While hanging out in Central Park, I watched a large group of people picnicking in a grassy area nearby. Without attempting to stare too much, I’d glance back to the group every five minutes. Each time I looked back, everyone had switched places. It was one big social waltz where everyone mingled with everyone.

Thinking back on events I’ve either hosted or attended, the best ones involved some kind of social waltz where no conversation dragged on too long and everyone mingled and connected with everyone.

Sometimes a social waltz happens organically, but more often, it’s up to the host (you) to make the social waltz happen.

In Dance Floor Theory, step two in turning a bad dance into a good dance is to introduce people to each other. DFT alumni should recognize this step as the “uh have you met uh” moment in the training.

As the host of an event, you get to make the social waltz happen. At first it might be tough, but over time it builds and eventually the dance should continue on without you.

KLM leveraged Social Media to creatively engage their traveling customers with a pattern interrupt of happiness. Imagine if your campus had a Social Media Prize Patrol that would track students down via public tweets and deliver them a pattern interrupt of happiness. (video)

To learn more about Blender Events, click here.
To learn more about our Dance Floor Theory Leadership Training, click here.

NAME:
Booshaka

URL:
http://www.booshaka.com

WHAT IT DOES:
Attaches a point-scoring system to the activity of your Facebook Fans to help you discover your Top Fans through an engagement dashboard.

MY TAKE:
Long time readers of the Swift Kick blog will know that I talk about the 90-9-1 rule often when it comes to community engagement, so to have a tool that really brings this rule to life is a big deal and something I’ve been waiting for. It’s not perfect yet as it seems to only track month-to-month, but I’m sure in due time, they’ll have a full data dashboard.

The actionable outcomes of having a visualization of your Fan’s engagement will be huge. You’ll be able to identify your trending leaders. You’ll be able to reward the top engaged users every month. You’ll build a game layer ontop of engagement. You’ll be able to…what else? How do you see this being valuable to your work?

SCREEN SHOTS:

Like Joseph Campbell’s famous Hero’s Journey philosophy, we like to divide college students into 5 different stages of engagement based on the Engagement Pyramid below…

Each stage is defined by a different set of characteristics of an individual. Fully engaged individuals display a different set of characteristics than apathetic/uninvolved individuals. Thus, the way we interact with individuals in each stage should be different. A “5″ doesn’t want to be treated like a “Neutral.” And treating a “Neutral” like a “5″ might be too much too soon and thus demotivating.

Once we’ve recognized an individual’s stage, then the next step is to move them gradually up the Engagement Pyramid step-by-step. In our Dance Floor Theory program, we call this X+1. “X” being the stage an individual currently is in and “+1″ being the next step that is challenging enough for that indivdual, but not too challenging (e.g. +3) which might be demotivating. If you think of it like a video game, video games do an amazing job of knowing your current level and knowing what the next motivating challenge is for you. That’s the same thing as X+1.

The hardest step on the Engagement Pyramid is moving someone from a “Neutral” to a “1.” Where a “Neutral” is someone who doesn’t care and is indifferent to anything you do and a “1″ is someone who actually pays attention and is curious. Once someone is a “1,” it’s much easier to continue to move them towards a “5.”

Ask most educators and they will tell you student apathy is huge on college campuses. Campuses are filled with “Neutrals,” however most of the activities we do on campuses are geared towards “1″ through “5″ people because they are the ones who will pay attention to our flyers, emails, and Facebook invites and take the extra effort to actually show up to an event. But what about the larger percentage of our campus that are “Neutrals?” What can we do to engagement them, to give them their X+1 moment, and to move them from a “Neutral” to a “1?”

Enter Free Hugs…

Well actually, Free Hugs is just one example of thousands of examples of events we call Blender Events. Blender Events serve two purposes…

1. Cause people to have a pattern interrupt throughout their day. Or as we say in Dance Floor Theory, get people to go from “Meh” to “Hmmm.”
2. Build peer-to-peer relationships by mixing people together with near-peers. Near-peers are people who are models of success that are just a stage or two ahead. In the Engagement Pyramid, a near-peer to an “X” would be a “1.”

