To structure our thinking about digital strategy we are developing a framework together with Jim Richardson of Sumo. The framework, which we soft launch at MuseumNext in Barcelona next week and of which a rough sketch is shown below, is supposed to help organisations develop successful digital strategies. I believe there are some fresh ideas in the framework, such as how we oppose digital outreach and engagement, but it’s also based on the tried and true ideas of thinkers like Jim Collins.

One of the most interesting points of debate we’ve come across in our workshops around the framework and in other work we’ve done on digital strategy, is the question: What are the main ingredients of a successful digital strategy? What are the building blocks that determine success? How do we start our thinking about digital outreach or engagement activities?

I believe we should start with a focus on our key assets and target audiences.

The key building blocks of a digital strategy are the assets you can use and the specific audiences you want to engage or reach out to. Between assets and audiences are activities: either those that engage existing audiences with specific assets, or those that use assets to reach out to new target groups.

Assets can be anything from your building, friendly front desk staff and the quality of your café to your products, customer service and loyalty programme. Audiences, of course, are small and specific groups of people you either reach already or want to reach. In our workshops we always try to be as specific as possible with both. Both assets and audiences should be labeled almost “individually”, so the activities that connect them can really achieve your objectives.

(Imagine, do you think it’s easier to design a successful campaign that connects the elderly with your website or one that connects local art students with your collection of old game consoles?)

The strength of using assets and audiences to design digital strategy again became apparent to me in a project we’re doing at the moment. Last week we spent two days in London with Rouge Eventsto gather the essential input for an innovative arts festival in 2013. We talked a lot about key influencers, target groups and content strategy and gathered hundreds of post-its with their ideas about assets and audiences.

With the client’s input, today we tried to come up with a concise, simple and yet effective set of activities and campaigns for the festival. Following the project’s objectives it was an easy puzzle with nevertheless uncommon and “different” outcomes. Assets and audiences almost combined themselves into activities.

So, next time you have to design a digital strategy for your organisation, a project or campaign, get out some post-its and colleagues and specify your assets and audiences. Take a wall and post your assets on the left, your audiences on the right and I promise you’ll come up with great activities that connect them through outreach or engagement that will outdo many of your traditional marketing efforts. (And please tell us if you’ve done so, because we’re always looking for case studies to use in our workshops!)

The Digital Engagement Framework, develop by Jasper Visser of Inspired by Coffee and Jim Richardson of Sumo.

I think it was Seb Chan who years ago pointed me to Facebook advertising and its usefulness as a tool to map your target audience. Without having to pay for an actual advertisement, the tool to make Facebook ads provides you with unique knowledge about your (potential) target audience as institution. At Inspired by Coffee we use it all the time to start our key influencer and target audience processes.

Participants in a recent workshop were keen on discovering how the process works. In this post I’ll describe how you can use Facebook advertising to research your audience without having to pay a penny. All you need is to register for Facebook advertising (you’ll need a credit card) and set up your account.

A word of warning: if you’re not into numbers and hate Excel (or numbers) the process I’ll describe might not be your cup of tea.

1. Open facebook.com/ads and create a new ad with the big green button.
2. On the page that opens, ignore 1. “design your advert” (unless you actually want to make an advert).
3. Scroll down to 2. “targeting” and keep an eye on the “estimated reach” box on the right of your screen. This box and a spreadsheet to keep track of your work will be your best friends.
4. When you change the values under “targeting” the number under “estimated reach” changes as well.
5. By carefully combining targeting-combinations this will help you pinpoint and understand your target audience.

Example: Is cooking more popular in Amsterdam or Rotterdam? (I can think of a million reasons why you’d like to know this.)

1. Under targeting, pick as country “The Netherlands” and select “By city” > “Rotterdam”. Uncheck the “include cities” box. You’ll find there’re 270k people in Rotterdam (on Facebook) and 522k in Amsterdam.
2. Go to “interests” and switch to “precise interests”. Type “cooking”, “cuisine”, “koken” and “lekker koken” (the last two Dutch for cooking and cooking nicely). The estimated reach in Rotterdam is about 3,320 and in Amsterdam about 9,240.
3. Excel tells me that there’s about 40% more people who like cooking in Amsterdam than in Rotterdam. It’s not scientific, and the numbers are small, but it says something.

