A couple of the key questions that agencies continue to ask about social media is "How do I make a business case for it?" and "How do I measure success?" Ultimately, those agencies that have answered these questions effectively - in advance of starting their project and all along the implementation path - will become best practice examples. The Better Buy Project and its incubation group on GovLoop (Acquisition 2.0) are quickly becoming one of those best practice examples.
Two weeks ago, Adam Schultz (BoldInteractive) and I attempted to respond to these questions through a presentation for the Advanced Learning Institute's Social Media for Government Conference. We developed a methodology that strives to move agencies from mission to measurement in a few steps. We know it's not that simple, but here's the general outline of the method:
1. Define Mission Achievement
2. Map Achievement Path
3. Locate Stakeholders
4. Design Engagement
5. Measure Outcomes
6. Inform Next Steps
We fleshed out these concepts for workshop participants over the course of three hours. You can view the full presentation below:
While an afternoon wasn't nearly enough time for participants to apply it to their day-to-day endeavors, we were able to apply it to the Acquisition 2.0 Group on GovLoop and its evolution to include the Better Buy Project. See slides 22-29 and 32-34 for a self-explanatory application to the first four steps for the Acquisition 2.0 group and the Better Buy Project, respectively. We thought you might appreciate some commentary on several of the slides:
Slide 30: This slide offers a Google Analytics look at the traffic for the Acquisition 2.0 group on GovLoop between its launch on March 23 and December 5. Where are the spikes? Well, the first one was right around July 1. What happened? That was our first event, a panel at GSA. There's another big jump right around mid-July. What was happening? The Open Government and Innovations conference. I could almost guarantee that the spikes in September and October were also due to events or news articles. In fact, we're seeing another flurry of activity in the Acquisition after last week's panel at NAPA.
TAKE-AWAY: When we come together physically, we accelerate our conversations virtually...and we need places like GovLoop and Better Buy to sustain and build upon those in-person conversations.
Site RSS
