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Three Practical Steps for Scaling Up Listening
By Michael C. Gilbert, March 22nd, 2007
Tomorrow I am teaching a seminar on the topic of Scaling Up Listening as a method of dramatically improving your relationships with stakeholders, whether it's for fundraising, grassroots activism, or community building. I'll be covering strategies, evaluation, long term planning, and specific domain application, as well as a number of useful tactics. I want to share three of those tactics with you here.
I've been talking about "scaling up listening" for several years. It is a theme of both The Email Newsletter Marketing Model, Communication Centered Planning, and the emerging model of The Permeable Organization. It's a powerful way to look at all of the new social media.
The shallow appeal of the Internet to civil society has been its power to scale up talking. Nonprofit organizations, in the context of our regressive economic and political environment, understandably feel that their message is not being heard. Now along comes a medium that allows them to reach a million people for hardly any more money than it takes to reach a dozen. Naturally, we've all gravitated to more talking: more and more email, more and more media about us and our cause, more and more marketing.
The deeper appeal of the Internet is its power to scale up listening. This doesn't require much insight to understand. That same feeling of not being heard that nonprofits are expressing is experienced by almost everyone. The reason people are so excited about talking - as witnessed by millions upon millions of blogs, emails, instant messages, social networking profiles, and so on - is that they hope that they will finally be heard. And the miracle of the Internet is that they are indeed being heard. Sometimes it's just fifteen friends and acquaintances. Sometimes it's unexpected multitudes.
Being heard has a profound effect on people. It keeps them coming back again and again to the place and the people who listened to them. It gets them talking to their friends and colleagues about those people and places. It builds affinity, loyalty, and trust.
Nonprofits must learn to listen on a new scale. This has implications for fundamental organizational structure, communication and resource development strategies, and relationships between and among organizations and their communities. But there are small steps that can be taken as well. What follows are three such steps.
(1) The Most Important Thing
There are a number of different ways to find this out, but if you can, you want the answer to the following question from every stakeholder: What is the most important thing you want us to know about you?
You can ask the question directly or you can glean it indirectly from comments and correspondence. You can ask it early in the relationship, later on, or both. You can ask it regularly, possibly in different ways and acknowledging the previous answer. Or you can just give people the chance to change the answer in some manner.
It's not enough just to ask the question. In fact, when the time comes that the answer to the question is relevant to your communication with this stakeholder, asking and then ignoring can do more harm than good. (See the HIMS Matrix for more about this dynamic.) Sometimes, it's enough to acknowledge the answer without accommodating it. And sometimes, if you know what's important to them, but you didn't actually ask, you can avoid some of the harm of ignoring the answer. But in no case is it enough to just ask.
You have to act on the answer, which can be simpler to do than you may think. Here are three techniques: (1) Keep the answer front and center on the profile or overview screen that you have accessible to you whenever you are considering correspondence with them. (2) Do a one time assessment of the answer and create an actionable list of its implications. Does it affect how often you write to them, how much money or time you ask them for, or what topics you determine are of interest to them? (3) Acknowledge the answer at a later date and ask for structured input on how you're doing.
(2) The Progressive Depth Signup
When you're introduced to someone in a casual setting, you usually have an immediate sense of whether the person is in the right frame of mind to go deeper with the introduction or whether it will stay at the level of names and nods for the time being. You can emulate that same dynamic online.
Here's how people signup at Nonprofit Online News: (1) They enter their email address and only their email address in the simplest possible signup form. (2) They receive an automatic email with a link through which they confirm that they are signing up. (3) They follow that link and confirm. (4) They receive an email welcoming them as a new subscriber, with administrative information that they should save, and a warm invitation to introduce themselves to us, with a link to a web form where they can do that. (5) They go to that page and give us their name, organization, general location, and a little open ended information about themselves (none of this is required). (6) They receive one last email from us, thanking them for introducing themselves and including a copy of the information they submitted for their records.
The important part of this process is the staging of it. The first stage is quite standard these days and makes sure that you have double opt-in permission to send them email. The second stage is also standard and makes sure that they have the information they need to manage the relationship. (Although most people can be counted upon to misplace this, it's important to provide it in the first place, along with the acknowledgment that they are indeed signed up.) It's the third stage - along with its separation from the others - that makes things more interesting.
