmarthenshire, had closed – a real loss to this rural community. The Trust bought the rundown terrace, which included a pub, shop and two dwellings, to help preserve the hamlet, working together with the local community.
11. It’s time to move from a hierarchical approach.
12. We are starting: new opportunities for public access to our land for food production.
13. We pledged 1,000 new allotment ‘growing spaces’ by 2012 as part of our Food Glorious Food campaign. We gave away 750,000 packets of seeds and held over 1,100 food events.
14. We want to put all our places back a the centre of community life
    we will ensure our properties are more widely available for local community groups for activities and meetings; — hold regular social events for neighbours and friends in the locality; — encourage dialogue and local participation in decision-making; — advocate local procurement and recruitment policies to bind our places more closely to their surroundings.
15. We have begun to shift from a preoccupation with ownership towards maximising the benefits we can offer, especially to our nearest neighbours
     Thirty plots at the thriving community allotment scheme at Gibside are being used by community groups and local people,
16. We have begun to foster better cooperation with our neighbours and local organisations.
17. We are a rare thread of continuity in an unstable world.

Thoughts..?