Another example: What are other interests of people who like cycling in Amsterdam? (Handy if you want to market your new bike shop, exposition or repair service.)

1. Under targeting, again pick “The Netherlands” and “Amsterdam”. Cyclists are mobile people, so include cities within 16 kilometre. Total reach about 640k people.
2. Under “interest” select everything that has to do with cycling (“cycling”, “road cycling”, “fietsen”, “tour de france” etc.). Total reach about 6,600 people.
3. Now, add unrelated interests to the existing list, for instance movies, gaming and reading. The estimated reaches changes to 11,500, 7,200 and 16,700 people.
4. Next comes the tricky part: Look at the estimated reach of only these interests (5,100, 600 and 10,700 people) and subtract this from the previous numbers (this is the overlap). Turns out 200 people like cycling and the movies, 600 like cycling and reading but 0 like cycling and gaming! So, best get your ad somewhere people can read about it…

Of course we put it a bit bluntly in the last one, but if you take some time to check all the possible alternatives, the mechanism gives surprisingly accurate results. For sure, before you start basing policy on Facebook users, make sure you back up your findings with proper in-depth research. There’s nothing wrong, however, with using Facebook ads to quickly put things in perspective.

Have you used Facebook ads and the amazing stats it provides to identify target audiences? Please share your story in the comments. Thanks!

Last Friday, with students and professionals in Breda we discussed the question whether supplying coffee to employees is a cost or engagement factor. If you see coffee as a cost, it’s tempting to downgrade beans to powder and offer fewer options to employees (no more lattes!). Obviously, in many work places around the world, coffee is a cost factor.

If you see coffee as an engagement factor, however, everything changes. Better coffee, skilfully prepared be an in-house barista, free of charge increases employee creativity and productivity and – if you follow the logic – overall performance. (Discover more of the surprising benefits of coffee.) Coffee as engagement factor is not about reducing costs, it’s about improving outcomes.

This is much the same with digital media. Like with coffee, we understand we can’t run a business without paying attention to social media, the (mobile) web and other technological innovations. The pivotal question then is: is it better to treat digital media as a cost, or engagement factor?

I believe it’s the second. Digital media should be an engagement factor and not just for marketing staff, but for everybody. Rather than cutting costs, it pays to invest in higher availability and quality. Only one recent post Chris Street already mentioned six possible success definitions, ranging from financial to emotional, and from measurable to enjoyable. There are many others.

Treating digital media as an engagement factor means that it shouldn’t be used to cut marketing budgets by moving marketing away from traditional channels (digital media isn’t cheaper per se). It means it shouldn’t be left to unpaid interns (alone). It means it’s worth your while hiring professional advice and support to make things brilliant.

Of course there’s a cost involved with digital media, as there is with coffee. And of course it’s tempting to minimise that cost. Yet the cost of having a cheap digital strategy might be much higher in the long run, just think back to that employer that had you drink cheap coffee…

At the close of a frantic first quarter and the verge of the roller-coaster ride Q2 will be, I’d like to tell the tale of how – months ago – we gamestormed our business model together. Business model generation is a tough job, but it can be productive fun. What we now know as Inspired by Coffee was born on a table amidst post-its, markers, coffee cups and two great books…

Nowadays it seems more important to be disruptive than to have a business model. We – old-fashionably – decided to start the other way around, with Alexander Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas. And although it’s a great tool, the book’s a bit dull to puzzle something unique together. To spice up our business model generation we mixed the canvas with another book I picked up last year: Gamestorming by Dave Gray, Sunni Brown and James Macanufo.

Gamestorming techniques are games to do successful brainstorming. Rather than sitting through another “every idea is good” session gamestorming provides a facilitator with a toolbox of inspirational activities for teams.

What is great about the combination of the canvas and gamestorming, in my opinion, is that while the canvas helps you to structure all the questions that need answering to build a sustainable business, gamestorming helps you to come up with creative and uncommon answers. Structure and creativity. (Sustainability and disruption?)

