Online at KaBOOM!: Ten Lessons Learned, Jim Hunn / Forum One Communications Web Executive Seminar
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Jim Hunn, the Vice President of Mass Action at KaBOOM!, covers the lessons learned from years of creation and improvement and shares the impressive results at Forum One's Web Executive Seminar, "Thanks, Come Again: Audience- Centric, User Experience" on November 5, 2009. To learn more about this event, visit http://www.forumone.com/thanks.
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Online at KaBOOM!: Ten Lessons Learned, Jim Hunn / Forum One Communications Web Executive Seminar
- 1. Online at KaBOOM!: Ten Lessons Learned November 5, 2009 Jim Hunn, VP, Mass Action, KaBOOM!
- 2. Web Executive Seminars Thanks, Come Again: Audience-Centric User Experience November 5, 2009 National Press Club Washington, DC Learn more: www.forumone.com/thanks
- 3. The KaBOOM! vision: A great place to play within walking distance of every child in America. The KaBOOM! mission: To create great playspaces through the participation and leadership of communities . “ Organizations like KaBOOM! are necessary not just to the health of our children, but to the health of the entire nation.” First Lady Michelle Obama, June 22, 2009
- 4. 2 months before 7:45 am 10:30 am 10:50 am 11:25 am 12:50 pm 1:25 pm 2:35 pm 2:50 pm
- 16. 2008 2007 2009 September Playspace Finder launches December Connect launches March Sites combined under single header; 100K campaign starts May DIY Planner launches; Connect revamped June Play Day Planner launches Total minutes spent on site Unique visitors visitors minutes
- 17. Connect Other Playspace Finder Planners (DIY Build & Play Day) Percentage of time spent on site “ Old” site 10% 32% 3% 27% 28%
- 25. 1 2 DISTRIBUTION PARTNER NAME GOES HERE 3
- 37. playschool.kaboom.org projects.kaboom.org playspacefinder.kaboom.org kaboom.org connect.kaboom.org playday.kaboom.org
- 42. “ Lightbox” Roadblock on kaboom.org
- 46. Take control of your own (online) destiny Lesson # 1 is the most important…
- 47. Be willing to make and learn from your mistakes Except for…
- 49. LEARN MORE: www.forumone.com/wes Web Executive Seminars
Editor's Notes
- CREATING GREAT PLAYSPACES—OUR OFF LINE STRATEGY: Build playgrounds in one day with all volunteer labor Identify and focus on underserved neighborhoods Match funding partners with strong community organizations Provide project management via a model tested and refined over 14 years and building 1,700 playgrounds
- Yield : Our goal is thousands of new playspaces per year; hundreds of thousands of inspired and empowered individuals; so that we can achieve our vision of a great place of play in walking distance of every child in America
- To achieve this impact, we have developed the following suite of online tools. kaboom.org provides free, open-source access to our process and know-how. We keep simplifying our home page and driving to key actions we want—find a playspace , improve our build a playspace, help promote the cause of play, and donate.
- The KaBOOM! Playspace Finder is a user-generated database of playspaces in the United States. It is a Google-maps mash up, and you can search by zip, city or playspace name, or better yet add a new record, with photos and a rating.
- We have more than 90,000 user generated entries (this is a playground near me).
- The DIY Build Planner allows any group to plan, fund, recruit for and execute Do-It-Yourself playspace renovations. We have 1,000 plus registered projects since launching at end of May.
- Here’s an example from Los Angeles.
- The Play Day Planner helps communities organize and plan Play Days. In September of 2009 the tool was used by 1254 communities in all 50 states and on all seven continents (yes, Antarctica, too) who self-organized these events.
- Here are photos of a play day from Jackson, Mississippi.
- connect.kaboom.org is a social networking site where participants can come together, share tips and know-how and act as mentors for others in the process. We have more than 24,000 members.
- Each registered user can create a profile. This is mine.
- The last critical tool is online training. I’ll talk more about this important initiative in a bit.
- The re-launch or launch fo our online tools is directly tied to our online growth: Visitors up 80% since 12/08 Time spent on site has almost tripled.
- More than 50% of current time on site is on products launched in 2009!
