Capital Funding for social media…how to get it

READ the latest update and news about the Capital Fund – including info on applying for Phase 3 and updated links to forms.  Added 3 December 2009.

Yesterday we hosted a workshop for the social media strand of the Communities and Local Government  Customer-Led Service Transformation Capital Fund.  Feedback from the day was good and I felt people really left with a better understanding of what the fund is trying to achieve and how to build a winning proposal.   We hope that we’ll be able to offer more of these workshops in preparation for future rounds.

You can find a lot of that information in a set of slides we used yesterday, but I thought it was probably worth expanding on a few of the points from the day.

Bidding:

It’s not really a bidding process.  It’s more a review of proposals – and there’s no single review – there’ll be a series of reviews every six weeks or so. This will be done through a ratification committee of senior local government people with a background in customer focused service transformation to support green-lighting of funds by CLG.   And proposals may well have to be refined along the way following a bit of challenge until it’s shaped into a final Memorandum of Understanding and actual money.   This speed and flexibility underlies why only councils can receive the cash.   The funding is also spread out over the next two years.

It’s more important to get stuff right than to rush it in.

Customer-led:

In terms of projects that will get funded, you should think of this less as a “social media” fund and more as a “customer focused transformation” fund.  Projects need to be focused more on how social media supports engagement with users to help you change the way that services are delivered to make them more effective, more responsive and, to be blunt, cheaper.

Criteria:

• Cross-cutting i.e. involving a range of agencies working together to deliver benefits for a specific community/customer group
• Strong links to a Total Place approach i.e. the agencies are working together in an area, ideally under LSP governance arrangements
• Promotes efficiency, including reducing avoidable or multiple contacts
• Will have a major impact on priority LAA outcomes and key national indicators
• Enhances empowerment amongst local citizens
• Capable of delivering benefits quickly
• Ambitious and innovative, providing a model that can be replicated more widely

These are the key criteria for successful proposal.  But having reviewed a number of the proposals around social media, there are a few additional points to make about these sets of projects.

What’s it all about? the form we gave you maybe wasn’t the easiest way of helping you tell your story.  In most cases, there wasn’t a clear story about what the project was meant to do rather than how it’s supposed to work.  You need to be able to tell a concise story of the project in terms of what you want to achieve for local people rather than the bit of social tech you want to implement.   (Don’t make social media a solution without a problem – great blog post by Paul Jennings today)

Partnerships and cross-cutting service needs: we really mean this…there needs to be an opportunity to improve services by bringing services together (virtually, not necessarily structurally) or bringing people to a range of services from one place based on their need or the issue at hand. In terms of social media, we know that a lot of projects are small or because this is a relatively new area these relationships may not be well established.  If you identify the right priority area first (based on your local area agreement), it may be easier to find someone who’ll be cooperative in one of your partner agencies.

Improving service outcomes and reducing costs: some of the successful customer insight proposals are built around the idea that helping the network of people who support an elderly person will save money by avoiding more costly interventions.  Some of that is well evidenced, but some of that is making a theoretical link.  You need to make the link between what you’re doing and how it will save money down the line.  Yes, we know – maybe no one’s ever tried it before.  Make a strong theoretical link.  How could this save money?

We know that we’ll have less money in the future… and that local services are going to have make some tough choices about what services they provide and where they can be just as effective being an enabler and a convener.  How can local government use of social media help citizens and communities help themselves through a network of support.

Outcomes, outcomes, outcomes: in too many proposals the outcomes were kinda the subtext.  I could see what people were aiming at, but it wasn’t always explicit.  Focus it around some local and national priorities that are about customers and community groups in relation to services (not corporate policy, enhancing democracy or improving place survey satisfaction results – though that needs to be a strong element, too).  Social media definitely has a broader reach – and many of the proposals included approaches that would definitely have benefit for more than one specific set of outcomes – but build your proposal around improved outcomes for a focused set of citizens or a specific community.  That’s not to say you can’t try to achieve the other things you want to do at the same time.

The examples we used in the workshop were both issue based (environmental crime, community safety) and a citizen profiles (NEETs, carers, and disabled people) – what participants did was often narrow those categories down even further in some cases or look at different solutions for different kinds of people within those areas.  I hasten to add that the Capital Fund is not looking to fund any one type of issue or demographic, these were just relevant examples we cooked up.

Working from the outside in: all proposals must be about how citizens and customers (and these may be businesses, not inviduals) can influence changing the way the service works.  So, user voice has to be at the core of every proposal.  That may seem an obvious point, but a few proposals were about using social media tools as a push mechanism – to communicate and sign-post or maybe more like social marketing rather than for engagement.  And a few proposals were about using social media to facilitate better communication and practice among practitioners in different partnerships.  These are all great uses of social media, but not what this programme can provide funding for.

Something shiny! : A number of proposals contained a “build” element for new social tech.  There’s nothing wrong with that, but you need to think carefully about whether what you want to do has to be based on something new, a new website, a new tool.  Can you use existing tools, e.g. the well-known ones like Facebook or Twitter or a nice low cost social networking site like Ning or Grou.ps instead of speccing out something that will be costly and take time to build?   Are there already neighbourhood based social networking sites in your area you can use?  e.g. www.harringayonline.com Or are there already smaller company solutions which could help you achieve what you want?  Check out AccessCity for their work on helping disabled people navigate London or look at Yoosk and their work on democratic engagement with Birmingham City Council (and here’s a review of their work by Ministry of Justice) or take a look at Plings.    These are just a few examples of how you might work with people who already have an interesting concept out there and have worked with councils.    (OK, social tech folks…I know I didn’t include your company…what we need is an online pro-social marketplace accessible to local government people…anybody willing to build that?)

If you build it, they may not come: OK, I know I said stay away from the “push” media, but if you do build something or start offering something new through an existing site, how will you let people know about it?  How will you use Facebook, Twitter, Bebo (or whatever it is) to start promoting your offer?  How will you promote it through existing communication channels, your website, council and local newspaper – will there be leaflets at face to face service points?  How do you know which channels are the most appropriate?

Where’s the link?: I think if  some of the elements on partnerships and focus on outcomes is fixed this will be solved.  But in too many proposals there was a really cool concept around social media, but I wasn’t necessarily convinced that there was real buy-in and a lever for change at the corporate centre or within service management.

The social media bolt-on: A couple I saw, I wasn’t convinced they really knew what they were doing on social media – the language was off, buzz-words were used incorrectly. Or  I couldn’t see that there was a real social media champion for the project or it wasn’t an absolutely integral part of what they were trying to achieve.  I’m only advising on this strand of the fund – the final decision isn’t mine, but if I see that – I’m going to strongly advise against it.

Mind your language: You need to explain the social media concepts and what you’ll hope they’ll achieve as if you’re explaining it to beginners.  Because you are.  You need to have the right message to win over people in your own organisations, partner organisations, and quite frankly, those on the ratification panel – as not all of them have a background in social media.

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