For instance the game “Design the box” can be used to come up with a solid value proposition. Just think about the value you’ll be adding as cereals and build and design the container. What are the ingredients? Why is it good for you? Will it make you happy?

Or the game “Cover story” (one of my favourites, I’ve been using it in tons of workshops) which can help you to think about customer relationships. What will people say to reporters about your business and its service in five years? What kind of magazine will feature you? What will the cover image look like?

Another example: we used affinity mapping to come up with revenue streams. This is a great game that involves lots of post-its with separate ideas that are moved around until patterns start to become clear and the best ideas are distilled.

The combination of the structure of the business model canvas and the creativity of gamestorming made our business model sessions both productive and fun. Our business model is not purely disruptive, but has an edge and is solid to begin with.

It’s still a bit too early to say it’s sustainable. We’re only three months in. We’re busy though, doing the stuff we hoped to be doing, which is a good sign. And we had fun doing the tough work we started out with. So, next time you’re asked to design a business model, consider to use the canvas and gamestorming techniques!

This week our team went to the Kom je ook? conference in the Stadsschouwburg Amsterdam, an irregular conference about trends and innovation in the arts and culture. The topic this time: membership schemes. Our friends of Tate Members and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra shared their stories, as well as others working on new ways of fundraising and building sustainable relationships with your audience.

The key lesson of the day, in my opinion, was beautifully summarised by Naomi Russell of Wonderbird. When talking about success with membership schemes and building relevant relationships, she said that “if you focus on the small things [and do them well], a lot of great things can happen.”

The smallest of small things you can do well – and an incredibly powerful one – is saying “thank you” to the people who took the time and trouble to connect with your organisation in one way or another. Saying “thank you” is often gratis, but it’s an essential step in the process of turning carefully involved strangers into friendly advocates. Unsure how to do this? Here are 10 ideas for saying thank you with a smile and social media:

1. Name visitors and customers in your blog posts, with links to their online presences.
2. Give away unexpected extra content after an event using the hashtag or mailinglist. Something extra, unasked for. An interview with the keynote speaker, a wallpaper or even coupon for their next purchase are nice details.
3. Retweet and reply to mentions.
4. Make photos of the normal people, not just the VIPs, at events and put them online (but don’t tag them!)
5. Surprise people when they check in on Foursquare in your venue (not just the mayor). (The best example of this, of course, is KLM surprise.)
6. Positive (or constructive) review on Facebook or a blog? Ask if you may add the author to the guest list of your next event, opening, tour or open office.
7. Like your fans’ pages.
8. Put physical reviews on digital view (I went to the MoMA and…), and put the digital ones on physical view (backchannels). But do tell people you do so!
9. Once in a year, mention all the people that did something nice or extraordinary for you or your organisation in a blog post.
10. Give away small things at will, unplanned. (Not all competitions should be about reaching out to more people (“For the next 1000th follower…”). Focus instead at engaging your existing audience (“Only for our existing followers…”) and thank them for their loyalty with cool little gifts.)

Thank you feels best when it’s honest, unplanned and comes straight from the heart. A bit of creativity doesn’t hurt either. Have you said “thank you” in a nice way lately? How?

The sun’s shining brightly again here in northern Europe and parks and beaches are packed with people catching a tan. And just like jeans turn into chinos and bordeaux into beaujolais, spring’s that time to rethink your digital activities and prepare for summer. We all know nothing ruins a carefully planned online campaign like a long sunny week. With these 7 easy to implement tactics, however, you will be summer-proof (plus have time to go to the beach yourself).