- At our last meeting with the KaBOOM! Board of Directors, we reflected on our successes and failures, and after doing a review of our online efforts, we presented these lessons learned. I think many are relevant to other non-profits.
- For KaBOOM!, once online become an essential means for achieving our vision and mission , relying on vendors to develop all of our online tools, proved to be too expensive, too slow, and the work often did not meet our expectations.
- This has meant hiring our first programmer—Elliot Laster. (And now we’re recruiting for our second).
- Taking control of our destiny, also means we have moved to open source platforms (in our case, Ruby on Rails and Drupal), so that WE OWN the online tools we invest in (our Planners, for example) To be clear, we use outside resources on strategy and for stand alone projects The tipping point at which YOU consider building in-house programming capability will vary by organization.
- For KaBOOM!, increasing competency of internal staff and moving to open-source platforms means we have lowered program costs significantly while slightly increasing our investment in staff. The payoff? Faster speed to market and tools we own.
- This is a follow-on to rule one. KaBOOM! used to try to solve a lot of problems all at once with external programmers. But no online tool is perfect, so get something out there! Product launch is just the beginning, never the final goal Don't plan on immediate success; a learning curve is normal Start measuring, testing and improving immediately Priority is to identify and fix worst barriers to usage; other things can wait Schedule for continuous improvement = numerous small releases
- Non-profits don’t think like businesses. As a mission and vision driven non-profit, we are agnostic about where online action in support of the cause of play happens—increased distribution of our tools and the actions they inspire is mission critical. In plain English, using widgets of our tools to take our content to where the online eyeballs are online is critical, so we don’t rely on traffic to our site alone. BUT we need to fund the costs of creating our tools (which often means including funder logos) AND we have the natural desire of any organization to let people know we created them, right?
- Two problems, illustrated by this widget for the KaBOOM! Playspace Finder. ONE: Corporate branding on a tool (which provides funding) prevents its adoption by non-profits, government and media partners TWO: KaBOOM! branding on a tool, though less restrictive, limits adoption by other organizations and companies SO, THREE….KaBOOM! is now developing widgets of out tools which carry no branding—other than the partner who is providing us distribution. We will do this when the benefits are significant… But it took us quite a while to make this decision… and has met some resistance on our Board.
- In online technology and social media, there is always something new and cool—but trying to pick up every new shiny nickel can be distracting and counterproductive, and prove costly. On the other hand, missing out important new trends also poses dangers, which in our case has meant we are playing catch-up.
- For example. Some of our shiny nickels were My Space and the fad for wikis to prompt consumer-generated content. Neither worked that well. Finding the balance, demands greater engagement with the online world and hiring of staff that is better able to distinguish between what is hot and what is important. An example: You’re probably being pitched—I know we are—from companies who want to develop a Facebook or a I-Phone app or widgets. You need to decide which are built to last and which are a good fit with your strategic goals. For KaBOOM!, that means we have prioritized an I-Phone app for our Playspace Finder, and not a Facebook application.
- Like many non-profits, we’ve established a presence on Facebook and Twitter – and we’ve seen some returns. However, we’ve realized that we’re often talking to people who already have a relationship with us – and we haven’t taken full advantage of what’s unique about these new social networks, which is the ability to reach the “friends” of those people . As a practical matter, this means getting people to publish their actions – especially their actions on kaboom.org – into their Facebook news feeds or Twitter streams, where friends can see those actions and discover KaBOOM! for themselves. We are currently working in this direction…especially for Facebook Connect.
- One thing we know from our existing efforts… People who come from either Twitter.com or Facebook stay longer on the site and look at more pages than our average visitor. For example, people coming from Twitter stay on the site an average 80% longer than the average user and check out 45% more pages per visit.
- KaBOOM! has a significant audience of engaged individuals (DIY Builders, Play Day Planners, etc.) who are now using on with our online tools. But getting them engaged is just the beginning. It has become clear to me that, at least in our case, where raising money, recruiting and planning a playground build is a mighy complicated undertaking, that these users need hi-touch support. Therefore we are now hiring a DIY Manager, whose sole purpose will be the care and feeding of this critical constituency, becoming their voice at KaBOOM!
