• Different strokes for different folks: multi-layered consultations that work for stakeholders and citizens
• Getting ideas from customers and the front-line
• Making consultation documents themselves more accessible and understandable

Today at work, the team are launching a couple of projects which I think take us a step onwards in our journey towards better consultation.

Thanks to Puffbox working with Jenny Poole at BIS, the Annual Report of the National Student Forum, the independent group of students advising ministers on student issues, has a rather nice new website. I think he built it in SharePoint or something.

It’s a sign of the direction we’re tending towards in commentable documents, based on our experience to date. Our first foray, Innovation Nation, took the executive summary of a document and made it commentable. Subsequent projects took whole documents – one epic example running to 245 printed pages – and made them commentable. We’ve learned two things: (i) concise documents seem to work better; and (ii) specific and action-oriented texts seem to elicit more engagement. So for the NSF’s report, we’ve pulled out just two areas – one a set of visions for students, the other a set of issues for universities and colleges to consider – and opened these up for discussion (with some rather nice Scribd integration Simon developed). It’s a nice-looking site, good value and turned round quickly. [n.b. why the .com URL, you convergence-minded people ask? We'll be working with the Forum on convergence in due course, but bringing their site into the fold seemed a good first step, given their unusual status and a challenging timescale].

The second launch follows up the Prime Minister’s weekend podcast where he outlined plans to address sharp practices by some credit and store card companies. The new credit and store card consultation is explicitly about raising awareness as well as seeking new ideas from stakeholders and consumers. So working with the policy team, we’ve come up with a layered consultation that hopefully brings the issues to life:

• For stakeholders, there’s the full PDF file and impact assessments with traditional response channels or online comment
• For more interested consumers, debt advisers and intermediaries, there’s a plain English translation of the 100-page document, boiled down in 10 crisp and clear pages, developed by Corinne Pritchard of Simply Understand – plus a 3 minute podcast summary
• For people with a more passing interest, there’s a simple poll which lets you find out about the five main areas, and see what the hottest issues are for others (code here if you’re interested)

The work from Simply Understand is simply outstanding. For a very small consideration, they’ve produced something which is clear, elegant and more impressively still, does justice to the original and keeps the policy authors on-side – Corinne has shown it can be done.

There’s some interesting online engagement around the consultation too, from the launch on GMTV by MoneySavingExpert’s Martyn Lewis co-ordinated by the Press Office to the discussion thread in MoneySupermarket.com, taking the discussion out to where credit card users are already talking. It’s been a really good team effort, led by Alistair Reid, with support from Rhys Stacker and Michael Morgan and the Consumer Policy team.

It would be great to hear feedback and suggestions as always, and ideas for where we might go next. If you’ve run commentable consultations yourself, what did you learn from them?

It’s Blog Action Day, and the theme this year is climate change.

I’m moderately tree-huggy at home: loft insulation from recycled plastic bottles, a super-efficient wood-burning stove, and kitchen worktops made from ground-up Corona bottles collected from Soho’s bars. But maybe most significantly – while I still drive a car and leave lights on and have the house too warm sometimes – I haven’t flown in nearly three years, and I’m really not missing it.

I’ve written before about the wonders of international rail travel aided by the phenomenal Seat61.com. If you didn’t check it out before, go now. What Mark Smith has put together there is quite incredible – down to an annotated guide on how to get the best ticket price on the Spanish-language railway site. He also describes the environmental benefits of train travel over plane travel – and on the holiday I’m going on shortly, taking the overnight train to the south of Spain rather than flying, it looks like I’ll be reducing my CO2 emissions from around 300kg to more like 50kg. But for me, that’s not really the clincher. As he says at the end of the article:

I didn’t start seat61.com to avoid flying, either for environmental reasons or otherwise. I started it because overland travel by train can be so much more enjoyable and fulfilling than today’s commercialised air travel experience. In an increasingly globalised world, where every flight is the same stressful non-experience, trains and ships show you more of the country you’re visiting and its culture.

All of that is true, and more so, if you’ve got a young child. To be fair, I’ve not tried flying with him, but I know that he likes to make friends, run around, eat good food and see interesting things, and travelling by Trenhotel, Palatino or Caledonian Sleeper for example are great for small people who like to do those kinds of things.

