Sir Ken Robinson continues to be a hero of ours for his ability to perfectly articulate how to imporve the educational system. In case you haven't watched any of his pervious TED talks, check them out here and here.
(via @NikiRudolph)
This is an except I wrote from an upcoming NCSL NOW! magazine article about online community engagement…
"When talking about online engagement my favorite place to start is offline on the dance floor. We've all been to good dances and bad dances. Good dances are proportional to the number of relationships built up on the dance floor. It's a simple idea, people are more likely to dance, have fun, and hang longer if they have relationships with the people around them to talk with or teach them new dance moves. So if you host a dance party, your job is to connect as many people together around shared interests to increase the number of relationships on your dance floor. It's not about you, it's about them connecting, learning, and growing from each other and the more relevant the introductions, the more likely the relationships are to solidify. You are the facilitator of engagement, not the gate keeper. After you've built up the relationships, you should be able to walk away from the dance and it will continue on without you."
Most student club advisors will tell you that club engagement goes through waves; some years are rockstars and others are duds. Almost every club starts the year with aspirations of rockstardom, but within a couple weeks, the excitement and motivation of the leadership team fades, and thus, the entire club activity withers. In pondering this problem, I've been talking more and more about an idea called engagement-based leadership (EBL), meaning that leadership is not a one-time elected thing, but rather an ongoing, ever-changing position rewarded based on engagement. Before I talk more about EBL, first let's dissect the problem of why student leaders fade within a month of being elected.
Several years ago, I walked the second day of a 2-Day Avon Walk For Breast Cancer with my wife and some friends. Anyone who's ever done the walk knows how grueling it is. Blisters alone are painful, but the average Avon walker can expect to endure multiple layers of blisters building up until his or her entire foot becomes one big blister. It's disgusting and painful and makes the second day of the walk intense. The organizers know that completion of the walk is extremely difficult without a continuous onslaught of support from spectators and volunteers. That's why for every walker, they commit to line the entire path with at least five cheerers. On the last leg of the walk, my feet blistered up and shot a pain through my body with each step. Mentally and physically I was ready to quit. My motivation was gone. But then, as we turned the corner, there was a smiling old lady sitting in a wheel chair, wearing a cap to cover her bald head and holding a sign that read, "I'm why you're walking, Thank you." Like a bolt of electricity, my whole body reenergized and plowed toward the finish line. Imagine if the only rewards for walking the race were in the beginning when they pumped us up, and at the end when we crossed the finish line? The attrition rates would be horrendous!
Like the Avon walk, student leaders begin the year excited and motivated about the idea of the journey they're about to start. They might have just attended an award ceremony where the outgoing leaders were showered in praise for the hard work they did throughout the year, which further motivates the incoming leaders. So much support. So much praise. And then, let's say within a month or so, reality sets in. The real work starts, and the "blisters" of being a leader build up. But unlike the Avon walk, with a motivational checkpoint waiting for you at every street corner, the next motivational checkpoint for student leaders most likely won't be for another six months, during their outgoing ceremony when they are praised for all the hard work they did throughout the year. Thus, within the first couple months of being a leader, the excitement and motivation fade and the attrition rates go up. It should be noted that some leaders drop off for other reasons, such as class overload, work overload, or personal issues.
What's a solution look like?
As the advisor, you could make sure to set up a collection of individual checkpoints for your leaders throughout the year, so you make sure they stay excited and motivated. At bare minimum, let's say you create checkpoints that happen once per week for ten minutes where you praise them for the work they are doing and remind them of the bigger picture of student engagement. Just one leader multiplied out for eight months, that's just under five hours of your time. Now expand that to 50-300 leaders. If you don't think you have a life now…
Enter EBL. The goal is still the same, keep the leaders motivated on an ongoing basis so they can survive through the typical student leader burnout, but in EBL, the tactics change. In EBL, you are moving the motivational checkpoints away from you as the admin/advisor and pushing it to the students. EBL builds in a peer-to-peer motivational system that is ongoing and ever present. Now it doesn't matter if you have 50 or 5000 student leaders. Actually, the more leaders you have, the better.
