All posts in the topic Fwd: 14: Recruiting and engaging participants (Short link)
Summary
- There are 7 posts — by 6 authors — in this topic.
- Latest post made by Steven Clift at 2005 Dec 14 16:06 UTC
Regarding Carol's question on Recruiting.. this is a good account of our process in Winona over 5 years ago. It was written by Steve Kranz, our local visionary with Winona Online Democracy http://www.co-intelligence.org/CIPol_winonaEdemocracy.html Here's an insightful article on the creation of one of the world's leading "online public commons" - local online discussions that matter in the real world. I wish we were living up to the claim of" leading" today.. .. I was very inspired by Tim Erickson's last two posts. Randy Schenkat by Steve Kranz Co-Chair Winona Online Democracy Nestled in a scenic river valley aside the meandering Mississippi River and surrounded by tree-covered blufftops, the idyllic town of Winona Minnesota (pop.25,000) seems an unlikely place for cutting edge online citizen involvement. But despite Winona's smaller size, E-Democracy has quickly taken hold and continues to grow. The techniques used to implement it demonstrate approaches to starting online civic participation in smaller communities by making specific efforts to build credibility, network within existing organizations, and allow the project to become an outgrowth of the community itself. Winona Online Democracy is an ongoing, community-wide discussion via email about issues that affect life in Winona. It began in mid-August of 2000 and includes a cross-section of community members, members of the media and local leaders such as elected officials, school board members, and state representatives. The goal of Winona Online Democracy is to give everyone a greater voice in decisions that affect the community, increase civic participation, and help to encourage more input into solutions to local problems. Prior to launching the email discussion, 106 members were recruited to participate. This included a broad cross-section of the community as well as a good representation of elected officials, city administrators and community leaders. Two months after the launch date, the list has 170 members and has generated interesting and valuable discussions. The impetus for WOD began when a local organization, Winona A Community of Learners, invited Steve Clift of Minnesota E- Democracy to give a presentation about online civic discussion and the impact it can have on a community. The organizers of this event sought endorsement/sponsorship by local community and government organizations and it attracted about forty people. At the speaking event, organizers collected contact information (including email addresses) from each attendee. They were then invited to a follow-up meeting to discuss implementation in Winona. Eight people attended and the agenda dealt with both the technical aspects of how an email list is operated and the practical aspects of what types of jobs need to be done in order to get the list up and running. Most attending agreed to participate on a steering committee to help get things started. It was decided that an email list would be set up for the steering committee. This would allow them to exchange ideas and continue to maintain a dialogue as they planned the project. In addition, it would serve as a learning vehicle to work out the bugs and make sure the list operated properly before we recruited others to participate. One important aspect of starting the project in a small town is that we felt people would be more comfortable if they perceived it as homegrown. We thought this would increase credibility and make people more open to participation. To that end, we decided to call our group Winona Online Democracy and use the "winona.org" domain name. This "local branding" of our efforts helped make the project feel more integrated into the community and not just another dot-com project from the "big-city". We also decided to develop a website. Our plan was to invite people to participate and direct them to the website so they could get more detailed information. E-Democracy can be difficult to explain concisely, so this allowed people to learn about it at their own pace and then make a decision. Next we focused attention on recruiting. The core of our effort to recruit list participants was the use of the "virtual door knocking" method (see Steve Clift's article at http://www.publicus.net). This involves having people send personal email invitations to people they know asking them to join. To make this as easy as possible, we drafted a sample invitation and encouraged people to modify it to meet their needs (see http:www.winonaonlinedemocracy.org) Virtual door knocking is an important concept because it increases credibility and the likelihood of a positive response. One virtual door knocking method that was extremely successful was to work within organizations to gain access to their membership. We invited local nonpartisan groups to become "endorsing members" of WOD. This included the League of Women Voters, the local teachers union, city government and local universities. This gave us access to about 850 email addresses in the community. These organizations invited their members to become part of WOD. They also agreed to allow us to list them on our website as "Endorsing Organizations. We made a particular effort to encourage elected officials and other community leaders to join the list. Having these people involved not only provides credibility and access to additional resources (such as email lists), but provides value to other participants in that their ideas and opinions will be heard by those that make the decisions. In a small community, it is important to get support from those who are prominently involved in the community. In order to leverage support that we received, we asked everyone who joined the list if we could list them as a "Founding Member". The list of Founding Members was then placed on our website. People could then see the names of their friends, neighbors and people they respected and know that they were supporters of Online Democracy. In addition to our online recruitment efforts, we decided to reach out in offline media as well. We developed a paper brochure to be distributed to clubs and organizations. We also appeared on a local cable-access television program and invited the local newspapers to cover the "launch" our project. This resulted in a front-page article in one of the local newspapers.