If you’re a big flyer and haven’t tried overnight rail travel, think about giving it a go sometime. It’s awesome.

Paul Clarke has begun a hatchet job on the event itself. Let’s just say it was an eclectic mix of topics and I didn’t exactly get to share many blinding insights from my world, but just before our panel, Helen Milner from UK online centres kicked off her talk with a slide distinguishing digital inclusion from digital engagement:

Digital inclusion: getting offline people online

Digital engagement: helping online people to do the things they want and need to

It’s an important difference.

Fundamentally, evaluation should be about measuring performance objectively in order to make improvements:

• measuring: involves a process for collecting, recording and sharing data, perhaps from a number of sources, or of different types
• performance: how successful the activity has been, which means how well it met its objectives, budget and timeframe – including unintended outcomes or side-effects
• objectively: trying to overcome natural personal and psychological inclinations to look on the bright side, remember ‘peaks’ or anecdotes,and try to consider every aspect of the activity fairly and in proportion
• in order to make improvements: not just evaluating for its own sake, but with the aim of making it better in future, through refining techniques or developing individuals

Source: Connecting with Communities: a good practice guide to outreach, CLG (2006)

I still think there’s something in that definition, and it came to mind when someone challenged me to write an intro to web analytics – a field awash with data and trends where it’s more important than anywhere to ask yourself: why?

So why analyse?

Before you analyse, ask yourself two questions: What is my site for? and What do I want to achieve by analysing? The answer to the first question will help you work out what kind of measures are worth paying attention to; the latter will help you be clear on what the numbers really mean for you. It’s important, because analytics can help you do all kinds of things:

To track progress towards a goal. Web analytics can help you benchmark and track trends over time to see how your site is performing: if the purpose of your website is to sell things, how well are you doing that? If it’s to build a community, are people coming back? If it’s to build an easy-to-use web app, do people get beyond the front page? It’s an obvious point, but not all goals are the same, so Good for one site is Bad for another.

To compare approaches.Web analytics are all about comparisons. Analytics can help you see if site A or site B send you more traffic; whether a particular piece of link text works better or worse than the one you tried last month, and whether people are more interested in your blog posts on Kerry Katona or Kefalonia.

To assess the value of what you’re doing. Return on investment is a dirty phrase, but the bottom line is that analytics can give you some of the raw materials for a story about what you achieve for the effort and money you invest in your site. But it’s the story and the insight into why people visit and what they do when whey come that’s really interesting.

To kill failure. Some sites or sections or campaigns flop for one reason or another. Analytics can tell you which ones they are, so you can try something else instead.

What do analytics look like?

Broadly-defined, I’d say there are four main kinds of analytics:

1. Server side: these are based on the big log files stored by the server your website is hosted on, which adds a line each time a web browser requests something from it. It stores information about the machine address, the page or image requested, and what the requesting machine’s operating system and web browser is, all in a line something like:
   123.123.123.123 - - [26/Apr/2000:00:23:48 -0400] "GET /pics/wpaper.gif HTTP/1.0" 200 6248 "http://www.jafsoft.com/asctortf/" "Mozilla/4.05 (Macintosh; I; PPC)"
2. Client-side: these are stats collected using a service like Google Analytics or SpeedTrap, which uses a bit of javascript code in each page of a website to detect information about the page itself and the visitor’s machine. The tools are often able to provide quite a bit of detail – even sometimes providing ‘heat maps’ showing which parts of the page are most clicked on – but don’t record anything if the machine visiting the site has javascript turned off (and a few percent still do).
3. Trackers & counters: particularly on the social web, you’ll find lots of services which track how many times something has been played, favourited, commented on or clicked through to. From comments on YouTube videos, views of a Flickr photo to clicks on a shortened bit.ly link from Twitter, all of these provide help to answer the ‘how many?’ question
4. Panels & data-crunchers: some services can tell you how popular your site is without even asking you. Well, they claim to. Tools like Alexa track the websites visited by people who install a certain toolbar, or are paid to be members of a certain panel, while services like Hitwise use data from internet service providers to track which websites are visited by their customers – and fascinatingly, what the demographic and consumer profile is of those people. Whether these numbers mean anything depends a lot on the profile of their sample, and whether they reflect visitors to your site – if you’re a big consumer site, there’s a chance they will. At the very least, they’ll give you some comparisons in terms of rank order and traffic volumes for some of those kinds of sites.