1. Focus your efforts on mobile. People might leave their desks but they won’t leave their smartphone. In fact, with all the waiting on waitresses and watching sunsets the cellphone might be closer by than before.
2. Create an addictive game for the family. It’s going to be tough to beat Angry Birds Space but certainly there’s space for another game to play while sunbathing or driving across the continent. My pick, so far, Tate’s Race Against Time.
3. Rethink your publishing schedule and times. With longer days and earlier drinks, people might prefer to receive your email or tweet earlier or later than in winter. Check your metrics and deliver when most people are online.
4. Claim parks, festivals and beaches. People spend more time outdoors in summer, often in less-formal settings such as parks. I’m sure outdoor activities like SCVNGR see a peak in users, and adding a special to your local beach on Foursquare might also make you popular.
5. Focus on photography. Spring and summer (like autumn and winter) are made for photos. Girls in beautiful dresses, kids running between flowers, boys flying kites… Ask people for their photos and you’ll get a lot of beautiful footage.
6. Provide social glue. Coca-cola can claim Christmas, but they can’t claim summer. You and your brand are irrelevant when the sun is shining, so focus your communication on what matters: let people have a good time with each other by giving the group deals, topics for discussion and a platform for their own sunny experiences.
7. Prepare for a rainy day. The bad days of summer are the worst and the only thing to lessen the pain is having something truly worthwhile to do. Prepare a great online activity for the first rainy day and launch with the first drops to get most out of your audience before they’re off to the beaches (or southern Europe) again.
8. (Bonus) Bring a notebook and pen. Notice how your best ideas always come when you’ve been relaxing for a while in the sun? Summer’s the time for lazy reflection and bright new insights. To stay away from your boss’s emails piling up, use a notebook and pen to make not of all your ideas to conquer the world.

How do you deal with summer, social media wise? We’re curious to hear your ideas, please leave them in the comments. Thanks!

At a recent workshop we met two of the people behind the membership programme of one of the most successful cultural institutions in the Netherlands: the Concertgebouw and Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. They are trying to improve the flow of their young members to (full paying) friends and in an informal meeting we looked with them at the role Facebook could play in this process.

This question touches upon a recurrent topic in our work: How can we materialize (or even monetize) our social media following? How can we get people from clicking “like” to attending venues, buying subscriptions and giving donations?

It’s debatable whether the people who like on Facebook are even the same people that pay to become members and there’s no doubt the relationship between fans and members is at best fuzzy. Yet, with Facebook integrated into a well-designed programme we believe it is possible to support and grow your membership programme with Facebook.

The evolution of a member

Last year at MuseumNext Martin Barden of Tate Members showed how he managed to grow their membership scheme to nearly 200,000 members. Tate Members is probably one of the best membership schemes in the world and a big inspiration for me. One of the things he does is segment his members into 8 different groups based amongst others on their likelihood to lapse, and then design communication and programmes in such a way that members in “lower” groups (more likely to lapse) evolve to member in “higher” groups (less likely to lapse).

It’s rather common to design a membership scheme in the hopes that members evolve from simple paying members into patrons, and that after many years of loyal membership they’ll leave you some of their inheritance. The Concertgebouw calls it “from 0 to 100 years old”, member from the cradle to the grave. In the image below the development of such a “normal” member relationship is shown with a red arrow.

Image: Development of relationships. Horizontal axis: time, vertical axis: involvement.

Such a development from cradle to grave expects people to be a member to begin with (or at least visit the venue or website to be lured into a membership with the option to jump the queue, get better seats or score a discount). The problem is, there’s a huge gap between most people and your venue or website. It’s this gap Facebook can bridge.

Digital relationships

To develop (online) passers-by into Facebook fans and then into paying members requires a strategy as elaborate as Tate Members’ programme to develop young members into patrons. Not all your Facebook fans are equal and you need to recognise that all are at different phases in their development towards members. This means you will have to offer different activities, content and extras on your Facebook page to address the different needs of the various groups of people.

If you have a well-designed and integrated strategy, the transition from a Facebook fan to leaving an inheritance can be seamless (the green arrow in the model). My favourite example of such a programme is Avaaz. They organise online campaigns for a better world and over the years have grown a community nearly 14 million people strong. Clicking “like” on Facebook to stop world hunger is a clear case of slacktivism and might even do more harm than good (read The Net Delusion for a powerful opinion on this), but the good people at Avaaz have managed to turn this digital action into real world success.

By being extremely persistent, and giving people at different phases of their relationship with Avaaz different options to be involved. Years ago I signed my first petition after being tipped by a friend. Over the years I occasionally left my email address, but slowly I started feeling so engaged that when they asked for a donation for a project two years ago, I made a small donation. By now I’m actively promoting Avaaz whenever I can, and regularly make donations. I’m sure that among their 14 million fans there are many others like me.