I think Randy's and Carol's points illustrate the entire spectrum of
recruitment methods. We tend to favour a fairly rigorous stakeholder analysis
process to work out exactly who needs to be involved, followed by a proactive
search for them - trawling local organisations, even looking for relevant
letters in local newspapers, and then asking those we find who else they think
should be involved. This is in addition to the usual methods of publicising
anything.
There is then the challenge of turning potential participants into actual
participants. We like to send people written invitations to participate
because we find a letter usually gets a better response rate than an e-mail -
and it also conveys both that the invitation is personal and that we would
really value their participation. We then ask people to register for the
process, partly so we have contact details, and partly because if we need a
process to be representative we know who is participating. The registration
process has to be as simple as possible, and we give people the option of
registering by mail, by fax or online. It is interesting the number of people
who will use a freepost envelope in preference to registering online.
The number of people who participate is directly related to the number who are
invited and who register. Our rule of thumb is that about 50% of people who
are personally invited will register, and 50% of those who register will
participate - so if you need 500 people to participate you need to invite about
2,000.
We also run open processes that don't require registration, but on the whole we
find these less satisfactory. I think asking people to register so we can
communicate with them differeniates participation from surveys and market
research processes: it establishes a more personal element, and it is also
probably more courteous - and in these debased times we need a bit more of
that!
I think Andrew is raising an interesting point about online consultations/epanels ... the topic as well as the outreach can be targeted at certain groups of stakeholders/citizens/experts, at representative or stratified samples, etc.. I think many folks think of these online events as always being designed with an "open to all" approach. Consultations geared toward specific audiences can generate special value for councils and decision-makers. With Issues Forums, they are designed with an "open to all" approach. First they tend to first attract "active citizens," elected officials, the media, interest groups, etc. We think this is a good thing because we are putting an open online commons in the middle of real politics and power. Our first goal is to make the forum matter in the real world as an incentive for broad community participation. Nothing in our decade of experience says that starting Issues Forums focus on the disengaged or even less engaged first works. People come into a forum based on their self-interest which must be evident and not just a "have your say" marketing message. However, this does not mean you stop with active citizens, a local steering committee needs to develop efforts (this is where Council funding would be crucial) to recruit "new voices" from diverse communities. We've have found that this great enriches the forum and can present a mix of local voices _never_ expressed physically in the same place be that a government meeting room or the local media. Our case study and the Oxford evaluation point out the need for more aggressive social inclusion efforts. More on this from: http://www.dowire.org/wiki/Issues_Forum_case#Lessons_learnt http://e-democracy.org/wiki/Outreach - Developing ideas for MN here http://e-democracy.org/wiki/Oxford_e-democracy_evaluation For general low/no budget "virtual door knocking" recruitment advice, check out page 9 and 33 in the Issues Forum Guidebook: http://www.e-democracy.org/uk/guide.pdf Steven Clift E-Democracy.Org ^ ^ ^ ^ Steven L. Clift - - - W: http://publicus.net Minneapolis - - - - E: <email obscured> Minnesota - - - - - - T: +1.612.822.8667 USA - - - - Skype/MSN/Y!/AIM: netclift Join Democracies Online: http://dowire.org Start an Issues Forum: http://e-democracy.org/if
"With Issues Forums, they are designed with an "open to all" approach.
First they tend to first attract "active citizens," elected
officials, the media, interest groups, etc. We think this is a good
thing because we are putting an open online commons in the middle of
real politics and power. Our first goal is to make the forum matter
in the real world as an incentive for broad community participation.
Nothing in our decade of experience says that starting Issues Forums
focus on the disengaged or even less engaged first works. People come
into a forum based on their self-interest which must be evident and
not just a "have your say" marketing message."
I think its right, to some extent, to link the incentive to participate with
having real political influence. But, if this is the case, then the real
question is how an issues forum can be made to matter politically? In what
sense are issues forums online commons that operate in the middle of real
politics and power? What does this actually mean? And how far have we got to
realising the first goal of making issues forum matter in the real world (as an
incentive for broad community participation)? At some level, isnt there also
something of a chicken-and-egg problem here, especially when you start with
these interest-based premises?