What to look for

Trends: the absolute number of visitors or pages is usually less interesting than the trend over time. Are more people coming than last month? Are weekends always low, or is it something we did? Trends help you establish whether a change or campaign consistently has a positive or negative effect.

Journeys: when people come to your site, they move about. It’s a common fallacy to assume people visit the homepage, click on an item from the main menu, then an item from that page, then the next page, and then view your detailed page. But analytics often show the reality of people who land from a search engine deep within your site, unaware of your homepage. The journey tools within Google Analytics can help you spot where people give up and go elsewhere, so you can take action to make the journey smoother and keep the traffic (if that’s what your site’s about).

High & low stories: the high and low points can tell you some interesting stories in themselves – what made a particular blog post twice as popular as the norm? And was it bad timing or bad content maybe that made that other post sink like a stone?

Surprises: analytics are full of surprises, like the geographic origin of visitors (plenty of UK consumers read US sites, and vice versa), or the screen resolutions on which people are reading your site. Have a large cohort of iPhone readers browsing your site on a 320×480 screen? Consider tweaking your stylesheet.

What to look at

Hits v Pages v Visits v Uniques. A hit is request for a single part of a web page, like an image or a stylesheet – so isn’t a great measure, as a page with lots of pictures and associated files can have a lot of hits for very few actual people visiting. Pages is a better measure, more comparable to measures used in traditional media given the correlation with the number of times an advert is displayed, for example. A visit gets closer to the concept of ‘how many real people visited the website’, looking at the number of times someone came along to the site and viewed a set of pages in a single session. Finally, ‘unique visitors’ tries to de-duplicate visits from the same person or machine, to give a cleaner measure of the number of different people who came to the site. I generally find unique visitors the most valuable number, as it gives me a sense of the real human audience for the content.

Time on page. By seeing how long it takes, on average, for someone to move from page to page within your site, analytics work out the average time spent on each page and on the site as a whole per visit. It’s an interesting measure which can give you an indication of whether you content is properly being properly read or just skimmed. If your aim is engagement and your time-on-page is just a few seconds on average, there may be a problem – a longer time-on-page is generally thought better for most sites.

Bounces. A special case for visits are so called ‘bounces’ where a visitor visits only a single page on your site. Perhaps they come to the home page, realise you’re not for them, and click back to the Google search results. Or perhaps they land on the in-depth article they were looking for, and need to look no further. A lower bounce rate is generally thought better.

Conversions. Some of the more complex functionality in Google Analytics lets you define goals and ‘funnels’ to analyse how people move through your site towards a defined sales objective – maybe downloading a document, completing a multi-page form or clicking the ‘buy’ button.  Non-transactional government sites often don’t look as hard at this measure, but that’s not to say they shouldn’t. A lot of websites are created simply to look good or get lots of readers, but establishing some more stretching objectives like getting visitors to sign up to a newsletter, subscribe to an RSS feed or complete a form to join a ’supporters’ scheme is more likely to show the value of the web longer-term in mobilising support and engagement from otherwise passing trade.

Referrers. Blimey, where did all those people come from? Referrer information tells you which site the visitor was on when they clicked on a link to your site. Looking at the list of sites which refer traffic to you can often open your eyes to unexpected organisations or individuals who found your content interesting and chose to link to you. ‘Direct entry’ generally means someone typed your URL in themselves or, in these days of desktop Twitter clients like TweetDeck, that they came to your site from a source outside of their main web browser. Many referrals are likely to come from search results pages which, in these days of Google dominance, are most useful in that they give you…

Keywords that people typed into the search engine in order to find the link to your site. These give you a sense of the popularity of different phrases used to describe your content, as well as some of the most amusing and surprising insights into your analytics – at time of writing this site, for example, is on the first page of results in Google for the phrase ‘sell stuff‘.