How does it work?
It's no secret I'm a fan of Whole Foods (also known as Whole Paycheck). Because there's a WF on my way home from work, I tend to frequently stop in and grab a few items. Over time, I realized that WF is one of the top five places I visit the most every week, which makes me a pretty darn engaged customer. In fact, WF should probably be rewarding me for being so engaged. Enter FourSquare, Yelp, and SCVNGR. For those unfamiliar with these three sites, they are, simply stated, mobile check-in tools. I can be anywhere in NY and check in that I am there via my mobile phone. Nothing special yet, until you start to receive prizes, titles, and recognition for checking in more often. For a while, I was crowned the Mayor of our WF because I was the most engaged customer. But then my speaking travel schedule picked up and for several months I disappeared and rightfully so, someone else took over as Mayor.
EBL rewards students based on their engagement. The more engagement "points" you score, the more rewards, titles, and recognition you receive. To repeat from above, leadership is not a one-time yearly elected thing, but rather an ongoing, ever-changing position that is rewarded based on engagement.
There certainly is much more to debate and discuss here, but consider this post only a surface-level introduction to the idea. I'm not interested in getting into the weeds just yet, so I purposefully left out many of the operational details.
The Value of EBL?
Admin/Advisor – Student Leader attrition rates will drop, which means student leaders will stick around longer and be more active in their clubs. The increased activity will make clubs more successful throughout the year. The admin/advisor also won't have to do as much individual student leader motivational check-ins.
Student Leaders – Like a video game, the rewards and benefits built into EBL will keep the student leaders motivated throughout the entire year on an ongoing basis. They are going to have more fun because their clubs are more active and engaged. They also won't feel as much guilt about dropping off the map and letting the club die due to some personal issues they didn't plan for ahead of time. A new leader with the most engagement points is ready to step up to Mayorship.
Students – They will have a larger group of active clubs to join. After joining they don't have to rely on a disengaged elected leader to keep the group going. Leadership is open to anyone who wants it and is willing to work for it.
Wrap Up
EBL is a blend of game theory and student engagement theory. Every student affairs professional knows the pains of deadbeat leaders and thus dead groups. EBL is a new paradigm in thinking about leadership. If we want to break out of the normal student engagement levels of 16-40%, we have to think differently. The ideas, tactics, and tech tools we use have to embody this new way of thinking. It's not just about making paperwork more efficient, that's just extracting more energy from the resources you already know exists. It's about exploring new potential energy that is sitting dormant in the 60-84% of the rest of your student body, that's a massive untapped pool of energy.
The Backstory
Kevin and I started The Student Affairs Collaborative in 2005 to test our hypothesis that a decentralized, open system of peer-to-peer learning built around shared interests would increase engagement and retention.
We wanted to create a community in which everyone was a teacher at some level, and everyone supported each other to become more involved.
In the beginning, 100% of the content was written by me, Kevin, and our speaker friend Del Suggs. We then bribed our student affairs friends with cookies to help us write content, and slowly, over time, the site gained a readership.The SA Collaborative started to become the go-to place online for student affairs professionals to receive and share knowledge from their peers. The growth remained steady, and then Twitter came along…
In 2009, over drinks at Panera Bread Co with Debra Sanborn, I pitched the idea of a weekly chat via Twitter for student affairs professionals, which would mimic the already established #EDchat (for teachers) and #JourChat (for journalist). She nodded excitedly at the idea, and a couple weeks later, on Oct 8th, 2009, we attempted our first #SAchat.
I remember telling my wife how nervous I was that it was just going to be me and Debra tweeting back and forth for an hour, and it would never take off because there were no student affairs people on Twitter. I kept a shot of vodka close by to calm my nerves just in case 
.