Asking everyone up front for their name or other information risks losing subscribers. They know full well that you don't need all that other information in order for them to get a newsletter. They also have no idea how you would put that other information to use. (Would you go to a list appending firm and use their name and location to get their postal address or phone number? You might not, but they don't know that.) By separating that out, you've already started the process of listening to them.
Furthermore, you get to hear two things about your stakeholders with that final stage. First, obviously you get to learn specific things about them that you can act on. You can use their name in correspondence with them. You can use their location for getting regional information to them. You can use their organization or other similar information to begin to glean their interests and needs. And you can use any open ended information they offer to begin to understand what's important to them. The second thing you learn is more important than all those details combined. You learn from the beginning who wants to be more engaged with you. By the very act of introducing themselves (or not) your subscribers have segmented themselves in one of the most powerful ways possible. That's something worth listening to.
The way we do progressive depth signup is only one variant on the theme. You could take this in many different directions and I encourage you to do so.
(3) The Two Minute Personal Response
With ten minute breaks, most people can constructively respond to 80% of stakeholder email at a rate of at least 25 messages an hour. (This rate can be much improved later through a wide range of automation and support tools, should that prove worth doing.) The value of encouraging and investing in such personal responses, at the very least on an occasional basis, is profound.
First, with two to four hundred such responses (a couple of days work, most likely spread out over a long period of time), you have a statistically valid sample with which you can test the impact of having made a personal response. This is especially true if you have a similar number of people who've written to whom you do not respond, if you're willing to do that for testing purposes. Clearly you would test the impact on the metrics that matter most to you, especially the intermediate ones that are predictors of taking action.
Second, you will begin to accumulate useful patterns about your stakeholders. Some patterns may be broad and unifying, and can affect the character and content of your future communication with everyone. For example, you may hear lots of similar complaints or widespread praise of particular actions or writings. Some patterns may be narrower and segmenting in nature. You may learn about the nature of divisions among your stakeholders that can be acted upon, but which were not captured by previous structured interactions with them.
Third, you will accumulate useful patterns about your own communication. The simplest example of this is the development of common boilerplate responses to common stakeholder queries. More importantly, you may discover new or refined messages in the process of personal email that are far less likely to be developed in the typical committee-driven process of larger scale communication.
Fourth, you will turn complainers into advocates. Some portion of people who complain will not be worth your time in the long run. (Nor are you worth their time, but the problem with some complainers is that they don't value their own time very well either.) But many of them are fundamentally supporters who have a specific concern that is amplified emotionally by the common frustration with institutional communication. If these people feel heard, you may well have turned them into a devoted advocate for life. Such advocates are often of far greater value than the silent (silenced) masses who have passively inured themselves to not being heard.
Fifth and finally, large scale personal responses are an important step in the continual refinement of your mass communication processes. Only by regularly dealing with enough unstructured communication can you discern the new patterns that you will need to turn it into structured communication. The obvious practical expression of this is the addition of fields that codify important facts about your stakeholders that were previously untracked. One of the problems with benchmarks and "best practices" is how much every organization's communication processes resemble that of all the others out there. The more you develop your unique understanding of your communities of support, the more powerful and effective you will become.
Conclusion: The Promise of Social Media
The power of listening is reflected in the meteoric rise of what are now called "social media". (Email and indeed the entire Internet are social media too, of course, but there is no accounting for the language of trends.) The prominence of blogs, social bookmarking, instant messaging, and discussion groups (in all their variants and brands) will force the hand of organizations that would otherwise never be interested in scaling up listening with anyone but major donors. The three tactics described in this article relate only obliquely to the profound changes that are coming.
One of the most powerful approaches to scaling up listening is strategic in nature. It involves leveraging the power of peers to listen to each other, in the context of communities and networks of which your organization is an intimate component. I've started to explore this in The Permeable Organization and will develop it a great deal more in workshops and articles to come. In the mean time, these three tactics - The Most Important Thing, The Progressive Depth Signup, and The Two Minute Personal Response - will yield both immediate results and will prepare you for the revolution to come.
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