Swift Kick Central

What's Wrong With the College Speaking Market

There's one name all college speakers know.

That "brand awareness" is a great testament to his ability to market himself and his own products. Not surprising, then, that marketing is what he teaches.

People say he's very successful and that's great.

I'm sure he helps some college speakers with their marketing.

The problem in the college speaking market today, in my opinion, is that there is too much focus on marketing and not enough on meaning.

The marketing message, one of the hundreds of emails we've received from this marketing trainer, has this header:

It addresses a pain of many aspiring and even moderately successful speakers - they are financially stressed. I get it.

It also appeals to our lowest instincts and produces speakers who do the same.

Money is not bad. I'm not against being rich or getting rich.

I simply believe that if you have decided to go into education, in any form, you have to be in it to help first. If you help well, by all means, you are free to make money. If you put money first, however, you won't help much.

Take one minute to watch a segment of this video by Barry Schwartz at TED - start at 12:35

At every conference there are legions of new speakers that will come and go. They will flood the colleges with their postcards and phone calls. They will, in short, market.

But they won't last.

If Barry's morality plea is too squishy for you, Jim Collins will give you 300 odd pages of case studies showing putting money first is simply bad business.

Find your meaning in helping. Do this first.

Filling the Gumption Tank With Some Help From Friends

Had a great day today. A few quick thoughts:

Vid Blog 9/20/2008 from Kevin Prentiss on Vimeo.

I feel like McCain's team: what I meant by "scalability" was: we are trying to hone our app and message to grow faster. I said "Garvee", but meant @garyvee : )

Join Our Team - Hiring an Account Manager for Red Rover

Red Rover is a free online tool for schools to use that improves education by increasing the engagement, effectiveness and relevancy. We are out to change education for the better and looking for someone, maybe you, to join our team.

As Red Rover continually expands to more and more schools, we want to hire a part time Account Manager to be the direct link to the school admins and help schools through the entire setup process. Please review the information below and if it excites you, send us an email to ( tom at redroverhq dot com ). Feel free to forward this message on to anyone else who might be interested.

THIS JOB IS FOR YOU IF:

- You are passionate about improving education
- You have experience with student activities and/or student clubs and orgs
- You know about, or have experience with, student affairs
- You are technically literate with the internet
- You quickly grasp new software
- You are available for 3-4 hours of daily work M-F 9-6
- You are familiar with Facebook
- You have a bigger left hand than right...
- You are personable on the phone and in person
- You quickly solve problems
- You work in an area that allows quiet and uninterrupted phone calls
- You might have customer support experience

RESPONSIBILITIES:

- Reviewing the Red Rover adoption pipeline for friction with schools
- Working with schools to overcome friction points in setup process
- Reporting on adoption pipeline to RR team
- Suggesting RR enhancements to improve pipeline effectiveness
- Testing development tickets and coordinating with Program Team
- Cleaning out old development tickets and posting new tickets
- Trouble shooting RR issues with admins / regular users
- Following up on RR Facebook Page issues
- Following up on UserSuggest issues

DETAILS:

You will initially be hired as an independent contractor on a per hour wage or per month stipend. Wage/Stipend will be discussed individually and based on experience and excitement for the job.

The Tale of Two Grateful Dead Shirts and My Passion for Red Rover

Last week I spoke at U. Penn Erie's freshmen orientation in a huge room filled with 1200 freshman. The orientation leaders were scattered around the room directing the students to fill the seats closest to the front. In my normal approach, I planted myself by the front door with a few orientation leaders and became the informal welcoming crew.

The students filled in as we greeted them with smiles and good morning wishes. I usually comment on cool or unique clothing I see as a way to personalize the greeting and make the students feel more welcome.

With the room about half full a student walked in wearing a torn Grateful Dead shirt, but I couldn't see his face to make eye contact and say hello because his head was drooped to his chest. His shoulders hung low and his feet barley lifted off the ground as he moved past. All his non verbals said he wasn't excited to be there and he hadn't made any friends yet. As he passed me in our greeting line, I pointed to his shirt and said, "Nice shirt." He looked up and smiled quickly and went on to his seat off to the side by himself.

Ten minutes passed and with the room nearly full, another student walked in with a similar torn Grateful Dead shirt and body language. As he passed me in the greeting line, I pointed at his shirt and said, "Nice shirt." He looked up and smiled. I continued,  "There's another guy who came in with almost the exact same shirt. He's seated somewhere over there." I pointed and the student's eyes lit up for a moment as he looked over the crowd of people. But with 1200 freshman in one room, it was nearly impossible to find that one student again.

I held out hope that maybe they'd run into each other throughout the rest of the day and make a connection because they were the only two people wearing Grateful Dead shirts. But the realistic side of me knew that the odds were extremely low and that made me sad because that one little connection could have completely changed their college experience.

The National Resource Center for The First-Year Experience and Student in Transition says,

"If we don't engage a student within the first two weeks of school, we essentially loose them for the full 2 or 4 years."

That's my fear of leaving the connection up to chance or through some randomly paired ice breaker. We might loose them for the full 2 or 4 years. I know there is a fantasy about meeting interesting people in college by chance, but we shouldn't stop there.

