collaboration

Reaching the Audiences that aren't in the Room

Often times, your second-most important audience, maybe even your most important audience, is not in the room.

The point of a meeting or a collaboration, especially among social entrepreneurs, is usually to catalyze forward action on a new innovation, replication, or policy; but no matter what the goal, rarely is every important player in the room.  For a new innovation to truly take off, maybe it requires some sort of policy change or tax incentive.  Perhaps a potential replication partner couldn't make the meeting, what do they need to know to inspire them and enable them to move forward anyway?

Collaboration events and meeting inspire high hopes and calls for action, but even the best post-gathering intentions can quickly unravel if the right non-attendees aren't also somehow moved or touched by the content.

The other day I was watching a documentary about how a key piece in unraveling the meaning of a set of ancient Mayan ruins was a gathering that took place between experts, all academics . They called it a collaboration. In the end this collaboration was successful because they were able to decipher a large amount of writing in very little time by making the most of each others' unique skills.

This brought me to last year when a team of volunteers, interns, and the Ashoka Fellowship team got together to unravel the mysteries of how Ashoka Fellows collaborate. We did this by searching through collaboration grant applications and the updates they gave our staff. This is what we found:

As in the Mayan academic gathering, we defined success as a collaboration that enabled a concrete output --something that went beyond an exchange of ideas, because to be honest, I respect knowledge exchange but I think that doing something with that knowledge is even better. And based on this frame of mind we went onward as explorers would in an unchartered land.

Lesson #8: Engage Your Participants in Setting the Agenda (and well before the event takes place)

This should be a no-brainer right?  Too often though, it is much harder a process than it really should be.  Emails sometimes go unanswered, brainstorming calls trail off into "ummm yea that sounds good" and different parties often have different priorities for the same event.

Its tough to get the feedback you need from the particpants you want before an event, collaboration or important meeting (though much easier after) but that doesn't mean its not possible.

Here are a few tips we are using to make sure we get the feedback we need from the Ashoka-Lemelson Fellows coming to the event and from our other participants as well

1. Email will rarely give you what you need. Get on the phone or, better yet, go see the future participants in person to find out what they are thinking.  Do a trial run with them to see what they like and don't like.  For instance, my colleague in Singapore just found out from a few Fellows that the site visit that we are planning for the event in Hyderabad (the one we are so excited about) is actually much less important to them than having plenty of unstructured networking time.  So now, with that feedback, we are looking at making the site visit optional.

The Road to Hyderabad: Lesson #6 Lay the Groundwork

One of the most successful things we've done in our recent Ashoka Tech collaboration gatherings is actually something that happens well before anyone arrives for the meeting.  Before anyone ever gets on a plane, we send out a short, pointed questionnaire to all of the participants related to the topic they are coming together to discuss.  After receiving responses back from as many participants as possible, we compile them into a packet of pre-meeting reading material that gets sent to all of the Ashoka-Lemelson Fellows participating at least one week before the event.

Seems pretty simple right?  Perhaps you've even done something similar.  I'll give an example.  For the meeting we are holding soon on reaching remote populations, I sent out this questionnaire to all particpiants:

One of the most challenging things about getting social entrepreneurs together for collaboration is that they are some of the busiest people on the face of the planet.  They tend to have a very "unique" concept of work-life balance, they don't get much sleep, and they usually have a somewhat umbilical relationship to their phone or computer, whatever it is that connects them fastest to their constituents and staff.

And while Ashoka Fellows value the opportunity to connect with one another above almost anything else in the Ashoka Fellowship, keeping everyone in the same place and focused for three days is still a challenge.  No matter how breakthrough the insight or how important the conversation, an urgent page from your staff is still urgent.  An inbox of unread email is still distracting, and even Ashoka Fellows aren't immune from the temptation to leave a 3 day meeting a few hours early on the last day.

Luckily, there are a few logistical things you can do to minimize distractions and keep everyone engaged all the way through to the end of the gathering. 

Besides being a sporadic blogger for Ashoka Tech, I'm also the coordinator for the Ashoka-Lemelson Tech 4 Society collaboration series.  That means I spend most of my time planning, executing, and learning from events that bring Ashoka-Lemelson Fellows together in collaboration.  So far we've held one gathering in Nairobi and are gearing up for three more in Sao Paolo, Singapore, and Chennai, before heading to Hyderabad for a larger, grand shebang in 2010.

Putting together events teaches me a lot about bringing social entrepreneurs together, what works and what doesn't.  Last night I sat down to write a post about everything I've learned so far and was sort of shocked by how many words I was putting down on the page.  Then I thought, why stop with what I've learned so far, why not continue sharing what we are learning on this journey to Hyderabad in 2010?