(We’ll be writing much more about the development of online relationships in the near future, so be sure to subscribe to our RSS feed.)

Retention and acquisition

What the example of Avaaz shows, and what Tate Members acknowledges, is that a good membership programme is as much about keeping existing members involved, as about reaching out to new members. Retention and acquisition. Quite often Facebook and other social media are seen as tools for acquisition of new members. However, I feel we have to see it as tools to retain people’s interest in what we do, no matter how “insignificant” their investment in this relationship might be (a “mere” like).

And while you’re using Facebook to turn passers-by into members by involving them, and keeping them involved, at the same time it can be a strong tool to support the retention activities of your existing members.

A Facebook like is the first step towards a long lasting and intense relationship between your audience and you. It’s not too much about getting people to like you in the first place, but much more about continuously trying to develop your Facebook fans towards a deeper kind of relationship which might in the end put you in their will.

Whereas we just wrote a post on the future being about attitude and not technology, of course we love finding the right tools for our trade. We too depend on many online apps to get our work done (and to maintain our personal life). I’d say most people would even find us somewhat on the geeky side. As much as we love getting those beta invites for every new app on the block though, we strongly believe that technology needs to be seen as a means to an end, not as a goal.

To get our company going, we put together a basic infrastructure, consisting of mainly free apps. (OK, the cloud part in the title was a bit of mandatory vocabulary.) I thought I’d share the 5 most important ones with you here, and tell you what we use them for.

Sharing files with Dropbox
Dropbox helps us keep our files in sync. When I save a file in one of my Dropbox folders, it’s almost instantly available on my phone, my tablet, anywhere in the world through an online interface, and on the computer of everyone I shared that shared that folder with. We use it within the company, with partners and with clients. Comes for free with a quota of 2GB.

Send mail and keep track of agenda’s with Google Apps
Email and calendars Google style. That’s basically it. Easy to set up. Very easy to use. In my opinion the best interface for these kinds of apps you’ll find in a browser. Of course you can also hook your email client of choice up, but I really like ‘the anytime anywhere in the cloud’ thing. Free for up to 10 users, with about 8GB’s of space for your mail. Comes with Google Docs for your document editing and sharing and some more apps which I don’t think are as useful as these.

Keep track of sales with Trello
An incredibly versatile app for a simple task: creating and organizing lists. Every Trello board consists of multiple lists and every lists can have multiple cards. The simplest example would be the lists “To Do”, “Doing” and “Done”. Boards are shareable with others, tasks can be assigned to team mates and its easy to see who is responsible for what. We have a board to keep track of our sales cycle, which has lists for leads, meetings, proposals and projects that we won. Hopefully we won’t need a lost-list any time soon . (I also use it for basic project management, but when projects get larger I intend to move to Basecamp or maybe try Asana.)

Email newsletters through Mailchimp
Be it a festival, a band, a museum or a publisher, what we mostly provide for our customers is a way to get in touch with (potential) fans and keep in contact with that fanbase. One of the most basic and effective means to do so, is by keeping them up to date through an email newsletter. It’s one of the easiest things to do too and requires less continuous attention than for example Facebook or Twitter. To build up our own fanbase, we practice what we preach: You can sign up here :) We currently use Mailchimp with a free plan up for to 2000 subscribers and 12,000 mails per month. (A good alternative is Campaign Monitor, but we went with the cute monkey this time.)

Keep track of visitors with Google Analytics
We like to know what blogposts you like the most, so we can make you happy and write more of those. When we get our website going, we’d also like to track how many visitors it gets, where they’re from, from what websites they have been redirected or what they’ve searched for (i.e. Googled) and whether they found it. There’s a lot going on in the web analytics space, but an all time favorite is Google Analytics. You’ll need a backlog of visitor data when you’re ready to start optimizing your site or planning to do a campaign to increase your traffic and want to measure the results, so make sure you track your visitors from the start.

If you’re about to start building your company or planning to further strengthen your existing infrastructure, this list might be helpful to you. We use quite some more tools and are still looking for the best tools to help us with tasks like time tracking, invoicing, bookkeeping, etcetera. When we’ve experimented some more, I’ll give you an update. In the meantime, if you know of an app that helps you get your job done, and might be useful to more of us, please let us know!