This leads to the passion I have for what we are doing with Red Rover. It's not just a technology solution or assessment tool, it really can change lives and I believe that 100%. It's why we've put so much into it already and continue to do so. When I talk about Red Rover, I don't want to talk about it as just a technology solution, but rather I want to talk about it in terms of changing students' lives, because that's what it does. For the two students at U. Penn Erie, it could have potentially helped them have a better first day at college, a better four years at college, and ultimately a better life.

Cutting the Fat

My fiancee and I (Tom) recently sold our car and signed up for the non-profit car sharing service iGo Cars. Our reasons for breaking free from the car chains were partly environmental, economical, and practical as we live in downtown Chicago. But three months into the program, I discovered another unexpected reason and it interestingly relates directly to my work with Swift Kick.

When we owned a car, the trip to the grocery store would take an hour and some change to complete. The goal was to get our weekly grocery supplies. That goal hasn't changed since selling our car, but the time it takes to do the task has. With iGo you rent by the half-hour, and I realized the exact same trip to the grocery store can be achieved in under 30 minutes. This gives me an extra half-hour to enjoy the better things in life.

Take this same concept and apply it to being an entrepreneur.

Everyday I have a defined set of tasks I'm working on that builds up to our established weekly, monthly and quarterly goals. Since I don't have a "boss" looking over me, the deadlines for individual tasks are set (or not set) by me and roughly have to be done by the end of the day.

"A task will swell in (perceived) importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for it's completion." - Ferriss, Timothy. The Four Hour Work Week. pg. 27. New York: Random House, 2007

Instead of just saying my daily tasks have to be done by the end of the day, I also put a minute deadline on each task. In the morning, before I open my computer to start working for the day, I estimate how long it should take for me to accomplish each task. Then I cut off 5-33% of the time and make that my new deadline. It forces me to "cut the fat" from the task and really focus.

I also downloaded Apimac Timer as a desktop timer to give me a visual cue of my deadline.

It's been three weeks since I started reorganizing my work flow and just like with our trips to the grocery store, I'm able to get the same goal completed in about 1/3rd less time.

Next I'll post about our process for deciding our quarterly, monthly, weekly, and daily goals and the joy of ruthless prioritization.

An Open Letter to Umair Haque, Applying for Revolutionary Status

Dear Umair,

Your Open Challenge was intriguing. Your manifesto required action.

We would like to apply for "revolutionary" status under your definition. If you have not yet found your five projects to advise, we humbly submit ours for consideration.

We are a start up determined to organize the world's education.

The data model of education needs to be turned upside down.

Currently, a student's information is trapped and chopped up into little pieces in the various departments of the institution. This information is encumbered by old thinking, systems and lawyers. The result is an expensive, top heavy and too often irrelevant model of education.

We give control of education data to the students, where they are free to be public. Leaving education footprints in the open allows us to provide recommendations, peer modeling, and peer mentoring. "People like you were successful when they took x class, joined y group, got z job and click here to see their path or ask them a question." The result is better education at a fraction of the cost.

We have invested all of our revenue in developing our web application. Quite literally putting our money where our mouth is - our revenue is from speaking in higher education. This experience has given us initial capital and more importantly a deep understanding and appreciation for the challenges. It has also given us 40+ schools signed up to use our system. We have made solid progress towards our vision.

Student apathy is a massive untapped resource. We want to free that resource by connecting and galvanizing individuals with common paths and common futures.

Our path to this vision is steep, but achievable. We have clear strategic milestones and reasonable acuity in the market - evident in our early success.

A big vision is a big risk. Your help would be invaluable. With your help we will continue to avoid the mundane and explode a truly renewable human resource.

I'm available on the phone or in person to discuss the project further. Thank you for your voice, it's inspiring.

My Best,

Kevin Prentiss
Founder, Red Rover

It Will Be Amazing, If People Use It . . .

I got a very straightforward question on Facebook today from a staff person at a very large school:

About your software: do you have evidence that students will use it? How do you suggest schools get students to do that? (Just wondering if students would see this as one more "hoop" to jump through and simply ignore it.)

I wrote up an answer that was probably inappropriately long for her question, so I'm making double use of it by sharing here:

--------

That's exactly the right question.  How can we make it not just a hoop?

We have evidence that student leaders like it. They too are very worried about "one more thing" but really Red Rover is designed so that they don't have to go there and upkeep. Most of it will be pushed to their cell phone, this is just a matter of proving to them that it really does add a benefit without much work on their part.

As for your regular incoming first year student, "adoption" is an important conversation.

If students use it, all these great things occur (assessment, recommendation, etc.) Adoption is always the problem with college led initiatives - and technology of any kind.  It's especially a problem when the software is useful / important to the school, but not important to the student, i.e. emergency text messaging. 

In the test runs so far we have reason to be optimistic.

There are three important parts on our side:

1) Solving a real pain. Students want to meet each other over the summer, at the beginning of school, and during every new semester. Identity management and grouping are huge needs and have been common themes (compare your friends!) in successful applications on Facebook. I give us an 7/10 on this one. (We need to do a better job of communicating to the students how to think about Red Rover before and after they have signed up.)

