I recently met with a team  from SMUD at their headquarters in Sacramento, CA to discuss how to improve collaborative calendaring to increase engagement and efficiency with internal teams, volunteers and public outreach efforts.  What was a new media geek and experience designer doing in the room?

The answer is a direct result of volunteering, developing and participating in community projects. In the Heroik Innovation Lab (HIL) we started a community outreach project called Built in R-Town (Roseville, CA) that features an innovative event calendar. We call it BIRT for short (Read more about the project here).  The BIRT calendar is capable of doing several things, among them:

• It allows event coordinators to share their entire calendar feed with the community. Anyone using Outlook, Google Apps, or ICAL can share their calendar with our community.
• Users & Visitors who come to the site and see the calendar can personalize it based on categories and tags based their preference and interests.
• Users can subscribe to their own, personalized, filtered calendar feed and bring it into Outlook, Google, or iCal. In effect,  our calendar users are kept up to date on the happenings in R-Town right inside their own calendar.So they’re not required to visit our site again, unless they want to.

What does this calendar do for the community?

• There’s simply a high signal vs. noise ratio for everyone. And we’re careful to moderate for event flooding and information overload.
• Scheduling is done once on our site. Not scattered across specialty sites with calendars that don’t import into your own; we’re talking about true one-stop, click, click, subscribe and go experience.
• In a few clicks on R-Town Calendar, you can see who has what planned and create smarter schedules that optimize the whole calendar, decreasing the competition for attention and marketing dollars wasted a bit. The community as a whole is offered more manageable schedule of opportunities for every day of the week; not just Thursday nights.

What the heck does this have to do with a 2,000+ employee organization like SMUD?

Communities and Organizations have more in common than you might think:

• They are both made up of large groups of people with varying interests and diverse roles.
• Those in the business community (and even non-profits) have competitive mindsets and don’t communicate events well among each other.
• They are all consumers, users, and normal people who enjoy great experiences.

That last one sounds like filler but is the most important. If you’re looking to engage a group of people on either side of the brand, inside and out, the trick lies in the experience. Employees are consumers and users as well. They compare their consumptive experience (say with Amazon, Google, Facebook and Twiter) with the experience they have at work.  Upon comparison of the work experience with a tool vs. a consumer / user centric tool, they’re rarely impressed with how things work within the company. This exists far beyond the digital bits, but you get the idea.

SMUD is not immune to this issue. They are a large organization with great virtue and interesting challenges. They have multiple programs to engage their employees and the public in volunteer and educational opportunities, but coordinating it all is a messy mix of varying experiences. Internally, they use enterprise standard tools; think dull, slow platforms that mostly the IT Dept really understands (or wants to use). Sharing calendar events relies mainly on Intranets (that no one looks at), a barrage of event reminders via email (spam that everyone hates to see and loves to ignore), and various calendars for different department. The result is low engagement, low performance, waste and confusion.

When people would rather use paper or excel to manage their calendar, it’s time to investigate what you’re offering them and the real experience with these tools.

Framing the Challenge

Compared to consumer and smaller product lines, the current Enterprise communication systems used by large organizations sucks. That is the appropriate technical term. Sharing, syncing and personalizing is so much simpler and more enjoyable in other markets. This is both sad and preventable. (Read more about why in this article). 

Beyond the new obstacles of the enterprise world, my initial take on SMUD’s particular challenge is that there is a lack of clarity around the goals of the organization’s in-reach and outreach efforts, and a lack of understanding of the importance of the experience for the stakeholders, beneficiaries and all involved.

What are the goals? 

• Increase employee involvement in volunteer efforts, speaker events,  and other internal events.
• Increase public awareness and engagement with public events

Who is important in helping us achieve them?

• Motivated, Informed employees and their personal networks
• Managers to ensure and support employee engagement in outreach and in-reach programs
• The public; partner organizations and the crowd as a whole
• The technical people who implement the solutions to help us achieve our goals

What actions do we want the important people to take?

• Show up and participate at eucational, volunteer, and internal training events
• Share our culture and values with the crowd and encourage their participation
• Design and implement solutions that motivate engagement and inspire participation

What perceptions and feelings do we want to invoke to encourage these actions?

• High arousal emotions like awe, surprise and wonder
• positive emotions of generosity, pride, confidence, sense of belonging and part of a larger whole (community)

What obstacles are we facing?

