Increasingly the “social bumping places”** where we might come across other local residents in our communities are stores and supermarkets … and the RSA believes that this could be turned to greater advantage for both shops and shoppers.
In a recent report called Community Footprint: Shared Value for Business and Communities, the RSA suggests that businesses “should act as ‘community hubs’, helping promote social interaction amongst their customers and developing local action plans to create happier, more resilient communities”.
Emma explained how they had worked with B&Q to research the relationship between their store in Sutton and local customers. They found 42 percent of customers had some interaction with other customers in the store and that 23 percent of customers asked other customers for DIY advice.
The report found that 70 percent of customers say they will remain loyal to a brand that demonstrates social value even in a recession, and suggests businesses should:
Identify a member of staff who will be leading on community work – if possible a local person whose role should include building local partnerships with third sector organisation and social landlords.
Give permission for staff to spend a certain amount of time (e.g. two hours) every week on community-relevant activities
Design and create a central community orientated in-store space that can be used for training and skills events, customer information sharing and innovation.
Emma said:
Businesses who are willing to be pioneering and give something back to customers and the community in concrete, tangible ways will feel the benefits. People will spend more in their stores and customers will stay loyal in hard times. What more can businesses hope for than that?
The term Community Footprint refers to ways in which the project was able to measure the impact of a store in its community – both positive and negative. That means it should be possible to demonstrate quantifiable benefits … not just urge community engagement as a good thing. Social responsibility and ethical business can have a street-level focus.
Emma said that the approach could be extended to clusters of shops, encouraging networking and collective benefits for shops in High Streets and other areas. The RSA has a large membership of Fellows, who are increasing active in RSA projects. Emma said RSA staff would be particularly interested in talking to Fellows who might want to take up the Community Footprint approach in their area.
** For more about social bumping places, see this report of a workshop in Manchester on Asset Based Community Development.
Earlier this week I spent an evening in the Treasury, Whitehall, talking not about the economy but about how visuals and other creative approaches may be used to develop and communicate policy.
Earlier this week I spent an evening in the Treasury, Whitehall, talking not about the economy but about how visuals and other creative approaches may be used to develop and communicate policy.
Last night I dropped into a West End gallery, tripped lightly over freshly-laid turf towards a barful of delicious Courvoisier cocktails, greeted on the way by engaging young women (and men) with offers of cake, hugs, massage … and sex and intimacy conversations.
Just another PR event in the life of a socialreporter? No, it was promotion of the Mindapples mental health project … so let’s move from tab-style to (slightly) serious. read more »
Update and summary: Lord Nat Wei, one of the authors of the Big Society idea and Network founder, will no longer blog about the vision. He will be working as unpaid advisor to Government. Meanwhile, many people are talking about Big Society, but finding it difficult to get to the core idea and connect with each other. The network could make a virtue of listening, and encouraging many voices.
There’s been lots of discussion around Big Society over the past couple of weeks, as you can see from my bookmarks, the Twitter stream, and this smart way of displaying content generated in many different places.
Using paper.li you can agree a hashtag (keyword with # before it) then ask people to post links (URLs) of blog items or other content in a tweet containing the hashtag. Set up paper.li to search for the tag, and it displays both the tweets and the original articles – creating your own news page refreshed daily (thanks @evangineer). read more »
It is just two years since the first Social Innovation Camp, when a mix of social entrepreneurs, geeks and activists came together for a weekend to develop projects from a set of crowdsourced ideas, and pitched for a prize to help further development.
That and similar formats are now well developed and accepted, if not documented … so I’m delighted my colleague Amy Sample Ward has taken the trouble to create a wiki explaining what’s involved.
Some social media discussions may be getting a bit tired and inward looking, as I wrote here. However, events and meetings over the past couple of weeks have given me a fresh boost of energy and optimism. At the heart of this is the very obvious idea of focussing on the individual, not the tools, and what people want to achieve. Why has it taken me so long to reconnect with that? Too many shiny toys and apps, perhaps. read more »
Daves Briggs reflects on the recent ukgovcamp unconference he organised, and the need to move beyond conversation: “What we seem to lack is an ecosystem of ideas in public services. Discussions about new ways of doing things, how to change the way things are, how ideas get progressed into prototypes and then into actual delivered services or ways of working”.
The prospect of doing some interviews at the seminar on Jemima Gibbons book, Monkeys With Typewriters, later today set me thinking on some gentle provocations to get things going … particularly ones that are a bit metaphorical.
Recent conversations and exchanges dispel any remaining simplistic enthusiasm for the possible benefits of social media. It isn’t a magic potion. We should pay far more attention to the context in which social media is used, for what purpose, by whom and so on. read more »
The Crowdsourced Council event earlier this week was for me interesting at three levels. First for the idea expressed in the name – that councils should use a variety of different methods to find out people’s opinions, engage with them, and improve performance in doing so. Secondly, for a useful demonstrations of tools showing how this might be done. And thirdly some insights into just how difficult it is to introduce these innovative new methods to councils, even when costs are low.
I came away with a new/old idea: that we need an open innovation exchange to help entrepreneurs, councils and customer/citizens collaborate to find new ways forward.
The event was organised by FutureGov in partnership with Capital Ambition, and we had demonstrations from Uservoice, Best Before Media, Yoosk, Debatewise, GovDelivery and Quiet Riots. Follow the links to see the goodies on offer. They provide a terrific range of ways in which people could discuss issues, vote on their preferences, create audio and video content, get updates and more.