2) Making it incredibly easy. It needs to feel as nice (simple / fast) as Facebook. I give us a 6.5/10 on this. Though it gets better all the time. For comparison, I give Blackboard a 3/10.

3) Building a community. (This will convert the 10% adoption to the 30% adoption which gets into "most of my friends are doing it" territory.) With student leaders, that looks like peer created blog (http://www.theslblog.org/) and then building community from group to group. I.e. hooking up the members of Latino clubs from nearby campuses. We've just begun this process and should be in full swing late summer.  With incoming first years, that means

From the school side, there are few things we recommend for getting the link in front of students to get to the initial 10-20%.

1) Use the FB group. (See instructions here: http://redrover.swiftkick.wikispaces.net/Adoption )

2) Send an email telling the students that this is a Facebook application to help them "Find their people." Find in their dorm, or major who share things in common.

3) Use the student ambassadors to encourage students to sign up before and during the orientation process.

We expect that we will be able to get to 40% of the freshmen class with these methods (much higher % at smaller schools) and 1/4 to 1/2 will actually sign up.

That is enough adoption to make the system fun to use. Then it's a matter of 1) using cell phones for registration and 2) providing real value so students tell other students. (And it goes back to building community and growing adoption over the year.)

So that was a long answer : )

The short version is that we are focused on this question, have a good strategy and will be publishing what we learn.

Because of the design of the system (we see live data from each school and can do benchmark comparisons) we will have 15 different approaches tested shortly. We can see what works best, and immediately tell the other schools what strategies work best. We can even parse the live data by same sized school (so you could compare to UW Madison, for instance).

Unless we've completely missed on the student motivation part, the test and learn with marketing should get us there this summer.

The testing part is free : ) and the potential benefit is huge.

Please let me know your thoughts on this, I know it's a common concern and I would love to discuss it with you.

-----

As we come near to marketing to first year students (we are still working on setting up leaders and groups with most of our schools) this adoption conversation will come front and center.

There are so many technology vendors who will sell a college a "solution" that very few students will use.  The college takes the risk, the vendor gets the money.

While the college's marketing may be part of the problem, usually the root of the problem is a little deeper.  It's the motivation of the school (and the vendor's supplication).  Is the benefit to the student clear to the student?  Does it matter to the student?

Why is it that students like Facebook and use it like crazy but often complain about Blackboard?

Who understands / listens to students better, Facebook or Higher Education Tech Vendors and colleges?  It just seems strange, Facebook provides the service for free.

So we are taking on the adoption risk by offering our software for free and publicizing our approach.  We're partnering with schools, with the intent of listening better. 

 

How We See Ourselves

Swift Kick is a laboratory.

Photo Credit: improbcat

While there are many layers of experiments underneath (business structure, marketing, virtual company, transparency, etc.) our primary value to education is in the ability to visualize, put together, and sustain experiments in the fields of student engagement and education technology.

To be clear, we are not the researchers. We cannot be both entrepreneurs and researchers.

Swift Kick the company is the virtual hardware of the laboratory. We are the lab technicians.

We design systems and reactions that will churn out data.

Of course we will have opinions on the experimental direction and what the data means, but the actual academic research will be done by others. Folks that are completely independent. Like everything else, we will be transparent with these relationships.

Talking vs. Doing

I was complaining to my girlfriend last night about talking vs. doing.

That I like talking. It's much easier than doing.

We get paid to talk right now. But it is a small part of the solution. Reconfiguring the system is doing - it's much harder and a much bigger part of the solution.

Red Rover is doing. It costs us lots of money and time.

Exploring the HASTAC.ning.com group that Mechelle invited me to this morning, I came across a Dead Poets' Society clip in Mechelle's feed.

The scene is classic. One student, Neil, is excited about a plan. His friend, Todd, is the wet blanket - Neil then asks if he is going to the club meeting, and Todd is wishy-washy.

Neil comes charging back:

"Being in the club means being stirred up by things. . .

But being in means you gotta do something, not just say you are in."

We're in this Edtech club. We get stirred up, and we gotta continue to do.

It's fun to revisit formative movies as an adult. There's so much weight buried in memories with this film.

"You gotta do something", not just talk, is just part of me.

It's an annoying part sometimes.

If I recall correctly, Neil commits suicide in the end.

My father, however, is extremely supportive.

APML and Education

A pretty little video:

DataPortability - Connect, Control, Share, Remix from Smashcut Media on Vimeo.

At the moment this is a highly fringe technology conversation - solving a problem of only the most involved and finicky mobile networkers.

The idea of data-portability is great - though the current challenge is two fold: you can't get your data out, and if you did, you can't plug it in.

The hope is that all this will change.

We will be adopting OpenID, APML and open social with the 1.1 release of Red Rover coming out in May. We will be doing our part to encourage portability, playing nice, context control, and plug and playing for education.

Plus APML is a pretty cool concept and direction. It's still a chicken and egg problem, if we build the profile for students, they need some place to plug it in, but we have to start somewhere.

I'm very excited to apply attention profiling to education and the relationship / relevancy challenge.