The chat started extremely slow, but within 15 minutes a couple of people joined us from out of nowhere. Twitter hasn't opened up its history past Feb 2010, so the data can't be verified yet, but I remember the hour generating around 100 tweets and 10 people participating. 80% of those tweets came from me and Debra though :-/.
This week marks the one year anniversary of #SAchat, and the community has exploded in celebration. Last week, I jokingly declared that the SA Collaborative editors were bringing fireworks to the party, and fireworks they did bring! I've personally received tweets, emails, phone calls, faxes, and even postcards in celebration.
Where We Are Now
The last seven days of #SAchat'ter generated 2,500 tweets with 300 people participating! The hashtag #SAchat is the go-to place on Twitter for student affairs. Many people have the hashtag saved as a favorite search and keep it open all day on their 3rd party clients, which further solidifies its validity.
The SA Collaborative is now five years old, and has around 700 subscribed readers, 3,900 Twitter followers, 17 content contributors, and is the #1 ranking Google search for "Student Affairs Blog."
As expected, lots of additional niche student affairs chats are popping up with varying success. Most are initiated by the community, but some of the established organizations in the industry are launching their own chats. I say, the more the merrier! It makes sense that as the all-purpose #SAchat grows, sub chats with a more narrow focus will emerge. Once you've found the music fans, now you want to find the old-time-bluegrass-with-a-fiddle-in-the-band music fans because that is what you are really into.
A large percentage of the community only knows my name because of the generous outpouring of gratitude I've received over the past week. I tend not to overly participate in the weekly chats or blog. It's not that I don't care or have time, it's that you all will learn far more from your peers, who walk in your shoes 24/7, than from me being an outside supporter of student affairs. So I'll happily continue on from behind the scenes helping the community grow by facilitating as many relationships as possible, so we all continue to stay on the dance floor dancing together.
Why This Community Continues To Grow
Every community is comprised of champions, participants, and lurkers. This is also called the 90-9-1 rule in which 1% of a community will be the champions, 9% will participate, and 90% will simply lurk. Wikipedia is the most famous example of the 90-9-1 rule. The challenge of community organizers is to provide the right incentives to the right people so they stay engaged in the community. Champions want an audience to help and support, like they received when they were just starting off. Participants want an easy way to engage with people like them around relevant topics and to learn from the champions. Lurkers want a way to watch the activity between the champions and participants, and when ready, a way to easily test the temperature of the water.
I continuously work with the editorial team to make sure we are moving the community in the right direction. For the champions, that means making it easier for them to share their amazing knowledge to an increasingly larger audience. For participants, that means providing quality content, a fun atmosphere, and peers like them they can connect with. For lurkers, that means keeping the community as open as possible and providing baby steps of engagement like the TuesTally.
What's Next
We're only a couple of weeks away from launching a directory for the #SAchat community that will further facilitate relationships and learning communities around shared interests. I want to help the student affairs graduate students find, participate, and learn from the #SAGrad community. I want to help women who work in housing find, participate, and learn from the #wihsng community. I want to help first year experience people find, participate, and learn from the #FYEchat community. I want to help the #RLchat (Res Life people) community grow, the #SAASS (assessment people) community grow, etc, etc, etc. The new directory will make all of this possible, and I predict it will challenge the established student affairs organizations to rethink how they engage their community. Heck, the #SAchat community has already turned some heads!
Three Challenges
And Lastly
My excitement for this community is overflowing. I believe we are pushing not just student affairs forward, but the entire educational field. We’re working our tails off over here at Red Rover to duplicate the successes of this community with the students on your campus. Wait till we launch the #SAchat directory, then you’ll really see what I’m talking about.
I’m writing this post from my perspective, but really it’s a culmination of countless conversations between the editorial team that are well deserving of endless praise, so extra cheers and digital cookies to Debra Sanborn, Cindy Kane, Ed Cabellon, Liz Van Lysal, Stacy Oliver, and Kevin Prentiss.