• Dependency on traditional systems- Sharepoint ( enduces gag reflex with each experience)
• Company culture resistant to engaging on these systems for reasons previously mentioned
• Teams aren’t proficient with capabilities of current systems
• The desire to convey calendar items through email reminders (why do you want to spam your co-workers)
• Lack of experience creating experiences as if they are customer facing/ user centric
• Lack of interdisciplinary skills for individual members to work in multiple departments in varying capacities
• Lack of knowledge about the obstacles and attitudes of the internal teams, partners, and public

Framing a Solution

I have to remind myself of my complete bias in solutions that are designed with the user in mind. Let’s start with adding some new goals.

New Goal: Build a Positive, Thriving Communication Culture Within the Organization

The process design approach to communication systems and tools has largely been based on the idea that teams will use it because its necessary to get work done. The “if you build anything, they will come,” attitude is that they will use whatever is available to get them the information they need. This may work for the absolute extreme of necessary work, but the attitude is really framed for failure because it willfully ignores the preferences, interests and motivations of those using it. If you ignore these, it leads to low motivation, low engagement, and low performance- which is what is being observed in the culture. Furthermore, for our goals, much of the events are extracurricular and voluntary.  So what was designed to force employees to the trough, certainly won’t encourage them to engage and volunteer.

By setting a company wide goal of positive, thriving communication culture, those in charge of selecting tools and designing processes can be tied to creating positive, experiencial outcomes. These squishy emotional words ensure that designers and technical teams are focused on the users’ perspective not only the raw capabilities and design of the tools themselves.

Start a New Internal Calendar- If it’s amazing, they will come.

If we incorporate a layer, just a slice of customizable, enjoyment in the intranet, we can boost engagement. In this case, we’re looking to get more participation at events, so we can start with a calendar similar to the BIRT calendar; that can be divided by category and keyword, and brought into a personal calendar.

Using Your Brain

The linchpin and key to  making this work is catering to the experience and preferences of the users.  In the world of experience design, it’s important to understand how our minds assign value to information in the first place. In 2008, Autodesk ran a study to investigate how the human brain established value. There conclusion was that by in large what is visual, persistent and interactive made up a majority of that determination. This is some of the thinking that drove the design of our Calendar. So for SMUD’s challenge, If the new calendar is visual, customizable, subscribable, people can make it their own, will recognize the value and begin to buy in, or at least paying more attention to these events.

Why stop there?

Email has been the dominant technology because up until fairly recently, calendars weren’t a shared medium. The virtue of an event calendar is that it allows you to frame information relevant to a particular time frame. That is just the lead, or the subject line. Once enticed with the date, time and basic information, there’s an opportunity to connect a viewer to a broader context and/or deeper understanding.

Using the Heroik calendar approach, the internal teams can learn about what’s going on in other departments, reach for other opportunities, frame interdisciplinary/interdepartmental calendars based on interest, categories and keywords. Allow internal teams to explore a holistic view of the organization and develop a well rounded understanding. The calendar provides a natural context to encourage people to learn about new opportunities.

The Scariness of Real Transparency

Imagine if you could share volunteer opportunities with your internal teams and the public? Step one foot outside of the organization to introduce an event calendar as a marketing & PR tool. Now you have the opportunity to get a little bit more street cred and engagement from the general public for what you have planned, not just what you do when you do it. The trick here is, since it’s public facing, there’s even more pressure to make it something everyone will love.

Successfully doing so buys you more air-time, attention and recognition for the effort and demonstration of the virtues of your brand with your customers, influencers and audience. Some get scared when I mention this, but the marketers, bootstrappers and PR teams get excited at the opportunity to create deeper connections with an audience and demonstrate company values (consistency in actions vs. talking points).

New Solutions & New Challenges

Make no mistake, changing the communication culture of an entire organization is not easy. And this particular solution creates new challenges of it’s own. The new challenge of social calendaring is creating a taxonomy, a categorization of the various elements, interests and topics relevant to organization and its culture. It requires exploration and a commitment over time. It deals with so many departments and reveals the murky business of Interdisciplinary Work. It’s not for the feint of heart. Challenges like these requires a small army of  teams from internal communications , process design, IT, event coordination, or in this case, one Heroik Practitioner.

I’m not in the business of taking on small, easy work.  My firm is called upon for tough challenges. And my job, and role is to inspire others to get Heroik, and deliver exeperiences that are nothing short of the virtues of our brand.

What’s your take? Any of this going on in your world?  Tell me about it in the comments.