On Skype with my friend Jim of Sumo today we discussed the final module of a two-day workshop we’ll be running next week, which is going to be about the future. To be precise, we will reflect on the future of technology, social media, mobile and all other things digital. So great, what is the future?

For one thing, the future is pretty hard to predict. A year ago hardly anybody knew about Pinterest, and now you can’t read a blog without seeing it mentioned as being the future (social network/online business model/copyright lawsuits/etc.).

Well, Pinterest isn’t the future. In fact, no hip social network is the future. Even the future of technology is not about technology.

If we want to talk about the future of technology, we should talk about the attitude of your organisation today and tomorrow. The only way to predict even the smallest little bit of the future is to be an organisation that is creating the future. Even if you don’t want to be at the forefront of your industry (all the time), your organisation and its people need to have the right attitude towards changes in the environment, such as a new social network suddenly popping up.

There are many books written about creating such organisations in the pre-Internet era, most notably perhaps Jim Collins Good to Great. Their theories receive some criticism however about their applicability in today’s digital world. Changes appear so rapidly you can go from good, to great, to obsolete in the blink of an eye.

So if the future is about attitude, what attitude should we adopt? I fear I do not yet have a definite answer (and will use this blog to discover the answer together with you, dear reader), but there are some trends visible already. When we were asked to make a list of the world’s top museums in the field of media and technology, most of them shared the same characteristics.

• Readiness to experiment. Even though not always actively innovating an entire industry, they are at least regularly trying new things and testing ideas.
• Sharing. Almost all keep blogs or write regular guest posts about their work, and talk about it at conferences, opening up their work to constructive criticism.
• Changing partnerships. Working together with completely different partners on different projects ensures a constant stream of fresh ideas.
• Great people. Quite often the great stuff happens when a number of great people get together, “great” meaning people who are open to ideas of others, passionate and full of creativity and energy.
• Focus on the customer. Every single great museum focused at least as much on the experience of the visitor, reaching and engaging them, as on their collection or stories.

Certainly, there’re more characteristics worth mentioning of organisations actively working on remaining relevant in the near future. We’re curious to hear your thoughts and ideas, and we’ll be writing about that a lot in the years to come as we discover more truths while working with such organisations.

Coffee is a surprisingly complex product. It took quite a visionary to take it from the seeds of reddish fruit to your morning’s latte. Of course, there’s the beans that have to be picked, sorted, processed, dried, milled, hulled, polished, sorted again, graded, aged, roasted and grinded before they can be used. And then you need hot water, milk for your latte (which involves cows and a process I will not go into), hot steam, a specially designed paper cup and a plastic lid. Stay in or take away?

And that’s just the story of the product. There’s a whole economy around your cup of coffee that makes you pay anywhere between 80 cents and 10 euros depending on location and your preferred style. Tim Harford beautifully describes the economics of coffee in The Undercover Economist. It takes profound thinking, strategy and Scots like Adam Smith before you can get away with StarBucks prices. Coffee is a surprisingly complex product.

However, this is not a blog about coffee. This is a blog about vision and strategy for the digital age. It’s a blog for people ready to face the challenges of the future, whether they be coffee addicts or teetotallers. I guess, this is a blog for you.

It takes a broad range of skills and dedication to success to produce a simple product as complex as coffee. You need to have a clear vision and convincing strategy, the right tools, skilled people and thorough processes before you can have tangible results. The same applies not only to coffee, but to all things worthwhile. At least, we believe it does.

We are Erwin and Jasper, and we are inspired by coffee. We help your organisation excel in the digital age.

This blog is where we will discuss with you what is needed to keep organisations relevant in the 21st century. Here we will publish the models we develop to boost strategy, the do’s to get people involved, the case studies that will inspire management. Most importantly, this blog will be about you and your challenges. Welcome.

There’s not much to see yet, sorry. If however you’re curious about what we mean with ‘strategy for the digital age’, you might want to have a look at the previous work we’ve done in music, museums, and elsewhere. See you again!