Diffusing Your Innovation

We suggest you formulate a diffusion plan for informing potential users about your repository project. Here are some basic concepts of diffusion theory that you should consider when developing this plan.

One effective diffusion strategy is to utilize social marketing. This is a planned communication process that applies commercial marketing strategies to bring about a social or behavioral change. Social marketing techniques have been used widely in public heath and safety campaigns, such as getting drivers to wear seatbelts or preventing teens from smoking. These methods can be applied with equal effectiveness to convincing potential users to adopt usage of your repository.

The important concepts in social marketing include: (http://www.social-marketing.org/sm.html)

1. The ultimate objective of marketing is to influence action
2. Action is undertaken whenever target audiences believe that the benefits they receive will be greater than the costs they incur
3. Programs to influence action will be more effective if they are based on an understanding of the target audience's own perceptions of the proposed exchange
4. Target audiences are seldom uniform in their perceptions and/or likely responses to marketing efforts and so should be partitioned into segments
5. Recommended behaviors always have competition which must be understood and addressed
6. The marketplace is constantly changing and so program effects must be regularly monitored and management must be prepared to rapidly alter strategies and tactics
7. Marketing efforts must incorporate all of the "4 Ps," i.e.:
   • Create an enticing "Product" (i.e., the package of benefits associated with the desired action);
   • Minimize the "Price" the target audience believes it must pay in the exchange;
   • Make the exchange and its opportunities available in "Places" that reach the audience and fit its lifestyles;
   • Promote the exchange opportunity with creativity and through channels and tactics that maximize desired responses;

Ultimately, as with all aspects of your marketing strategy, you are striving to achieve critical mass. This occurs when enough individuals have adopted the innovation that the adoption rate becomes self sustaining. Adoption is generally slow until a critical mass is achieved, then it accelerates. Recent examples of innovation adoptions include email, text messaging, iPods, and cell phones.

We will consider some of the social marketing concepts in more detail as they might be applied to the goal of convincing your target audience to adopt and utilize the repository:

1. The ultimate objective of marketing is to influence action. Ideally, you must encourage your potential users to choose to make use of the repository. You can’t force people to adopt an innovation and if you do try to mandate its use, people often become more resistant to adoption. It is generally more beneficial to illustrate the positive reasons to use the repository and emphasize the benefits to the user. Your message and marketing materials should be focused toward this goal.

There are a number of ways to go about affecting this action. One method is to target top officials in an organization’s hierarchy for initial adoption of the innovation. If you can get the leadership of a group to adopt your repository, it sends a message to the group members and they are more likely to follow.

Another effective technique for facilitating diffusion, according to Rogers, is to make use of a change agent. This is a person or group that serves as a communication link and facilitates the flow of information from the project team to the potential users. In the beginning, and probably throughout the project, your project team will act as your own change agent. In this capacity, project team members must seize every opportunity to spread your message about the value of the repository. Identify stakeholder groups to speak to, present at meetings and conferences, go out and find potential users and speak to them directly. As you identify other people who realize the value of the repository, you may want to enlist them to serve as change agents as well. For example, as The Orange Grove team began marketing the repository, they identified “champions” at different institutions within the community college and university systems. These were people who believed strongly in the importance of The Orange Grove and would be able to take information about the project to the faculty and staff at their home campuses.

Rogers also stresses that change agents should strive to identify opinion leaders. These are individuals who are able to influence other’s opinions about innovations. Focusing communication and marketing activities on opinion leaders can help increase the rate of diffusion. Opinion leaders are different than innovators. Innovators are the first to adopt new ideas, while opinion leaders have followers who look to them when evaluating a new innovation. Well respected or popular faculty members often function as opinion leaders on college campuses.

It is valuable to seek out entire groups that could make use of the repository and try to get them to adopt all at once. If many members of a group adopt at the same time, critical mass can be achieved more quickly. For example, one strategy The Orange Grove has used is to integrate the repository into the learning management system (LMS) at each college or university in the Florida system. The Orange Grove will simply become another tool available to them via the LMS.

Once integration is accomplished, faculty training is delivered to effectively use the repository. Training can be conducted with faculty from a targeted subject area or multiple subject areas.

