Tool Box

Wiki Sites are Great Engagement Tools

Collective Impact is a long-play on community change. Large scale community change takes time and over the life of a Collective Impact initiative, there will be many documents and lists produced and people will come and go as well. Keeping track of the important reports and data can be time-consuming. And imagine coming into the work a year or so in. How would you get up to speed?

A “wiki” is Hawaiian for “quick.” They are relatively easy to build and use and can be used for a project or as a website.  There are many options for building a wiki site. The tool I am showcasing is  Google Sites, which is free to use and allows for integration with Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Calendar and Google Groups.

Features of a wiki site include:

• Collaboration among users no matter where they are located. For example, you can edit documents collaboratively and users can be notified whenever a document is updated.

• Creating or co—creating a Common Calendar that can be embedded in the wiki site.

• Creating and managing a Clearing House of documents, images and other files by theme or topic area that users can view or download. This allows you to have all pertinent documents stored in one place, which provides a historical view of your initiative as well as provides newcomers to your initiative an efficient way to be oriented.

• Create sign up forms for registrations that are automatically displayed as well on the site.

• Create a survey that automatically populates the results of on the wiki site.

• Link to or embed a Google Group to foster discussion on the site among participants.

• Create static webpages and navigation to other wiki pages.

• Display a plan as well as a link to it for downloading.

• Widgets can be used to automatically display recent news that users should know about.

This tool download goes deeper into the pros and cons of a wiki platform and includes some examples of wiki sites I have built for collaborative groups.

SCALES FOR EVALUATING ENGAGEMENT SATISFACTION

This tool is one I developed for a quick session I taught at Tamarack’s recent learning gathering in Vancouver, Community Engagement: The Next Generation. It provides an overview on the NetPromoter score, Likert Scales, the Semantic Differential Scale and Visual scales for collecting and measuring feedback from those you are engaged with.

CLICK HERE FOR THE PDF

Why Strategic Planning Goes Wrong

reprinted by request

As a consultant, executive staff member, board director, and teacher, I have had the opportunity to engage in a lot of strategic planning. I think about it, research it, and look for ideas to make it work better than how it tends to work.

It has always bothered me to know that more often than not strategic planning efforts go awry. In another article I wrote on this topic, I stated the biggest reason why strategic plans fail is that people don’t do them. While there is truth in that, the story doesn’t end there of course. It’s why people and organizations fail to do successful strategic planning that deserves some attention.

The difference between Strategy and Plan
Let’s start with what I suggest are some fundamental misconceptions about strategic planning. The biggest misconception is that strategy and planning are one in the same. How often, for example, do you hear people equate strategic planning with a “blueprint” or a “roadmap?” While those words are good metaphors for the word, “plan,” they fail substantially in capturing the meaning of “strategic” or “strategy.” Continue reading →

Journey Maps

Journey maps are used often in the private sector to map out a customer’s experience of a product or service. It identifies customer needs and wants, motivations, and interactions with the product or service from beginning or end.

In terms of a journey map for you collaborative or collective impact initiative, here are some of the things it can do for you:

  • Tell the story of your collaborative journey from initial start through engagement, to where you are today
  • Can be the whole story or part of the story.
  • Identify key milestones, interactions, successes, set backs and other key touchpoints
  • Provide history for new comers
  • Deepen/expand understanding of what works and what doesn’t or of choices that were made or need to be made.
  • Helps visualize where the journey is going.

Journey Maps are visual treatments in which key steps, milestone, and decision points are identified in relationship to each other.

Download the entire Journey Map Handout (PDF).