Browser stats. In making design choices about your site, browser stats can tell you what proportion of visitors used outdated browsers (such as Internet Explorer 6) and therefore do or don’t need catering for, as well as the screen resolutions they have, which can inform what kind of layout you go for – often very useful when combatting the oft-quoted stipulation that government sites need to work for the sizable minority of visitors on 800×600 browsers. They’re a minority, but they’re not as sizable as the folks browsing your postage stamp pages at 1600×1200.

Social stats

Social media tools and platforms introduce a new dynamic. On the whole, you don’t get the richness of traditional web analytics (though some platforms such as Ning let you plug in Google Analytics code if you pay a bit extra). But on the flip side, your analytics are much more public, which introduces its own interesting dynamics of ‘popular content’ and feeds the ego.

• Views of videos, pictures or presentations are probably the most straightforward, along with click throughs of link services like bit.ly (tip: take any bit.ly link e.g. http://bit.ly/3zfftT and add /info/ in the middle to see the public stats on that link – e.g. http://bit.ly/info/3zfftT). [UPDATE: And as Robin says in the comments below, it's worth mentioning the stats built into Feedburner, which lets you track the otherwise untrackable activities of people who come to your content via your RSS feed and never actually visit the site itself]
• Comments are the next notch up, showing who has engaged with the content to the extent of responding to it, e.g. @replying to a Tweet
• Shares in the form of bookmarks on services like Delicious, Digg or StumbleUpon or re-tweets on Twitter indicate people who liked or felt inspired to spread your content to their own networks or save it for later. Ditto for starring/favouriting items.
• Embeds and responses in the form of inbound links to your site (which you can pick up by searching for link:http://blog.helpfultechnology.com on Google or Google Blogsearch or using services like BackType) are maybe the highest form of engagement, where people are moved to respond – hopefully positively – to your content.

Measuring social media stats is both easy (they’re often public, and pretty straightforward) and hard (they’re spread over lots of sites, and can overlap or tell conflicting stories). Tools like PostRank (h/t Treepixie) are emerging to help disentangle the mess, and put these stats alongside your own site’s web analytics.

What analytics don’t tell you

With so much information, it’s easy to assume that’s the whole story, but of course it isn’t. Web analytics tell you what machines think people do, not why they do it, or even who they really are. Beware of treating one-off spikes and troughs as trends or significant patterns – maybe Google just tweaked their algorithm that day, or your site went down for an hour without you noticing. It’s also hard to assess the true extent of engagement from hard stats alone, and that’s often better done from a deeper sense of what people who come to your site say in the comments and do when they send you enquiries and feedback forms. Above all, be careful of attributing cause and effect to the stories you see in the stats: use the flexibility of stats to compare alternative approaches before deciding that you’ve been doing it wrong. See what norms you can glean from tools like Alexa or Hitwise if they’re appropriate to your audience, or informally from friends and colleagues if like me you operate on a smaller scale. And remember that stats can’t tell you much about the who and why – so consider using an old-fashioned visitor survey or subscriber questionnaire (or even just a blog post asking people to tell you a bit about themselves in the comments) to understand the visitor profile of your readers and what they want when they get there. More about that in another post, I suspect.

Congratulations for getting this far – you can be sure I’ll be watching the time on page carefully to see if you read it properly

Photo credit: Department of Business, Innovation & Skills, Crown Copyright

The Civil Service Guidance on Propriety sets out the role for civil servants in communicating the policies of the Government:

As part of the Government’s duty to govern, it needs to explain its policies and decisions to the electorate. The Government has the right to expect the department to further its policies and objectives, regardless of how politically controversial they might be.

It defines some principles for government communication, specifying that it:

• should be relevant to government responsibilities;
• should be objective and explanatory, not biased or polemical;
• should not be – or liable to be – misrepresented as being party political; and
• should be conducted in an economic and appropriate way, and should be able to justify the costs as expenditure of public funds.

So I’m really proud of what the team achieved today in support of explaining a controversial area of government policy using modern methods and at low cost. Accompanying Lord Mandelson and Ben Bradshaw’s visit to the BRIT school in Croydon to put the other side of the peer-to-peer file-sharing debate, the guys created a multimedia package that takes the press notice and tells an interesting policy story. What’s more, it was live on Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and the corporate website within 4 hours as one of our new-style hybrid stories/multimedia resource pages.