In the four video interviews Dominic Campbell, of FutureGov, explains the thinking behind the event, and we hear from Tim Hood of Yoosk, Dave Worsell of GovDelivery, and also Shane McCracken of Gallomar. They just been award £200,000 from the Wellcome Trust for I’m A Scientist, Get me out of Here – explained here. (You’ll see the four videos in the frame once you start playing, or mouse-over).
As well as the cleverness of the tools in front of us, what really intruiged me was the background story I heard from those developing them: they were often prepared to make some of their offer free; they would collaborate to see how they could offer councils a menu of options and ways of making things work together; some were taking big personal risks to develop something of real social benefit. Yet whether big or small they found it difficult to get their products and services in front of the people who could make decisions, or find ways to test and evolve new tools with both citizens and councils.
A number of barriers emerged. The big one was procurement procedures, which could meant that if you weren’t on the approved list of suppliers you didn’t get a look in. In theory councils would specify what they needed, and then go out to tender: but that doesn’t work well for innovative products. As one developer said: “If you don’t know what you want, because you haven’t seen it yet, how can you specify it?”
Another problem was that decisions usually involved a lot of people in the organisational hierarchy, and often in partner organisations. You couldn’t get them in the same room together. They didn’t even go to the same conferences: “The senior people will be at the old-style big ticket events, while those lower in the hierarchy who may know what’s needed are at the informal barcamps and unconferences.”
You might find one council officer prepared to take an interest, but they would change jobs. If you didn’t get everything lined up at the right time of year, you could lose six months because of holidays and other delays.
All this might be of little concern if it were just a bunch of profit-hungry corporations trying to sell products that councils could better develop in-house – or that tough competition would ensure a better deal for us all. A few years ago it was perhaps the case that councils had to specify major development work through big suppliers. But these days there’s a vast array of social media tools – like those on show – that can be delpoyed rapidly, and at relatively low cost, provided councils can make fast and informed decisions. That means really getting to know what’s available and working collaboratively with suppliers and citizen-users.
Tim Hood summed it up: “People think private companies are just concerned with profit. That’s clearly not true. People risk their livelihoods to try and innovate for public good, and there’s no shame in trying to make some money out of it. There no shame in the decision makers and people in procurement being in the same room and talking through collectively how they can make the whole process work more efficiently”.
But that often isn’t happening. I heard that it can be just as tough for council officers. Unless you are passionate about social media it’s really difficult to see what’s available, and get your ideas adopted. Of course there are brilliant exceptions … officers and whole council departments around the country who are doing great work: Devon, Kent, Barnet, Barnsley keep getting mentions, and there are quite a others as I explored at another conference about knowledge management. It just doesn’t seem sensible to have such clunky systems when it’s desperately important to improve public services and reduce costs at the same time.
Is this a fair analysis? Or did I just happen on a group of people – developers and officers – who, by their interests and enthusiasms, find the current system particularly frustrating and unproductive?
Let’s say the analysis is right at least in part. What might be done in a small, collaborative, organic, social media-ish sort of way? I’m really impressed by the work that Ingrid Koehler, Steve Dale and others are doing on the IDeA knowledge hub, which I’ve written about here. In the longer term the new system and associated development and training should help move all councils, not just a few, across into new ways of working.
But that’s going to take years. Meanwhile Amy Sample Ward and I have been talking to IDeA about ways in which we could use the Social by Social network as a space in which to pilot some ideas. There’s already some groups there. Out initial thinking was on three fronts: how to combine discussion and knowledge sharing, with a market place, linked to events. The aim would be to bring together people working in public bodies with social media developers and suppliers, and with those working in the hyperlocal programmes and third sector. And anyone else interested in how to use social tech for social impact … the substance of our book Social by Social (buy or download free here).
During the Crowdsourced Council event these ideas crystalised into thoughts of an Open Innovation Exchange. It’s not new: Simon Berry, I and others first proposed something like this back in 2007 for third sector organisations, in an open bid to Cabinet Office. We didn’t win, but generated a lot of interest as you can see on the original site here. My friends – and clients – at the Innovation Exchange are now doing a great job in taking forward the winning bid, but it’s focussed on third sector organisations, and social media is only a part of their business.
In essence we would create a complementary space into which anyone could pitch an idea, request, product or service … whether free or paid for. It would be up to IDeA and other public sector organisations – if interested – to promote the exchange to their sectors and interest groups. Similarly for the hyperlocal and third sector interests. We would run some associated workshops and turn up to events like Crowdsourced Council to do some social reporting, broker connections, and recruit people to the exchange.
When I floated the idea to a few developers at this week’s event they sounded seriously interested, and even said they might contribute some seed funding if public sector interests would come in.
That’s as a far as I’ve got with the idea. At this stage I just want to check out if it makes sense. If so, I’ll discuss further with our friends in IDeA, NESTA and other bodies. If they are interested I would suggest that we run an open workshop in January to co-design what’s needed, with the key interests. Let’s model the collaborative exchange process we propose. At this stage I’m not suggesting that the current Social by Social platform would do what’s needed … but it could be a gathering space for those interested.
What do you think? Do drop a comment here, and I’ll also post across on SocialbySocial.net.
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