Leopold+Leadership+Program


 * Leopold Leadership Program **


 * Contact Person:** Pam Sturner, Executive Director
 * Phone:** 650-723-0708
 * Email:** pam.sturner@stanford.edu
 * Executive Director:** Pam Sturner
 * Communications Director:** N/A
 * Social Media Staff:** N/A


 * Baseline **


 * CWRF Overall Level:** Walk
 * Overall Score:** 1.46
 * Detailed Score:**[]
 * Burning Questions To Be Answered**: We want to create an online social platform to support the global "community of practice" to share learning about what's working in teaching environmental leadership. Two questions I have about using social media and measurement effectively for this effort are: 1) how do we use measurement to curate our content most strategically? 2) how do we use measurement to build a ladder of engagement to serve our audiences well?


 * Measurement Indicators [Crawl=1, Walk=2, Run=3, Fly=4]**
 * Data-Informed:** 2
 * Tools:** 2
 * Sense-Making:** 2


 * Social Media Presence **

Blog: http://www.stanford.edu/group/leopoldleadership/cgi-bin/wordpress/ Facebook: Fans: YouTube: we've created it to support a specific project, but it's not publicly visible yet Subscribers: Views: Twitter: none Followers: Hashtags: #LeopoldLP

A phrase that resonated for me from yesterday's orientation call was that you're never too small to start good measurement practice. It drove home for me that part of learning to measure our social engagement strategies is developing the mindset (and habits) to do so. I'm excited about gaining tools to do this through our action learning project and discussion.
 * 1/22: reflections**


 * 2/25/13:**

I'm way behind after a bout of bronchitis that has been making rounds through the family since 2/8. Ugh! Not the kind of inspiration about "going viral" I was looking for....

Here's how our project has been taking shape since our 2/4 peer learning call:


 * 2/4:** Our peer learning call underscored again the need to keep feasibility the focus while scoping our project. I've been thinking about how to create a "baby step" project that will work, given that our ultimate goal is to create the online community of practice for members of the academic community who are teaching and learning environmental leadership development. Where to start?


 * 2/8:** As I've been thinking about this question, a couple of great resources on using editorial calendars have come into my inbox, including two posts from Beth ("If You Do Nothing Else, Use an Editorial Calendar and Measurement for Your Content Strategy" and "How to Easily Repurpose Your Content for Social Channels") and a podcast ("Is Less More in Social Media?") by Allison Fine at Kivi Leroux Miller's blog. Allison's advice to narrow and focus on just a few topics a nonprofit wants to be known for resonated strongly with me. We completed a strategic plan in 2011 that moved us from "Leopold 1.0" to "Leopold 2.0," which translates into a shift from a "pipeline" model to a "dialogue" model of communications. This means that rather than developing content and sending it out to fellows and others in our network, we are supporting peer-to-peer conversations among them and curating content for them as needed. Social media is a key tool for reshaping our communications strategies to fit this model. We know that our academic audience values excellent content and also has little time to engage with social media. They won't stick with us if we're not providing them with the most valuable content for their goals. What are the 1 or 2 topics we should focus on that will keep them engaged?


 * 2/15:** In a staff brainstorm we identified two topics that have consistently resonated with our audience: 1) teaching and learning environmental leadership in academic settings; and 2) impact Leopold fellows are having on real-world sustainability problems, aided by leadership skills we teach. Topic 1 is well suited to an action learning project because it meets all three of the following criteria:

• we have an audience that cares about it and is seeking best practices for it

• we have content ready now to seed an editorial calendar

• we have infrastructure to support it (a dedicated blog, Twitter, a group of fellows who tweet, an email list, and an RSS feed).

We sketched out the following action-learning project, based on our conversation, the goals and metrics outlined in our strategic plan, our experience listening to fellows on Twitter, and survey data collected from fellows over the past 5 years:

• We will plan an editorial calendar on training the next generation of environmental leaders. The content will be shared through our blog (“Leopold 3.0: Training the next generation of leaders”), Twitter, and email (via RSS feed or other subscription mechanism).

• We will reach out to our target audiences (see below) to invite them to join the community of practice on teaching and learning about environmental leadership, by following us on Twitter and/or subscribing to our blog.

• We will create a set of measurements to track progress on our ladder of engagement (see below) and refine our strategy as needed to improve our performance.

Next step: flesh out SMART objectives for the full project and the part we can complete by the end of June.
 * 2/20**: I vetted the concept with a friend and former colleague who is a communications specialist, who found this a sound approach.