Combined with the Digital Britain Forum blog’s discussion of the file-sharing issue, I think this makes an interesting and little-heard case for a policy, through digital media. I think that’s what government information in the 21st century is about.

Great work, guys.

There’s plenty of WordPress-powered online properties in Government right now and some very busy freelancers building them. For a while now, I’ve been trying to compile a list of useful people, agencies, tools and resources for WordPress, so I thought I’d kick it off here. It’s obviously incomplete, and mention here does not necessarily constitute personal recommendation.

Please add any additions, amendments or feedback in the comments and I’ll amend this post over time so it becomes a bit of a living resource. If you’re an agency/developer and have client permission, I’m happy to add some portfolio URLs to your entry below.

Agencies & freelance developers

• The Awesome Web (Jenny Brown, @jennybee)
• Davepress.net (Dave Briggs, @davebriggs)
• The Dextrous Web (@dextrousweb)
• Harrisment (Jonathan Harris, @harrisment_uk)
• InterconnectIT (not used them, but look pretty specialised – reviews welcomed)
• Popokatea (Laura Whitehead, @littlelaura)
• Public Platforms (Joss Winn & Tony Hirst, @josswinn & @psychemedia – CommentPress experts)
• Puffbox.com (Simon Dickson, @simond)
• Sweet Interaction (Simon Wheatley, @simonwheatley)
• Visudo (Eddie Tejeda, creator of Digress.It – see below)
• We Are Social (@wearesocial)
• The Workshop (Sheffield based)
• Worth Digital (Brighton based)
• Zed1 (Mike Little, @mikelittlezed1)

Worth also joining & asking on the WordCampUK mailing list. More info about WordCamp.

Hosting providers

• Bytemark (seems to assume slightly more command-line savvy than some hosts)
• Eduserv
• WebFusion
• Memset
• uRevised
• I seriously need more options in this category. Please recommend good UK-based WP hosts.

Useful themes & plug-ins

• 40 Free Wordpress themes, Six Revisions
• All in One SEO Pack (adds features to improve search ranking of your blog)
• BackupWordPress (automatic backups for a WP install)
• BuddyPress (social network theme/plugins)
• Category Order (lets you drag/drop categories, handy to tweak menu order)
• Commentariat (comment on sections of a document)
• Contact Form 7 (flexible email contact forms)
• Digress.it (formerly Commentpress; comment on paragraphs of a document)
• Google XML Sitemaps (auto-generate Google sitemap.xml documents)
• My Page Order (lets you drag/drop pages, handy to tweak menu order)
• [ Podpress ] (upload podcasts, generate feed, add embedded player to your posts – but mixed reviews about compatibility/support – not a silver bullet for podcasting)
• Post Ratings (add star ratings to posts)
• Sociable (add social bookmarking links)
• Subscribe2 (let users sign up to email notification of new posts – Feedburner also accomplishes this)
• Subscribe to Comments (add tickbox to comment form so commenters get email notification of new comments)
• TinyMCE Advanced (adds extra styling features to normal rich-text editor)
• Widget Logic (switch widgets on/off on different parts of the site through basic logic)
• Wordpress multi-user (host multiple WP blogs on one install, a la Wordpress.com)
• WP Super Cache (speed up your blog)

Training & tutorials

• Hardening Wordpress, WP codex
• see InterconnectIT above, who also offer training
• The complete guide to creating widgets in 2.8, Justin Tadlock
• Learn Wordpress at Elstree Studios (1 day, £250 – haven’t used it, but let me know if you do)
• So you want to create WordPress themes, huh? (via Martin Oxley)
• Wordpress Template Tags, WP codex
• Wordpress.tv

UK Government examples (as of September 2009)

• 10 Downing St
• Audit Commission Newsroom blog
• The Big Care Debate
• BIS Science & Society Strategy
• Defra Food 2030
• Defra Third Sector blog
• Department for Business, Innovation and Skills
• Department for International Development consultations
• Digital Britain Forum
• Digital Policy Blog (COI)
• DFID blogs
• Governance of Britain
• Independent Advisory Committee on Development Impact
• JackSpeak – Royal Navy
• Parliament’s News channel
• Power of Information Taskforce Report
• Scotland Office blog
• Wales Office

See also Puffbox’s archive of reports on WordPress use in Government

1.1 is always an important milestone. The excitement, the blank canvas and the pressure of 1.0 are behind you. The feedback has started to come in. The team starts to think about version 2.0 but right now, it’s important to deliver something just a bit better than what we’ve got which fixes the glaring bugs and takes on board the good ideas – and that’s where 1.1 comes in.