Here’s to another 365 sunrises and sunsets on our great community! Queue the fireworks.
BJ Fogg created the Fogg Behavior Model (FBM) through his work at the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University. The FBM states…
"Three elements must converge at the same moment for a behavior to occur: Motivation, Ability, and Trigger. When a behavior does not occur, at least one of those three elements is missing."
Fogg goes on to break down the three elements even further…
The FBM deals mostly with online software user behavior, but with a little twist, it can also apply to engaging students on campus.
Kevin, of Red Rover, created the Student Motivation Pyramid (SMP) to better understand the different student motivations. The SMP states…
"Students can be generally divided into three core engagement motivators: Comfort, Connection, and Contribution. Comfort is defined as a motivation for lowest common denominator connections on an individual level (e.g. you like sports, I like sports, let's be friends at orientation). Connection is defined as a motivation to join relevant interest groups and act together toward a common outcome (e.g. German Club, Chess Club, Magic Club). Contribution is defined as a motivation to give back to the campus by consciously leading and supporting the community (e.g. Student Leaders)."
In terms of student engagement, applying (trigger) the wrong motivation (comfort/connection/contribution) at the wrong time (ability) will have little or no effect. Such a simple sentence to write, but opens up a spider web of questions:
The good news is answers are available and technology provides the helping hand. In Part 2 I'll dig further into each question to provide an overview of how campuses can better engage their students through these models.
Yesterday, USA Today reported on how student participation in co-curricular (outside the classroom) activities leads to higher GPAs and a more satisfied social life.
"College experts say students who participate in extracurricular activities are more engaged in the college experience, and benefits can be seen both in and outside the classroom."
The article's focus wasn't about participation in standard clubs such as German and Chess, but rather in more obscure clubs such as Michigan's Squirrel Club or Harvard's College Cube Club. In other words, the long tail of student interests.
But ask any student activities department how they would feel about a 50% increase in registered campus clubs and you'd experience a face of joyous panic.
Supporting the long tail means the position of student activities also has to shift from gate keeper to facilitator. Instead of registering, formalizing, and monitoring every organization, support a platform that allows students to self-organize around an infinite number of interests and act as the facilitator to introduce like minded students together.
"Seth have you met Randy, you both like White Water Canoeing"
Allowing bizarre peer-to-peer learning communities to form through the long tail will not only increase engagement, but also will lead to longer lasting friendships because the commonality of "we're the only ones who love XYZ" is already established. As John Gardner, president of the John N. Gardner Institute for Excellence in Undergraduate Education said in the USA Today article:
"Friendship formation is task No. 1 for most students. If you don't make friends, you're lonely, you're anxious, you feel sort of adrift."
New tools are supporting schools as they shift towards a more decentralized peer-to-peer engagement model.
Through the schools using our Red Rover campus directory tool, we can actually visualize, and for the first time quantify, what the long tail of engagement looks like.
I promised the good student affairs folk of the Penn State system
that I would write up a draft outline of a tech plan for a state wide
student leadership event. I delayed a bit, so that we could finish up
this new sachat platform – I think it’s an important example of the
goal.
This will be a picture of what is possible, and the benefits,
complete with notes. While I will aim at “reasonable and doable,” the
degree of difficulty will vary by campus. This certainly isn’t THE way
to do this, it is a draft plan to pick apart and play with.
This plan isn’t about just getting something up or what can be done
in an hour, this plan is about creating a cost effective community that
will help your leaders be successful.
1) Build a statewide community of student leaders. Use the in person
experience as a catalyst for building an always-available community
online.
Notes: Many leadership conferences focus on skills. “Sit in a
Educational Session and learn what you need to know, then go do it.”
While skills matter, engagement is more important. Community leads to
engagement, conversation, and retention.
Student leaders often face frustration on their own campus. Most of
their peer students just don’t care as much. Giving them easy access to
peer student leaders, who do care as much, will help them maintain
their own motivation while building their skills.