• KBI leading to KPI • Easy/hard/useful/not useful evaluation of your metrics to separate essentials from "nice to have's" • Global Giving's plan to identify top donors who use Twitter and are influencers and engage them in social media pilot
 * Reflections on 2/25 peer learning call:** There was lots of content from today's call that will help me finish scoping my action learning project. The highlight for me was the case on MomsRising and the way they use simple questions to get from a high-level strategic goal to an understanding of what they need to know to meet it, and from there to a set of metrics and data-gathering and analysis tools for sense-making. What a great example of putting simplicity into action to get high-impact results. Other gems included:


 * 2/27:** In my coaching call with Beth, I got fabulous insights and tools for creating and managing group blogs. I'm now looking at organizing our blog as a group blog with 10-12 topics of focus that will become "beats" that fellows write for. With their input, I'll also create templates that will help manage workflow and make it easier to plan our editorial calendar, once we've started collecting data and know which ones resonate best with our audience. For planning, we'll use an editorial calendar like Holly Minch's and an "idea dashboard" for continuously collecting ideas for future posts. A key to our success will be showing fellows how they can repurpose what they're already working on for the blog.


 * 3/7:** My project is taking shape as follows:

__Goal__: Build the “content creation machine” to gather our online community of practice

__Audience__: Academics who are teaching and learning environmental leadership development

__Involves__: •Establishing a practice of editorial calendar planning, starting with our blog (identify 10-12 topics of greatest interest to audience; develop templates for posts; use “Idea dashboard” and calendar template) •Using a team approach (establish beats; share templates with writers; make assignments; provide technical assistance; manage workflow) •Tracking *consume, amplify, and engage metrics to see what content performs well