Another interesting technique is to develop language regarding the use of the repository that any institution or group in your state can include when writing grants. A statewide repository is an excellent vehicle for dissemination of a grant’s output, providing storage and making the results easily discoverable and available to a wide audience. Building this language into the grant will both provide content for the repository and as well as raising the repository’s profile among the grant funding agencies.

2. Action is undertaken whenever target audiences believe that the benefits they receive will be greater than the costs they incur. When persuading potential users to accept the repository, it is vital to illustrate the benefits that users will receive by adopting the innovation. These perceived costs and benefits will vary among your different stakeholder groups. The important thing is to identify the concerns of a particular group and show how the benefits gained will outweigh any costs.

For example, when The Orange Grove began publicizing and marketing the idea of the repository to state-wide leadership and the Legislature, one aspect they focused on was the cost savings to the higher education institutions and the State of Florida. Consolidating resources into a centralized repository that is accessible by all educators in the state prevents duplication of effort. Faculty would not spend valuable time and resources recreating an existing item which is freely available for them to use. In this way, it was shown that the cost of funding the repository would be offset by greater savings in the long term.

When marketing to faculty, one misconception that had to be overcome was the perception that by contributing resources to the repository, the faculty were “giving away” their work. The Orange Grove addressed this concern through education about the repository’s copyright policy. In The Orange Grove faculty can stipulate the terms of use for the items they create and contribute. The default copyright statement in The Orange Grove is the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike (by-nc-sa) license. This license allows other users to use or even adapt the item as long as they credit the original author and license any new creations under the identical terms. Since derivative works must carry the same by-nc-sa license, they will also be non-commercial in nature. In addition, faculty can replace the default copyright statement to retain or give up any copyrights they choose, anything from simply allowing use of the work but no derivatives to releasing their resources into the pubic domain. Faculty began to realize that the “cost” of contributing their works to The Orange Grove, was much less than the benefits they would receive in increased exposure and scholarly collaboration. The “cost” was not really a cost at all, as faculty would not be forfeiting their intellectual property losing control over their works.

Another perceived “cost” to faculty was the imposition of contributing resources to the repository. If faculty members feel the contribution process is burdensome, they may choose not to contribute. Many also think that since their materials are already available in an institutional Learning Management System (LMS) or on their personal website, they don’t need to be in the repository as well. The Orange Grove staff addressed this issue by making the contribution process as simple as possible. The required metadata is collected via a straightforward web form with questions and drop down menus. The process is relatively undemanding and requires a minimal amount of effort on the part of the contributor. The Orange Grove staff also illustrated how adding a resource to The Orange Grove offers much wider access to and dissemination of the faculty member’s work. Resources posted only to an LMS or personal website are available only to people who know about or have access to those sites. In contrast The Orange Grove is able to federates with or be harvested by other repositories, making the resources available to searchers all over the world. In addition, repositories offer stability. If a faculty member changes courses or institutions, material in an LMS or website may be taken down or relocated, preventing it from being easily located. Items stored in a repository, however, will remain accessible irrespective of the location of the contributor.

3. Programs to influence action will be more effective if they are based on an understanding of the target audience's own perceptions of the proposed exchange. Before beginning any marketing or diffusion activities, it is a good idea to determine how your repository is perceived by people outside the project. This could be achieved by surveying (either formally or informally) members of your stakeholder group or other potential users. For example, provisional versions of messages may be tested with small groups to obtain feedback and, if necessary, be redesigned to make them more effective. Once you have an idea about how users feel about the project (or if they are even aware of it), you will better be able to craft your message and materials to address any specific issues or misconceptions. For example, if respondents think the repository will be difficult to use or hard to learn, you might emphasize the user friendly aspects of the software or the availability of training. Emphasizing the desirability of the repository and the benefits of adoption will encourage individuals think favorably about the innovation.