2) Teach and encourage student leaders to share their model of high
education involvement and education via social media and the internet.
Notes: Sharing models of engagement is good for the school (great
content for the web, first year experience, etc.) and for the student -
they have a positive digital identity that will help them find a job.
1) Use a public collaboration space to plan the events of the conference. I recommend wikispaces.com Start with the free version.
Here’s a great template from an education technology conference happening next weekend.
Notes:
- The point of using a wiki without a password vs. google docs is
that you are modeling for the students how to plan in the open. If they
begin to plan their events on campus in the open, they will, in turn,
be modeling the various stages of involvement for other students around
campus. This is a very good thing.
- Wikis are not magic work solvers. While they do open up the
possibility of community members contributing some effort, don’t count
on it. It will likely be the same 3 people that always to 90% of the
work, plus one surprise over achiever that will come out of no where
and be very helpful.
- Wikis will make it easier for the planning group, and early
interested students, to get on the same page. Compare it to sending
lots of emails, where the information is in small pieces spread
everywhere. Wikis bring it together.
- Click on the “Notify Me” tab on the top of the page to get change
notices to your email. This makes it easy to stay up on things.
2) Set up a Facebook Group (not a fan page), put a link to it on the wiki.
Notes:
- I feel conflicted about this step. Facebook Groups don’t last, as a general rule. Even with student groups, most get set up and forgotten.
The goal here is to establish a longer term platform. If Facebook
groups typically die, does that mean any lines of connection or
artifacts (pictures) burried within the Facebook groups are taking away
from energy that could have gone into something else? I’m not sure.
It’s close, but I think not. I think it’s worth trying both and seeing
where the energy goes. It might just be both. Facebook has changed the
design now, to be more stream oriented, and the message boards now
allow threaded messages and replies in emails. All of this adds up to:
maybe Facebook groups are worth another shot.
- At the very least, it’s worth including in the organization
process to give students a place to post their pictures. Pictures are
one of the most important artifacts of community. Profile pictures,
pictures of fun, pictures of people – it’s one of the best online
reinforcement of feelings that we have.
3) Set up a twitter account specifically for penn state leaders. Something like twitter.com/pennslead
4) Spend 30 minutes learning Mailchimp by watching their howto videos.
Notes:
- Reach out to the attendees as soon as you have a list. Make it a
goal of having a preliminary list as quickly as possible. The first
email should be very short “We’re excited for the conference! Sign up
for the facebook group here or follow us on twitter.”
- If you just want to use Mailchimp for the run up to the
conference, it will be free. If you fall in love and want to use all
the features over a longer period (to send lots of emails), it’s $30 a
month. The tracking alone is worth it.
- Mailchimp will allow you to see who opens the email, and who
clicks on the email. Send a follow up email with a different subject
line within two days to everyone that didn’t open the first email
(Mailchimp makes this easy.)
- Mailchimp will be one of three communication methods you will use.
You will also use Facebook and Twitter (depending on how many students
follow- I would expect 10% or so.) Twitter will get you to the
cellphones if the student wants it, now you have Email, Facebook, and
Text Messaging covered. This makes you awesome.
5) Now look at the students that have joined the Facebook group and
how many have followed on twitter. These are your leaders among
leaders. They are your biggest enthusiasts. Send them a personal email
asking them to get involved in planning the conference. Send them to
the wiki with a specific task and see who follows through.
Notes:
- Again, two things are happening here simultaneously – you are
getting the work done, but you are also teaching. Think of this process
as an ed session in and of itself. If this sounds like a lot of time -
and it’s a couple of hours – ask yourself how much time you would spend
prepping and delivering an ed session for the purposes of educating the
students. Why not teach them online? And doing the work with be
teaching yourself as well.
6) With the help of the students, fingers crossed you’ll find some
techies, build a collaborative place online to put content up from the
conference when it is happening. The goal is to generate a lot of
content at the conference and then keep it going afterwards. Whatever
method you decide on below, you will use the mailchimp interface to
notify students about it before the conference and after the conference.