I’ll leave BIS’ resident celebrity webby to explain more of the strategy, save to say that this version is principally about a nicer look and feel and a larger scope of content, moving in the direction of 2.0 due early next year, but still on the Wordpress platform and developed in-house by the team for zero external development cost. For now, I just wanted to share three little code snippets I contributed towards:

1. The RSS Extra Plugin

Wordpress’ built-in RSS widget is handy in a pinch, but it’s not ideal. It predefines the format of the list, and makes the title of the widget link to the specified URL in the feed, even if this isn’t really what you want (e.g. a Pipes page or a search form). So I spent a satisfying evening head scratching and learning how to roll my own* Wordpress plugin widget and came up with RSS Extra which lets you:

• specify the link to use in the title of the widget
• add some arbitrary html above and below the feed listing
• show the date in a friendlier format
• decide whether or not you want to show the orange RSS icon in the header

The refreshed BIS site uses the widget to show news items and speeches, linking to our own news page, of which more below.

* (yes, I know there are more sophisticated alternatives)

2. RSS Librarian

It was decided a while ago to use COI’s News Distribution Service to handle online publication of our news releases – rather than duplicate effort by adding them separately to an archive on the BIS site. It’s a sophisticated service well-used by press officers and journalists, and a great cross-government resource. But we’d like to feature the stories we publish there on our own site too, since there isn’t an easy way to link to a listing of BIS releases on the NDS site itself. NDS offers an RSS feed which could make this possible, though it is reset on a monthly basis so isn’t a workable archive.

RSS Librarian is a little script run on a cron job to grab an RSS feed, check it for new items, and store those items locally in a monthly archive and a global archive. This drives the BIS news archive. To me, this is RSS fulfilling its potential as a proper syndication tool between government sites which delivers a better user experience as well as reduced costs by creating once and publishing twice.

3. Did you mean?

With two sites merging into one, there’s been a misconception amongst some colleagues that a www.legacysite.gov.uk/url/to/something address will automatically now be accessible via www.newsite.gov.uk/url/to/something. We’ve put some redirects in on an ad hoc basis, but in a large corporate organisation, it’s hard to avoid people making assumptions which could lead to irritated users hitting 404 errors. So – by far the simplest of these code snippets – is a little checker included in the Wordpress 404 page which takes the requested URL, goes off and checks if it’s valid on each of the legacy sites, and if so, suggests that that may in fact be where you intended to go.

These are all free to adapt and reuse under, for now, Crown Copyright and a GPL licence.

(Photo credit: thinkpanama)

At work, I get a fair few people come and try and sell me their thing. Some are better at it than others. Here are eight tips on how to sell me stuff (and if you’re smart enough to find these before you contact me, you’ll be well on the way):

1. Don’t cold call me.
I know cold calling is probably an efficient way to reach consumers, but phone has to be a bad way to make a business sale. The people who’ll speak to you probably don’t have the budgets, and the people who do will be annoyed that you stole the few minutes they have at their desk between meetings.

2. Get to know me through social media (but don’t creep me out)
I’m a dead easy target, because I talk about so many of the things I’m working on, the people I work with, and the problems I face here and across the social web. When I meet a potential supplier who’s read my blog, we save ten minutes each and have a more interesting conversation. That said, I had a slightly freaky (cold) call recently from a vendor who’d clearly been randomly sampling my blog and blogroll in order to drop names and quotes into the patter. Thanks, but no thanks.

3. Go where I go, talk to me about the other things you’re doing
I’ve barely spoken to some of the suppliers I have the most favourable impression of: I feel I know them and their work from the barcamps, events, blogs and online magazines I follow. I’m actually fairly receptive to a simple, factual email now and then about the work you’re doing, new products you’ve developed, conferences you’ve presented at (with links to your material) and so on.

