One of the things that strikes me as fascinating when talking to participants in their workshops is the number of people in an operational role who are responsible for looking after their organisation’s website who quite openly state that their management aren’t that interested in it.
In fact, the interest of their management is only piqued when:
- Something is out of date and someone has drawn attention to it
- The manager’s name is misspelt or one of their achievements doesn’t appear
- A competitor re-brands and launches a new website
At other times, when intrepid web editors and maintainers ask for extra time to properly maintain their website or to better integrate a campaign into the web (eg for something positive to happen to the website) the answer is, more often than not, no.
So how do you get management involved in your website? How do you engage with them? There are three guerrilla tactics you can use to do this … and over the next few blog posts we will look at those three ways.
The first of these is quite simple.
Guerilla tactic #1: Corporate jealousy
If you are working within an organisation that really doesn’t seem to care about the web, one tool that is available to you in business is to use the age-old chestnut of corporate jealousy.
Nothing motivates management more than seeing what your competitors are doing and discovering that they are behind. In fact, we have colleagues in graphic design who have made a career and generated significant business from approaching competitors of an organisation that has just rebranded and relaunched its logo. There is something innate about us that we want to keep up … and in business that is certainly the case.
So if you’re finding it difficult to get management interested in your website and in what you are doing, why not show them what other people are doing in your industry? But then importantly, follow that up with how much they are investing in it and the results they are getting.
For example, we are working with an industry-based commission, which is competing with the other states in Australia to do business. They seemed quite proud that they were spending 10% of the other state’s online budgets. Their bean-counter mentality was almost overjoyed that they had saved significant money. It wasn’t until we revealed how much the other states were generating from their website that they started to seriously consider whether or not they were massively underspending to their own detriment.
If you are like this and are thinking about going down this path, it is also worthwhile mentioning how much time other organisations are spending on their website but again tying it back to results. That may help.
Next time: guerrilla tactic #2: how to educate your management about what the web can do for you.
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