We work with big visionaries, and it's fun to dream big on the web. But social innovators are too busy and your work too important to see your sites and tools fail due to lack of focus, no clear market need, or inappropriate resources to back them up. Before rushing into a complex digital project, take some time to look at and hold the big questions.
Research: Seeking Truth from All Sides
Multiple, diverse inputs from inside and outside your organization help shape possibility but also surface realistic and important limitations and concerns.
Our research typically reviews four data points:
- Analytics: how is your site currently performing? What's actualy working? Who is converting? Where are they coming from?
- Competitive: how are your leading competitors innovating with their digital strategies? What's working? What unique gap can you fill?
- Audience: who are your current and future target audiences? What need do you serve? Why would they offer you more if you asked them?
- Internal: are we hearing needs from all departments that connect with the world through the web? How do we build internal momentum for change and help teams collaborate more effectively?
Taken together, these inputs provide rich (and often sobering) focus to what is possible, achievable, and sustainable with your uniqe online vision.
Grounding: Helping Social Innovators Focus Effort
Many organizations we work with have highly dynamic and complex social business models. Often this makes them attractive yet confusing to those on the outside. While appropriate during the early start-up phase, growing to the next level requires moving from "behind the scenes" to becoming more public by engaging more people/customers/donors in support of your work.
Our "grounding" process helps focus your digital vision by growing innovation from the solid ground of your deepest value proposition. Through the process we:
- analyze your current offering: programs, services, products, ideas, and solutions, find those that are most vital for your future, and help structure them in ways that better tell your story
- help define your existing core and new target audiences, and articulate your story using language that resonates with them
- focus on appropriate digital opportunities found at the convergence of your emerging offering (or biggest new passion), your audience's needs, and your capacity to execute
- advise on internal "culture, systems, and people" changes required to enable the extension of your brand into new engagement territories
This approach comes from seeing hundreds of well meaning website and online community projects rush into development and then fail to stand the test of time (or last longer than the grant that produced them).
Investing time "holding the question" at the front of the vision process saves literally thousands of hours, dollars, and heartache further down the line. After 16 years in the biz, we won't start a big project any other way.