4. Target audiences are seldom uniform in their perceptions and/or likely responses to marketing efforts and so should be partitioned into segments. When planning your repository, you identified a group of stakeholders— individuals or groups that would benefit from and use the repository. While this assemblage shares the common trait of potential repository users, they will obviously bring diverse needs to the project and may have different expectations of benefits they might receive. Therefore, when addressing marketing or training messages to your stakeholder group, you may want to further segment your stakeholders to identify sub-audiences within this group. This will allow you to target these groups with specific messages about the repository and how it benefits them in particular. For example, institutional administrators might be interested in how use of a repository could save money by eliminating the creation of duplicate learning objects by faculty members, or to document and share administrative resources within the institution. Or, they may be attracted by how teaching and learning might be improved by offering faculty free access to high quality learning objects. In contrast, faculty members might be more responsive to learning how use of the repository could save them time in their lesson planning/preparation or how the freely available materials in the repository might help them to illustrate a concept that is particularly difficult for students to master.

Once you have identified your various audiences and crafted messages you think will appeal to their specific needs, your next step is to plan the deployment of these marketing messages. When defining your marketing approach, you should consider models of communication flow, which is the most effective way to get your message out. One communication flow model recommended by Rogers is the two-step flow model. This model asserts that mass media does not have a direct impact on individuals. Rather marketing is more influential on people’s actions when mass media messages are directed to opinion leaders who then pass the information along to their followers. In the two-step flow model, value is added to the message when it is received from a person who is respected by the individual receiving the message, rather then simply from a faceless media entity. Interpersonal interaction is critical in facilitating this type of diffusion. By identifying and marketing to opinion leaders in the various sectors you are trying to reach, you will be able to spread your message more efficiently.

5. Recommended behaviors always have competition which must be understood and addressed. Competition is an interesting concept. While your project may not have a direct competitor in the form of another repository, it may have lots of competition for the user’s attention from other ideas or ways of doing things. For instance, faculty may be used to relying on course packets from publishers for their instructional content. Any established method of doing things can be a type of competition for your product. Training is an effective method of overcoming some of these issues. A well-crafted training session can illustrate the many benefits of a repository and convince possible holdouts to adopt a new way of doing something. Training is discussed in more detail in the next section. You should also think about what your organization does or can do well. What makes you stand out from competitors or other players in your market? What advantages do you have over other groups engaged in similar efforts?

6. The marketplace is constantly changing; program effects must be regularly monitored and management must be prepared to rapidly alter strategies and tactics. Throughout your diffusion and marketing efforts, it is important to continually perform formative evaluation. This is research conducted while an activity is ongoing in order to improve its effectiveness. This feedback from your users and stakeholders is vital to ensuring that you have a product that meets the needs of your intended audience. Conducting formative evaluation throughout planning and marketing as well as during pilot implementation of your repository allows you to identify problems with the implementation or any aspects of the project that users are not pleased with. If users perceive that you are interested in their opinions and that you are incorporating their feedback, they are more likely to stick with project through any rough patches.

7. Marketing efforts must incorporate all of the "4 Ps”, product, price, places, promote. The first two “Ps”, product and price, were addressed during the planning stages of your project when you assessed your stakeholders’ needs and desires and planned a repository that would offer them the features and benefits they required. Your planning teams also considered the “price” of the repository, both in the cost of development and in any costs passed along to the users. Places refers to the need to make your repository available in a way that it will reach your users and be easy for them to discover and access. Again, The Orange Grove’s strategy of integration with an institution’s LMS would be effective here. Placing the repository within a system the faculty is comfortable accessing, should encourage use of the repository. The 4th “P”, promotion, incorporates all of the marketing strategies through communication efforts. There are several possible avenues you can use to promote the repository. If your budget permits, you may use paid advertising, such as Internet advertising and print media. Public relations, a form of unpaid advertising, might include newsletters, targeted emails, websites, press releases, sponsorships, and a presence or presentations at conferences, seminars and exhibitions. As we discussed earlier, word of mouth, especially when delivered through opinion leaders, is a valuable promotion strategy that promotes attitude change. You might also consider providing incentives for early adoption of the repository, at least until the critical mass is reached. For example, those users that contribute resources to the repository might receive a small promotional item or a letter of commendation for their personal files.

Resources

• Social Marketing Institute: http://www.social-marketing.org/sm.html
• Diffusion of Innovations, Fourth Edition by Everett M. Rogers (1995) ISBN-13: 978-0029266717
• Diffusion Simulation Game: http://www.indiana.edu/~istdemo/guest.html