4. Have a demo, a tour and a feature list
If you’re selling software, this is important. Depending on the tool, how much I need it and how innovative it is, I might want to start with an online demo I can play with in my own time (often, I’ll just forward it to home, to play with of an evening) – I’ll definitely want this before I buy. Occasionally, I may watch a ‘tour’ video, but again, probably not at work where video performance isn’t great. But I almost always need a feature list – preferably a page on your site – which gives me an impression in 10 seconds what the tool does, and gives me something I can send on to colleagues if I want to get them interested. A smart vendor will have all three, publicly available on their site.

5. Give me some ballparks
I know, I know. Tell the client it will cost roughly X and when they’ve given you their full requirements and it actually costs X+Y, they turn round and say: “But you said it would cost X?”. I’ve been on both sides of that in the past. Frequently, I have little or no budget right now, but I may do in the future if the right project comes along. But without a ballpark, I’ll struggle to assess the kind of value I’m expecting from your product, I’ll have no idea whether I can afford it or should suggest it to a colleague, and we’ll waste both of our time. If it’s highly configurable, say: “Client A bought a mid-range package to do X, Y and Z and it cost them between £5,000-£10,000″. Ranges are fine.

6. Tell me about you and UK government
I’m a central government prospect, so tell me about your work with government. Mention some clients you’ve worked with and describe or show me screenshots of the kind of projects you did with them. Tell me what government standards or accreditations you’ve achieved, and about the procurement frameworks you’ve got onto which I might be able to buy through if things go well.

7. The biography goes at the end
It’s not that I’m not interested in your slides of big-name client logos, org charts, parent company details, awards, shortlistings, staff profile, company history, chief executive’s photo, office locations, mission statement, core values or brand essence… actually, it is. Above all, it’s a bad way to spend the first twenty minutes of our meeting, even if I eventually want to know some of that stuff. I’ll be impressed if you kick off with the product and what it does in a nutshell. Then tell me some stories about how it’s been used by your different clients – and if you’re brave, where it hasn’t worked so well and why. Give me an idea of the kind of costs involved. And then tell me why, since the company behind it all is so ace, I’d be a fool to miss out.

8. The killer email
So what’s the best way to approach me? Probably a well-crafted tweet, or more likely a good email that reads something like:

Hi Steph

I hope you don’t mind me getting in touch. I’m a big fan of your [insert adjective flattery here] blog. I read your post recently about [some fascinating topic] and I thought the responses to the comment I left were really interesting.

As I mentioned on the blog, I’m sales director at CoolStartup.com, a UK startup which offers an unusual online contact management tool called CrazeeName. It’s different from ThingYou’veHeardOf.com in three main ways:

- one: it has cool features A, B and C – and it even works on Internet Explorer 6!
- two: our pricing model is based on X which means a simple install starts from £2k up to £10k for our gold package
- three: we’re government accredited to level X and on frameworks A, B and C

If you want to take a look, I’ve set up an online demo for you at: http://coolstartup.com/yourdemo which will work for 30 days, and I’ve attached a summary of what the tool does with a few case studies of how government clients have used it. If you want to know more, head on over to http://coolstartup.com/tour and take a look.

I’ll drop you a line in a couple of weeks to see what you think – perhaps we can set up a meeting then if you want to discuss it further or involve some colleagues?

All the best – see you at CoolSocialMediaEvent09 next week?

V. Smart

Recently, I’ve been grappling with the issue of what a corporate homepage should do. Obviously, a lot of what I do is central government-oriented but in this case I’ve been casting the net quite wide, as the interface design problems of corporate organisations in whatever sector are actually pretty similar.

A corporate homepage generally isn’t trying to sell, but it might be trying to signpost customers quickly to an e-commerce microsite or customer portal. It’s not aimed at a nice, neat target audience, because it’s got to work for journalists, students, staff, investors and a whole bunch of other people. It’s promoting a wide portfolio of products or services, trying to illustrate it with imagery which is engaging but also generic. And corporate homepages by definition have a large number of people within the organisation clamouring for space and priority.

