Inspring staff to use new tech tools
16:22, 11 September 2009
.. Posted in Communication, Outreach and General Mngmt.. Link
Back in the olden days of the 1990s, I would try to introduce co-workers at the non-profit where I was worked to the new-fangled things called "email" and "USENET", which at that time were my favorite tools on something called the "Internet." A year later, at a different organization, I was trying to sell co-workers on an additional tool, called the "World Wide Web."
It took me dozens of times saying, You know, you could have emailed that to everyone instead of faxing it to finally get one of my co-workers to abandon many hours standing at the fax machine to send out meeting minutes and agendas. At a professional association I was a part of, it took generating a standing-room-only audience of newcomers for a monthly meeting to convince the board that you could sell an event successfully with email and postings to online discussion groups -- no postal mailings and no faxes (I'll never forget, in 1997, asking the room to raise their hands if they found out about the event via email or the web, and most of the room raising their hands).
Selling online volunteering also proved difficult, and 15 years after the first workshop I did on the subject, I would say the majority of traditional volunteer managers/coordinators remain unsold on the idea (while people who work with volunteers, but don't identify as volunteer managers/coordinators, seem to need no convincing to use online tools with volunteers). Workshops, online materials, books and endless success stories just can't seem to get the majority of traditional volunteer managers/coordinators on board.
Convincing people to use new and even not-so-new online tools remains tough. What strategies have you used, or what circumstances do you believe need to be in place, to convince someone to join or post to an online discussion group, to use RSS to subscribe to updates on a web site or blog, to fill out a profile on LinkedIn, to share documents via an Intranet, or to be even REALLY daring and edit Wikipedia?
Please, no generalities ("Be sure to talk in non-tech language" or "Remember to stay customer-focused", etc.). I'm looking for concrete examples of carrots and sticks ("We had five mandatory trainings and then people had their tech use evaluated in their annual performance reviews").
In return, I'll give you four virtual tons of cyber karma.