- We also need to test and perfect ways to motivate actions by our Alumni and our 8000 plus registered Playmakers--(personalized e-mails, online badging and reputation management) that provide users with care and feeding while not draining unmanageable levels of staff time.
- KaBOOM! has radically shifted how we deliver training—from all off-line, to a hybrid, to all online. The numbers tell the story .
- In 2007, we conducted all our training offline—with U Play! (a 2 day national training AND seven one-day regional trainings). Both required heavy investment in staff time and financial resources, without providing clear measurable returns on the training 472 were trained.
- In 2008, we held 12 one day trainings across the country; and complemented these with 44 Webinars. We learned that meeting recruitment goals is not enough—participants need to be ready to take training content and apply it to a build, which often didn’t happen. Recruitment marketing for trainings in specific cities on specific days was also expensive and time-consuming. 945 were trained.
- In 2009—migrated to an exclusively online platform to radically increase number of trainings while reducing costs per training. Projected to train more than 5000 attendees in 2009 via live webinars and asynchronous (on-demand) sessions Trainings are available anytime, anywhere Relevant content is delivered in digestible amounts at a time when the trainee is ready to act 76% of trainings are asynchronous
- This is a little techy, but I thought worth noting, because of it’s potential impact on our communications with funders.
- Our social networking platform in served by Kick Apps, an off-the shelf, turnkey platform; the KaBOOM! Playspace Finder is a custom-developed open-source google maps mash-up; our DIY Build and Play Day Planners are also custom built applications; our online training platform uses another off-shelf online education software package, and our content site is self-hosted using open-source Drupal software. Compete.com and alexa.com (the most widely used 3 rd party reporting tools) do not recognize all our subdomains (which means you have something before kaboom) and therefore grossly underreport traffic, which can bring up issues with (among others) smart funders who are doing their homework. Specifically, compete.com reports KaBOOM! at half our actual traffic. This another trade-off we think is worth making.
- KaBOOM! has had considerable success getting significant off-line media exposure. We initially thought they would drive online traffic.
- On May 23, 2007, we were feature on Live with Regis and Kelly Regis and Kelly joins an “Operation Playground” build in New Orleans (Operation Playground was our effort to build 100 playgrounds in areas of the Gulf Coast devasted by hurricanes Katrina and Rita—we’ve build more than 130 so far) 20 minutes of airtime created a 22% bump in online traffic for one day… then back to normal
- On June 17, 2008, our 100 th Operation Playground build was featured on Good Morning America. A 4 minute segment, created a 30% bump for one day, then back to normal.
- On June 28, 2008, Dr. Sanjay Gupta broadcast live from another “Operation Playground” build in Metarie, LA. Coverage also included segments on Headline News, CNN, and CNN.com The result? A negligible 8% bump (also the network with the lowest ratings). By the way, big print hits (New York Times, USA TODAY, Fortune) showed no increase in online traffic whatsoever.
- But then on October 22, 2009, KaBOOM! was fully integrated into an episode of Parks & Recreation on NBC, as Par tof the Entertainment Industry Foundation’s I Participate iniative. Traffic at kaboom.org hit an all-time high for a single day: Unique Visitors: Up 304% In 5 days after, a continuing 25% increase—we expect to revert to normal soon. But value was still primarily brand-building.
- We lvoed all this coverage, and it was and is great for brand building. But now, our communications emphasis for driving online traffic is online media where kaboom.org is a click away. This requires far more extensive outreach… builds slowly, but has greater long-term value. As an example, a hundred plus sites were the source for the more than 33,000 unique visitors to our Play Day website, with many bloggers and non-profit newsletters cumulatively contributing most of the traffic—but there was no single homerun.
- Our online mission is empower individuals to self-organize to take action in the cause of play. Strangely enough, these individuals really take the doing it on their own seriously… and many don’t bother telling us what they did. This has been a real problem in measuring our impact.
- We’ve learned to make reporting on their results a fun and rewarding component of our online planning tools—as we have here with grants and a direct appeal to let us know what they accomplished. We are currently developing a suite of soft and hard incentives to motivate self-organizers to lets us know the great things they are doing on- and off-line. This is critical to securing funding for our online efforts.