Swift Kick Central

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:

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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.

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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. 

 

Ed Reform: Whose Job Is It Anyway?

Capitalism and business models go together. It's a natural conversation.

You want a better business? Get a better business model.

This blog post below inspired me.

Whose Job Is It Anyway?: "Henry Chesbrough's article in today's WSJ about the importance of business models in innovation reinforces a point we often make here: the most important, effective, and disruptive innovations are often the result of new business models, not new products or technologies. (Think Netflix to Blockbuster or iTunes to the rest of the music industry.)

Often, we look at the core reasons companies are unable to create new business models: they have entrenched infrastructures and a vested interest in maintaining them, they struggle to see the world as it could be vs as it is, they are risk averse, insular and myopic. They are fat and happy. Disruption tends to come from the upstarts and companies on the margins that need to find a new way in.

Chesbrough raises another good point: Business models are nobody's job. R&D looks at technology. General Managers try to maximize profits within their systems and structures for predictable quarter-to-quarter growth. The CFO tends to look at different factors and metrics. Marketing focuses on current brands and capabilities. The CEO generally looks at the bigger picture vs. the business unit level challenges.

In other words, for many companies, business model innovation is out of scope - no one owns the responsibility. And yet, it offers perhaps the biggest point of leverage for innovation.

Maybe it's time to appoint a CBMO. And if you're not in a position to create structural change in your organization by adding this job, why not pick up the discipline and responsibility yourself? If you're not looking at the model, you're not maximizing your innovation potential. Start there and then branch out.

"

(Via Innovation Ecosystem.)

In higher education, maybe what we need is not Web 2.0-ified classrooms, not pedagogy, or grants or think tanks. Maybe what we need is new business models.

I'm not talking corporate sponsorships.

A different value exchange. Red Hat vs. Microsoft. eMule vs. Sony Music. Education run ad-hoc like Alcoholics Anonymous, and degrees granted by peer review instead of out-dated tenure.

But the idea of "business model" is disagreeable to many academics. It's too capitalist - to them it implies greed instead of creativity. Designing a new model is certainly no one's "job" in academia.

So some who get it labor within the system, trying to distract entrenched with new. There is no position for them to talk to, so they talk to the top, or their peers, all of whom have other responsibilities maintaining the status quo.

It doesn't seem to work from the inside out. Not one of the big-5 music companies has really made use of the new distribution models - instead they've fought, and continue to fight, to hold on to the same business model they understand.
Here's to the fellow "upstarts", may some of us make it through.

Bad Interface of Big Scary

Bad interface is a huge pet peeve.  Ever since I read Interface Culture a few years ago the idea of someone adding extra confusion and disorientation to our disorientating world bothers me.  Enter the US Government.  I travel all the time and every airport in the country has some version of this sign all over the place:

It hasn't changed since August of last year, when it was briefly moved to red after the british plot.  Every time I'm in an airport I'm reminded of simply this: HIGH RISK. What, exactly, is this colored, 5-level interface helping me

navigate?  Is it simply my level of fear and awareness?  If turning up and down my level of awareness is the goal, wouldn't it be important to change it more than once a year? Raise your hand if you think this will be green in your lifetime. This particular interface, setting out to control my level of anxiety and fear-tinged awareness, just makes me angry.  Then sad.

How New, Smart, Fast, Companies Work (Part 1.)

I get asked a lot about offices, and when I explain that we work from all over the country people often ask how it works.  It deserves it's own post. 

We started with almost all web based software.  It travels, it scales, it was quick to turn on and go. 

Our first priority was sales (cash flow) so our first purchase was:

 

I had conversations with other college speakers about this purchase and they all thought we were nuts to be spending approximately $4,000 a year for this when we could spend $100 for ACT and get the "same" features. 

This speaks to an SK culture point - we believe in buying ahead.  It comes naturally from insisting on a bigger vision.  If we only wanted to speak, and were content doing it the accepted way, ACT would have been fine with us. We wanted to do more (specifically year round follow up to EVERY student that saw us speak) and so we knew we needed more horsepower.  To be clear we had only vague notions of how this would work with Salesforce.  And that's another culture point - we're willing to be wrong. 

Salesforce is incredibly huge and we still use only 30% of its features. We recently hired a Sforce consultant to help us take greater advantage of features in Sforce. 

And like all of our web-based software, Salesforce grows.  This is important.  In the past, business custom built their tools / processes/ and software and used it until they outgrew it.  Then they had to go through the build process again.  Now, when we buy into one of these companies, our tools push us.  Especially when they have open source components to their business model. We are constantly culling and using new business ideas from the new features that come out every quarter.

Salesforce kept us on track with follow up and sales.  We could work the same contact from 1000 miles away - seamlessly.  And better yet, having all of our sales work on sales force allowed for total transparency.  Tom could see what I did and vice a versa.  We read each other's e-mails, I would pick up tricks from him and he from me.  Sometimes we would remind each other to be more careful with spelling or grammar.  It was kind of annoying at first, like having someone reading over your shoulder, but then it just became the way we did things.  We were on the same team, we had the same goal. 

We talk a lot about Lego pieces around here.  Meaning we have a "snap together" tool set - if one tool becomes outdated, we swap it out with something better. Salesforce is the current sales Lego piece. 

Another aspect of our business is product development.  For speaking this means content.  We take in huge amounts of information from the web, from books, from conversations, and we scientifically process it for easier digestion.  We make presentations by grinding through the information and pulling out the valuable bits, shaping them, polishing them, and adding memorable hooks - visuals or taglines.  Sharing the raw material becomes critical, especially when everyone does the same presentations.  Enter:

 

Del.icio.us (explanation needed because our readership is diverse) is a social book marking site.  It allows a user to create a book mark of a website and add tags to it.  This way, Tom could find a good resource and tag it "MSFB" and I would know that that bit of information was important for the MySpace Facebook Lecture.   

Del.icio.us would have been fine for storage, where it becomes great for collaborative development is when it's paired with a RSS reader.  This provides us with an up to the minute feed of what everyone is interested in - so when Tom calls up and wants to talk about that new thing, if I've kept up with the feeds, I'll already have the same raw info he has, and he won't have to waste time trying to explain the background to me. 

Now Steve has come on board, and one of the first things we did was to set him up on del.ico.us and an RSS Reader so that he could both read and add to the flow of new information in Swift Kick. 

In practice, it looks like this:

 

So you can see, under the "Swift Kick" folder in my reader, I've got three feeds from del.icio.us - from Steve, Tom, and now Daniel (our newest intern) and the second any one of them finds something interesting enough to save, I know about it. 

You can also see there is more fun stuff in the RSS reader.  I'll get to that in Part 2. . .