__ Ladder of engagement: __ **Reflections on 4/15 peer learning call:** Huge thanks to Matt for the share about Mark Smith's office hours on NodeXL. I've been reading about NodeXL -- we have been looking into ways map our network -- and I will definitely check out this opportunity! **10/28:** I've been back at work from my family leave for a little over two months now, and a priority has been to implement our action learning project as described in my post from 3/7. Based on what I learned from Beth, the sources she recommended in our coaching call, insights from participants in our peer learning exchange, and interviews I did with several colleagues, here's what we did to begin implementing our ladder of engagement (see above): **Phase 1:** //**April:**// Selected a limited set of templates that lend themselves well to the kinds of topics that are of interest to our community. //**May**//**:** Solicited "15-minute grant reports" from all past fellows about one engagement initiative they are working on. 120 of our 175 past fellows responded. The data we collected gave us a refined understanding of the kinds of topics we should focus on to seed our editorial calendar. //**June:**// 1) Held an introductory session on blogging as part of our core leadership training session for our 2013 fellows; introduced basic principles of blogging and shared the purpose of the Leopold blog, our templates, and our expectations of fellows to contribute posts, write comments, and tweet. 2) At the end of the training, had the 2013 fellows give us plans identifying the skills from their training that they wanted to focus on during their "practice year," which runs from June 2013 to June 2014. //**August:**// 1) Based on fellows' comments, updated the blog design: changed the theme, changed the header (traded the logo for a compelling photo), added categories (per Beth's suggestion), streamlined the front page text, and made sure all existing posts had tags. 2) Subscribed all fellows who submitted "15-minute grant reports." They receive notifications of new posts via email (a channel we know they use and are comfortable with) 3) Set up free RowFeeder account to track our hashtag, which we add to all tweets about new posts. 4) Used initial data from "15-minute grant reports" to establish an editorial calendar of posts to publish twice a week. Identified authors among our fellows to write them. //**September:**// 1) Solicited posts from identified authors and wrote some ourselves (modeling best practices I learned from Beth, Jon Morrow, Kivi Leroux-Miller, and Daren Rowse WRT variety, length, wisdom of "headline hacks," headers, tagging, and categories). For posts written by authors other than me, I usually wrote a *very* short introduction about the person and the topic to clarify how the post related to our programs. 2) Tweeted all new posts 3) Solicited comments from fellows, as appropriate 4) Tracked the metrics associated with our ladder of engagement (see above) **Phase 2 (beginning):** //**October:**// 1) Continued to implement and refine our editorial calendar, based on data from past fellows' "15-minute grant reports" and 2013 fellows' practice year action learning plans. 2) With one full month cycle of posting, tweeting, and data collection complete, began to look for evidence of what kinds of posts and topics resonate most strongly with our community. 3) Studied colleagues' best practices at sister organizations for both blogging and tweeting and sought out additional online resources for specific implementation questions. Did an informational interview with a colleague who inspired me to experiment with a different Twitter strategy that may make better use of both my account and our organizational account for getting additional readers. 4) Signed up for a free Twitter Ads app to help gain a fuller picture of how our content travels (or doesn't) there. It's an experiment inspired by my interview with my colleague -- we need to find a free (or very low-cost) tool that gives us more depth than RowFeeder's one-term tracking. 5) Installed JetPack on our blog to gain functionality not available through our university's WordPress collaborative tools interface. We now have email subscription and social media buttons. Finally!! 6) Continued to track metrics associated with our ladder of engagement (see above) **Insights gained as a result of our project:** 1) Twitter has been an important accelerator for building our ladder of engagement. I've been amazed at how quickly I've been able to deepen my understanding of our audience and begin a conversation with them by using Twitter. I've also connected with several people there who I would not have met otherwise. One is a likely candidate to invite for a guest post. 2) We don't seem to lack ideas for posts, but getting completed posts from authors on time is something of a challenge. I've learned that I have to give our fellows much more lead time than I originally expected. We've managed to publish twice a week for the most part so far -- Beth recommended this as the minimum frequency for building the ladder of engagement -- but we haven't been consistent about the days of the week we publish. We target publication for Monday and Thursday, but we haven't always made it. 3) I've realized that the brief introductions I write for the posts are a great tool for sharing information with past fellows about how the Leopold program has changed (from 1.0 to 2.0) in small, easy-to-read "bites" that are delivered regularly to their inboxes. Communicating this shift is an important goal we've had since completing our strategic plan in 2011. I want to track how well this method works vs. others we're using. 4) The templates Beth introduced me to are working very well! They help me to think about topics to cover and approaches to take (or to ask our writers to take). After my coaching call with Beth, I also subscribed to Kivi Leroux Miller and John Morrow's blogs and nearly always learn something applicable to my work from them. I also find that Darren Rowse is great for general "how-to" info about blogging. Together, these resources have taught me a lot about how to run a group blog. 5) There still a lot of education do with fellows about blogging and how it's different from other types of communication. **Additional plans for Phase 2:** 1) We are building the blog into two new elements of our program arising from our 2011 strategic plan. We require all our 2013 fellows to contribute to the blog as part of their practice year, and we will require participants in our advanced trainings to do so as well. 2) I've begun sharing the knowledge gained from this action learning project with our fellows. Many of them find blogging appealing but don't understand how to use measurement to design a blog (or a guest blogging strategy) for impact. I'm developing a webinar on this topic (to be held in November) for our 2013 fellows, using our blog as a case study. A goal is to help them see that contributing to it is a small, low-risk, and potentially informative experiment for them to undertake as they explore ways of engaging with their target audiences. I also offer individual coaching for fellows who have already have blogs and are looking for ways to have more impact through them. 3) We will reach out individually to several fellows in university leadership positions to ask them to follow the blog and encourage their faculty to do so as well. 4) I am working with our IT staff person to resolve a problem I encountered when I tried to install Google Analytics on our blog (there's an incompatibility with the university's collaborative tools interface for WordPress). In the meantime, we're using the analytics app that comes with JetPack and provides much of the same functionality. I want to say a very grateful thank you to Beth and the Packard Foundation for the privilege of being part of this peer learning exchange. The experience has been transformative: thanks to what we learned here, our communications strategies now match our program vision and mission for working in a networked way for impact on sustainability. The focus on practice and experimentation has been very helpful in integrating these new approaches and tools in a robust way. I've developed a new mindset in which I think constantly about how the blog and our other program activities can feed each other to support our ladder of engagement, and what small experiments we might undertake to start making those linkages. I'm energized by the ongoing learning at the heart of this way of working, and I have a new confidence that we can truly know how effective our work is (or not), owing to our ability to measure. Thank you!
 * ** Outcomes ** || ** KPI ** ||
 * Create || Number of blog posts per monthWhat is a doable publishing schedule?What is the frequency of publication?Word lengthPast data from newsletters – teaching/learning How many writers: ~dozen ||
 * Consume || Unique views of blog postsSubscribers ||
 * Amplify || Tweets / Retweets ||
 * Engage || Comments on posts ||
 * Apply content || User surveys ||
 * Share lessons || Number of blog posts or comments that discuss how the writer applied learning ||