Some focus on identifying and signposting different audiences, some try and help people accomplish their goal and some just aim to tell compelling human-scale stories about megalithic organisations.

So I’m starting a collection of good corporate homepages, using the Bookmarklist open source tool that powers Digitalgovuk. In a nutshell:

1. Find an intelligent, elegant homepage of a corporate organisation (i.e. not a startup or personal site, and not primarily a sales or campaign site)
2. Bookmark it in Delicious using the magic tag ‘goodcorpweb’ along with other descriptive tags e.g. the sector, the style and anything else that’s relevant
3. It will magically appear at: http://www.helpfultechnology.com/goodcorpweb for anyone to browse and discover
   

Between us, we can give corporate web teams the world over a useful collection of great inspirations for a tricky interface design challenge. Thanks!

Photo credit: hiddesdevries on Flickr

Last night, as I was flicking through tweets and Google Reader items, I found myself realising a strange co-incidence. I wasn’t just reading social media news or the usual (excellent) fare from government digerati blogging in their spare time. I was clicking from post to post of voices of civil servants, in their day jobs, blogging more or less officially about their work. The challenges and frustrations they faced. The ideas that had occurred to them. Some of the stories. The human impact they’d had that day.

There was Alistair Morgan, Director of Trade and Investment for UK Trade & Investment in China, talking about a stroll through the Beijing suburbs:

At weekends I like to walk.  Walk and, if I can manage it, reflect.  Yesterday I headed north and east beyond Beijing’s fourth ring road, walking beside canals, through well-landscaped districts of new apartment blocks and through other places where the city is ramshackle and half formed, sometimes even derelict.  There was the usual clanging and industriousness on the construction sites. A less common sight was two blacksmiths with a portable, coal-fired forge on a piece of open ground, beating out scrap iron into meat-cleavers.  This even drew a crowd.

I thought a bit, as I walked, about statistics and how to make sense of them.  For the first five months of this year, metalliferous ores and scrap metal was the UK’s largest export to China, up 6% on the same period last year.  Clearly the two blacksmiths I saw were not the only two people at work in China’s iron and steel industry.

Then I peeked into a day in the life of Neil Barry, a humanitarian specialist at DFID, who I’ve probably queued with for a coffee on Victoria St, but will probably never meet:

5.00 am
As usual, mug of tea in hand, I am just logging onto my computer at home.  It’s still dark outside and wonderfully quiet here in rural Kent.  My laptop hums and clicks while I wait for the first email messages of the day from Katy, my colleague in Sri Lanka.  By time zone, she is four and half hours ahead of me and her day will be already in full swing – meetings with the UN and NGOs, field visits to plan, proposals to write and DFID-funded programmes to monitor. This is all part of the £12.5 million humanitarian programme we work on, for a population affected by the recent conflict in the north of the country.  Sure enough, a volley of emails arrives in my inbox and I set to work on them.

Then some Twitter discussion pointed me to Sam Sharps in my own Department, talking frankly about where the policy he is working on is going next, and asking for feedback (16 comments at the last count):

The  business of government is never quick enough for some, but always too rushed and hasty for others. To get a new fund up and running just takes time and there are various administrative hoops to get through. That is what we are working on now.

But perhaps my favourite civil service blogger discovery is someone you’d fear would be a bit dry, but turns out to have a warm and funny written voice – the UK Government’s Chief Information Officer, John Suffolk:

As an industry we have come a very long way but there is still more to do to make the technology we produce “human proof”. But all is not lost, technology is hugely sophisticated. I found this as proof, clearly a true story.

“At a recent Sacramento PC User’s Group meeting, a company was demonstrating its latest speech-recognition software. A representative from the company was just about ready to start the demonstration and asked everyone in the room to quiet down. Just then someone in the back of the room yelled, “Format C: Return.”. Someone else chimed in: “Yes, return!”

Unfortunately, the software worked.

I hope these are the pioneers of a movement that will flourish into a vibrant From Our Own Correspondent from the deepest cogs of the government machine. In uncertain times with conflicting pressures, there are such interesting and insightful stories to tell, I hope the courage and desire to tell them wins through.