There are two main options for pulling on the content together in one public place:
A) A posterous blog,
where lots of people can email pictures and words. This creates one
central public blog. Students with smart phones can email pictures
directly from their seats to this blog.
Notes:
- This is the easiest and fastest platform to set up. It has it’s own comment system which works well.
- Every student that emails in content will get posted on the common
group blog as well as creating their own personal blog. Apologies if
this makes your head hurt, it’s an important point.
- Everything the student emails to
B) An aggregated WordPress blog like the new student affairs collaborative platform.
Notes:
- This requires the selection of a common word that students would
attach to their blogs, pictures, or tweets. Use something short and
easy to remember. Best if it is the same as the twitter account. Like
#pennslead
- We went to this system because we wanted to aggregate twitter and
blogs in the same place using one common tag. We wanted student affairs
professionals to have their own blogs where they wrote about what ever
they wanted. When they wanted to add their content to the collaborative
space, they simply add “#sachat” to the blog or tweet and it shows up
on the central blog.
- This system is more flexible and allows participants to use
whatever they are already using (instead of asking everyone to use
posterous.) More flexibility for users requires a little more
investment in the platform. You would hire someone to build this using
Word Press. It’s not a huge expense, but expect about $1000 up front
and $200 a year to keep it going.
- This system would work with whatever blogs your students were
using. So you could encourage them to set up their own blog on penn
state’s system, and then pull together only the content with the tag
#pennslead.
- Notice that this system works. We’ll be posting more on this in
the future, but the student affairs blog is a great and growing
community. It’s a perfect example of exactly what we would want to see
for the student leaders of any state.
7) If you use WordPress, take the RSS feed
and add put it into mail chimp as a RSS -> Email Campaign. You can
set this to go out every Wednesday morning if their is new content on
the central blog. (posterous has it’s own email notification settings
that students will control on their own.)
Notes:
- To build the community, you’ll need both content and notification of the content, until it is a habit. This will take a while.
- Follow up with those students you found in step 5. Ask them to
create content. Tell them they are special (because they are) and you
need their help in creating this place for them to connect and learn
online.
- As staff members, you can keep putting content into the blog and
sending it out. The goal of course, is to transition from staff to
students over time. Keep pushing them, it will happen.
- You will have lots of assessment to show anyone. Mailchimp will
give you open rates and click through. You’ll know traffic to the blog,
new content, and comments. Share these stats with the group to keep
them motivated.
Fire away with comments and questions.
Online community ninja, Jakob Nielsen, is one of the original brains behind the 90-9-1 rule. Stated simply, the rule goes…
In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.
Wikipedia is a classic example. 99% of Wikipedia users never contribute to the site. Of the 32 million Wikipedia unique visitors in the US, 68,000 are active contributors. In other words, only .02% of US Wikipedia users actually contribute to the site. Wikipedia isn’t alone in experiencing such inequality. The rule applies to almost any online community.
Engagement matters, and almost every online community would give a few fingers for more user participation. Lurkers make up a site’s largest set of eyeballs. Without lurkers, 90% of the possibility of new engagement is eliminated. Private platforms are often used in higher ed as a way to maintain control (both legally and mentally). By hiding content and contribution behind password protected areas, a community is eliminating 90% of it’s possibility of new engagement.
The Student Affairs Collaborative has been our experiment in an open, peer-to-peer, learning community. The SA Blog, The SA Forum, and The #SACHAT are all open systems that allow, and welcome with open arms, lurkers. Lurkers are learning, and often times come back to contribute.
Nelsen says that we can’t overcome participate inequality, we can only move the shape of the curve.
We’re experimenting with even more ways to create open communities in higher ed, because we believe open communities lead to increased engagement. Not to mention they are cheaper to build and maintain and are great for SEO.
Allow more lurkers in. Make participation easier for lurkers. Reward contributions. Publicly promote your 1%.
