Mad 2012 : 7 billion people : (The worlds most inspiring photo)

Speaking to young innovators and social entrepeneurs in Hong Kong at MaD 2012 conference. A fantastic experience to meet young people with ideas and projects to change the world for the better – one step at a time! PS. Carl Sagan is awesome.

Groupon for public services or social good?

Groupon : An awesome name for an awesome idea…

First of all, it does what it says: It is a ‘coupon’ for groups. People join up to the groupon site and get sent special offers by email Eg. a half price holiday or spa visit. If a certain number of them ‘group-on’ to the offer by signing up in principle to pay for the product/service then the company will provide the product/service at a hugely discounted rate.

The Groupon concept has some great features which could be applied to a public service or social context. I thought I’d write a just a few up below for you to think about.  I was wondering if anyone had come across similar incentive schemes or group buying in the public/social sector that I should take a look at?

Peer referral

The idea that you need to get a group of people around the offer before it goes ahead means that peer referral is strongly incentivised. This enables the groupon concept to grow virally and reach deeply into friendship or interest networks.

If you applied this to public services you could reach people that public services can find it difficult to reach in order to promote take-up of training or healthcare offers.

Targeting niche markets

You could use groupon to match user groups with very specific needs with tailored/bespoke offers made up of both financial and NON financial benefits. For example, those living with long term conditions in a particular geographic area might form a group to network AND buy support services at discounted rates. Those with rare conditions who feel isolated can be matched with others to purchase discounted specialist treatments that they need AND to provide peer support.

Pipeline for ‘new social services’ 

Services like Cool2Care http://www.cool2care.co.uk/ which provide specialist carers to families with disabled children could stand to gain through being able to better understand and plan for demand for the service by creating a pipeline of demand when people sign up to take on their offer. Personal budgets could be spent on this type of care OR cautious investors could be attracted to make investment once the provider has been able to demonstrate a strong market for their service.

Just a few ideas to explore…be interested to hear your thoughts.

Goodgym: A smarter social service

You might remember me mentioning the marvellous Goodgym a while back when the project won the Social Innovation Camp weekend ideas pitching session. Yes, this is the project I almost fell into a canal for.

The concept is very simple -  it matches two differing needs in order to provide a different kind of social service.

The idea of GoodGym is to provide isolated or immobile older people with regular human contact and to provide motivation for younger, mobile people to run and get fit.   The Good Gym aims to make it easy for people to channel the energy used up as part of their exercise routine  toward a wider social good. 

I was very pleased to see that Ivo and the team were featured on BBC London News spreading the word about the project. Check out Goodgym on the telly! Excellent to see things going from strength thanks to lots of wonderful project leaders and volunteers’ time.

The project is currently piloting live throughout Tower Hamlets right now and looking for people to get involved there, as well as inviting expressions of interest from further afield.

Evaluating Service Design : Service design thinks #1

One of the things I did in my blogging break was to have the significant honour of kicking off the Service Design Thinks discussion series as put together by Nick Marsh, Lauren Tan and Jaimes Nel. I discussed the very glamorous and necessary issue of  evaluating service design processes, and then promptly ran off to catch a sleeper train to the Isle of Eigg. (Will update you on that one later!)

You can see the talk here:

Alice Casey – How was it for you?

Techniques for evaluating the effectiveness of user engagement

The four key points I made could really apply to any user-centred public service development that you might be thinking about:

1. It’s never too soon to think about evaluation; (it helps you plan your end goals and the best ways to know when you’ve reached them)
2. Involve people in the evaluation process; (user voice is authentic and powerful, it helps you to define success from different points of view)
3. Appreciate the policy context; (try and understand how to measure success from a ‘national targets’ point of view then don’t ‘just do a survey’)
4. Tell a compelling story, (its all about mixing qualitative numbercrunching and quantitative storytelling to make a powerful and persuasive evaluation)

“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”

Return of the Mack?

Yes, in the time honoured tradition of  Mark Morisson, and Slim Shady; I have returned. Indeed, I am back.

Where have I been these last 8 months or so?

Could I possibly have been over at NESTA, managing the final stages of the Big Green Challenge and helping set up Jailbrake with the team at sicamp, as well as taking on the role of Chair at OteshaUK whilst simultaneously storing up ideas for allsorts of exciting blogposts that I haven’t had time to write up as yet…?

That sounds about right to me.

Watch this space for some new news and some old news, but definitely no Huey Lewis and the news. There are limits.

#rebootbritain : social by social and interactive charter

I went to the NESTA Reboot Britain conference on Monday afternoon. My top two ideas to watch were:

1) Social by Social : New book/website looking in a practical way at how social media offers opportunities for social change. Check out the link. Sponsored by NESTA and written by David Wilcox, Andy Gibson, Amy Sample Ward and Nigel Courtney and Clive Holtham of Cass Business School.

2) Interactive Charter : Tim Davies and Paul Evans were joined by Tom Watson MP and Jeremy Gould to launch a charter for developing and improving how social media is used in a government context. Again, they can explain it far better than me over at the website linked to above!

The point is that both of these ideas have something in common that is very important to me, namely – a way of looking beyond what happens online into practical ‘real world’ application and culture change. If social media is going to make a real difference to the way we operate our social and governance systems, then we need more practical projects like these to lead the way forward. Let’s move from rhetoric and discussion into more piloting and learning.

Evaluating online engagement

Hello all. Apparently that post before last was a bit long… well, I’m afraid I just had alot to get off my chest on global-local deliberation on climate change!

Today I’ll be brief to make up for it…

My presentation for the Participation and Social Media Action Learning set run by Tim Davies  at LGIU is right here.

It is *hopefully a simple starting point for evaluation aimed at those setting up an online engagement project. My main argument was that a good evaluation tells a compelling story through combining qualitative  and quantitative information in a clear format to key decision makers and practitioners.

Goodgym : Site Launched!

Yes, the rumours are true – just what you’ve all been waiting for – the Goodgym site is in beta and you can check it out for yourself right here!

New project manager Phillip has been pretty busy getting things off the ground in Tower Hamlets as have the rest of the team, so keep your eyes on the blog for more news as the project grows.