Well, the 'self interest' aspect is being encouraged by the governemnt with
more funding being directed via Local Strategic Partnerships and then being
distributed to projects that have a specific dependency on the involvement of
community groups.
E.G. Do you weant a new playground? Then form yourself into an action group,
bid for funds (of course with suitble professional support) and commission the
local authority to spend these funds on the project that you are advocating.
The message is: don't wait for the local authority to do something: if you want
it you need to put in just a little bit of effort over a period of time and you
can make it happen.
The role of the local politician changes from one delivering the goods to one
of facilitating citizens to go and get the goods (and thereby having some kind
of moral ownership of the goods).
Ian Robertson <ian.robertson@rochdale.gov.uk>
> Well, the 'self interest' aspect is being encouraged by the
> governemnt with more funding being directed via Local Strategic
> Partnerships and then being distributed to projects that have
> a specific dependency on the involvement of community groups.
Can someone give more details about these LSPs? Who administers
them? Where do you find out what funds are available? How does
a group apply for them? Could they be used for IFs in general,
or are they for capital only?
Question that just popped into my mind: why are so many grants
only usable for capital costs? Running costs seem to be the big
difficulty: things are built, get the sponsors' logos on them
and then there are problems manning and maintaining them.
I know projects have to show business plans and so on, but lots
of them are over-optimistic and sometimes the tying of the grant
to them makes it impossible to change a failing plan before the
end of the grant term.
(Replies to popped question by private email if it's off-topic here.)
Great question. I think most other forms of e-participation start with the premise that the Internet will help improve the quantity of citizen input as well as hold up the idea that diverse groups of citizens, like young people, will show up. This "build they will come" approach doesn't work very well in reality. We are beginning to see a greater focus on the quality of input, particularly with the idea of targeted online consultations. With Issues Forums, our frame of reference in terms of quality is that what exists in the "real" online world. Meaning, how do existing local online forums compare in terms of quality, focus, local issue relevancy, civility, agenda-setting, etc. to an Issues Forum. Comparing Issues Forums to more academic ideals of deliberation or perhaps the practice of in-person, higher budget, facilitated democratic deliberations/consultations sets the bar quite high. I've often said, "That 95 percent of political discussions online are pure junk and our's are only half junk. The miracle is the half has value." So if you have a low cost model to generate 50 percent value (signal) and people accept/figure out how to deal with 50 percent noise, you've created an online public space with value where none existed in practice. (Tim Erickson will tell you he thinks the St. Paul Issues Forum is closer to 75 percent signal and 25 noise. The local UK forums are definitely above my 50 percent signal baseline.) So from the online reality perspective, in Newham you'll note that the only online forum space for all citizens (not Newham Young People Online or the history forum) at the local newspaper is completely dead. It is a virtual ghost town. There is no local blogosphere that we can find. You could dig into the UpMyStreet forums at bit I would suppose. More: http://e-democracy.org/wiki/Newham_online_forums In Brighton and Hove, the most active online forum space is at the Argus newspaper. While local bloggers abound, there does not seem to be much blogging (and commentary) on local issues. We've linked to that an a number of other local forums/listservs: http://e-democracy.org/wiki/Brighton_and_Hove_online_forums A content analysis of the local politics section on the Argus forums (which allow anonymous/alias-based posting) compared to our Issues Forum would be quite informative. Down the road, qualitative interviews with Councillors on which environment they find more attractive for participation (reading and/or posting) would be interesting as would interviews with local media about story ideas or reactions to having their stories commented upon publicly in the Issues Forum. If the OII is game, we'd love to help collaborate with such an independent study. Overall, what seems to be a lack of local media transfer (forum topics generating local media stories) in the UK deserves exploration. First, I'd like to see more outreach by the local steering groups to make sure the main local beat reporters in Newham and Brighton are subscribed to the forums. This agenda-setting aspect is key the success of our Minnesota-based forums and we need push it more in the UK. Local media is the route to a more democratised and accessible Issues Forum, just like any community event, Council report, etc. that generates broader awareness via mass media coverage. To be honest, the relative weakness in UK local media and your greater focus on national news presents a bigger challenge to local democracy in the UK than anything else I've seen to date. Steven Clift E-Democracy.Org