From Open Knowledge Foundation

Community and Promotion

Audience profiling and engagement

NB: the audience profiling is work in progress, and will be completed shortly

Who are our audience now?

The current audience appear to be interested individuals, who have heard about WDMMG through the initial wave of publicity around the prototype, e.g. being cited in Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s TED talk. This audience is likely to welcome innovation, and would be tolerant to missing features on the understanding that this is a prototype, which achieves something that has not been done before.

The challenge is to engage an audience beyond the current one. In order to do this, we would need to add:

• A way to establish the amount of tax paid by themselves / their family
• A local authority, to show average per-capita data for that area

Who can we engage to grow our audience?

Audience segments

• General population
• School children
• Teachers
• Bloggers / activists
• New voters
• Political party workers

General working population

Everyone pays tax in some way, e.g. VAT on general purchases. However, this group also pay taxes to both the government directly (via income tax etc) and to their local authority (via council tax).

Ways to target this group:

Lead on a specific issue, e.g. health spending, government debt, etc, and prompt user: ‘what’s your position on this graph?’ To do this, we could lead with the output of someone else’s data search (or a curated search result from the team) and then engage the user to make a judgement. This will both explain what can be achieved through using the tool, and encourage further exploration.

Data inputs:

Members of this group have a pre-tax income, which they are likely to know as a top-line figure. However, in order to provide an accurate breakdown of exactly how much they pay in tax, we would also need to know:

• Tax code
• Local authority name
• Council tax band of their home

There are likely to be some privacy concerns around entering sensitive data of this type. The security features should therefore be made clear, e.g. stated next to the data entry points. Given that this data is sensitive, there should be the option to enter data without saving it to the user’s profile, as well as to save it, to allow immediate access to accurate data on subsequent visits.

Because the data is both sensitive and not necessarily immediately to hand (e.g. tax code must be found on a payslip), we should offer a ‘lite’ way to enter approximate data so that the user can get some value from the tool without having exact data. The minimum would be to enter an income and a postcode (or the first half of the postcode) and then to use averages for this income and local authority as the data.

School children / teachers

Many school projects can be imagined around exploration of the tool. The website can provide support in the form of suggested projects for a variety of ages, with notes for teachers.

Data inputs:

School children are likely to want to enter their parents’ income, so that they can explore the data from the perspective of their family’s contribution. However, not all parents would be willing to share this data in this way, because this raises privacy concerns around sharing this data with other children at school (and then with the children’s parents). Sharing income data may also cause issues within a class, with children competing to show that their family earns the most money. It’s therefore important to use aggregated data to allow classes to explore using the same data set.

To define an aggregated data set, we would need to have the name of the local authority. We can then use the average income levels for an adult from this area. This has the benefit of using locally relevant data whilst avoiding privacy issues. It would also mean that the children’s outputs will be based on the same data, allowing answers to be checked for accuracy.

Promotion Strategy (SC)

Summary

Using social media channels will enable us to spread the word about WDMMG by providing topical and interesting output from the tool. In order to achieve this, we will need to set up and manage accounts on Facebook and Twitter (the Facebook page is already in place, but I can’t find a Twitter account).

The goals of the promotion strategy are:

• Build an audience on social networks, so that we can promote new content and encourage use of the tool.
• Present well-formed output from the tool, to build users’ understanding of what the tool can deliver and the available visualisations.

Longer term aims

The ultimate goal is to allow users to generate a visualisation, and then export it in a form which can then be shared on Facebook and / or Twitter, or embedded in a webpage (e.g. a political blog). The visualisation would be accompanied by a link to the tool, so that users can then interact with the data and form their own opinions and conclusions.

The next iteration of the tool should support sharing of insights in a number of ways:

• Allow users to comment on the current view and publish this comment to Facebook / Twitter.
• Show links to related news articles next to the current view, to give social and political context. These can be added by members of the public, as well as by the editorial team.
• Ultimately, provide functionality to compare two data points and to leave a comment on the significance of this comparison.

Short-term actions

In order to capitalise on the run-up to the election, and the period immediately beyond the election, we need to raise awareness of WDMMG by delivering immediate value, and to support future promotion by gaining followers on social networks, so that we can push content to our audience on an ongoing basis.

In the absence of deep linking, how can we present a graphic that tells a thousand words - a data visualisation supported by a one-sentence description, which makes a social or political point?

Uploading a screenshot as a photo on the blog, with a description would be a start. This would allow us to provide an output from the graph accompanied by a description of its social or political relevance.

We then promote the content by publishing a short (less than 145 characters, to allow us to send via Twitter with a shortened URL) summary to our Twitter and Facebook accounts.

Next steps

Content creation

• We should define and agree a regular publishing schedule (e.g. 2 x per week?) and appoint a volunteer to define the visualisation and text for each update.
• Who can come up with some interesting points and then define a visualisation that accompanies the point? Are there some the team can make immediately?

WDMMG Blog

• There is a section entitled ‘visualisations’ on the current blog. This presents visualisations in a different form to the current tool’s output. We should archive or remove these, and use the section to promote the current version of the tool.
• Who has control of the blog? The editor will need to check that images and text are in good shape and then publish updates to the page. SC: I am happy to take on publishing of the updates.

Facebook

• The WDMMG Facebook group already exists. LE has assigned admin rights to SC, who will publish links to new content on the main WDMMG blog.
• All blog updates should be published on the Facebook group page. This can be handled manually for now, to ensure that the output is at the right level of detail for the audience and format of delivery.

Twitter

• Is there an existing Twitter account for WDMMG? Yes, there is: wdmmg (wheredoesmymoneygo probably too long?). Password available on request.
• A tweet will then be published to promote new blog posts.