Every time we host a Blender Event on campus and cause a “Neutral” to have a pattern interrupt in their day, or get them to go  from “Meh” to “Hmmm,” or connect them with a “1,” then we are supplying them with an X+1 Moment. The more X+1 Moments they have, the harder it will be for them to stay a “Neutral” as they will start to display characteristics of a “1″ whether they want to or not. And once they are a “1,” then we can work on getting them to become a “2.”

So there you have it, That’s the ‘why’ behind Free Hugs. As you may have noticed, it has very little to do with the actual Free Hugs event and more to do with the introductions/connections/relationships that happen from the Free Hugs event.

In a series of brainstorming conversations with a fellow NY EOer we attempted to outline ways to increase retention within the NY EO chapter. After several rounds, he and I seemed to not be looking at the situation the same way. To figure out where the disconnect was, I drew the outline below to demonstrate what my approach would be like if I were working with one of our client schools.

To further explain my chicken scratch…

1. The conversation with a school usually starts in the middle with the idea of increased student engagement and involvement.
2. But one has to take a step back and ask why increased student engagement and involvement is important? Most of the time the answer is higher retention rates. Beyond intuitively making sense, there is research (Astin/Tinto) that draws the line between how engaged/involved a student is to fellow peers and his/her retention rate from year-to-year.
3. The next step is to list out all the tactics that an institution is currently doing to increase engagement and involvement.
4. By attaching a measurement/point system to each tactic we can then build an Engagement Dashboard that tells us who a school’s most involved, and least involved, students are.
5. If the data from the current tactics isn’t enough, then we need to brainstorm new tactics that we can create, measure, and plug into the Engagement Dashboard to get better results.
6. The end result is a dashboard that gives us a clear visual of who a school’s most involved, and least involved, students are. With this information schools can focus their energy on celebrating the engagement/involvement of the top third while putting their limited resources into supporting the bottom third who are at the highest risk of dropping out.

For schools, being able to target the bottom third is huge because they are the most at risk. From an administrator’s perspective, each student’s tuition from year-to-year makes an impact on the bottom line of the school.

Bringing the story back to EO…

After I laid out this Engagement Plan, my brainstorming partner quickly went, “Ah-ha! I got it. Unlike a school where there is a real desire to support the bottom third and keep them in school. EO is an exclusive organization and if you aren’t up to carrying your own backpack, then we don’t want you because we only allow so many members at a time. So with our Engagement Dashboard, we are going to put all our energy into celebrating the top third.”

Makes sense. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that not all communities want to keep increasing their numbers and retain as many members as possible. Some communities, like EO, are built on an exclusivity model.

As you build out an Engagement Dashboard for your community, make sure to be clear on if your goal is to be an exclusive or inclusive community.

A couple weeks ago, I attended the inaugural #140edu conference in NYC which brought together several hundred educators for two days to talk about the future of education. Modeled after TED, each person was given roughly 10 minutes to talk about his/her topic. My topic was on leveraging social media to increase student engagement outside the classroom. You can watch my keynote here.

After the first day of the conference it was clear that the focus of my talk was different than almost everyone else. While everyone was involved in education some how and had a desire to improve it, almost all the topics involved how to make “in-classroom” learning better, while my focus was on “out-of-classroom” learning. In higher ed this is often an area managed by a Student Affairs department.

I’ve attended dozens of education reform/revolution type conferences over the years, and I always end up feeling like the lone wolf talking about the “out-of-classroom” learning space. The informal learning moments that happen in-between classes.

Higher education analyst, Thomas G. Mortenson, revealed that a typical student will spend 15% of their day in class or working on classroom work and 35% of their day sleeping. That leaves 50% of the day for working or hanging around the campus community.

According to a UCLA national study of college seniors 4 out of 5 seniors say their most significant learning moments happened outside the classroom.

Academic researchers Astin, Tinto, and several others, conclude that the more socially involved a student is within the campus community, the higher his/her retention and graduation rates are.

With such strong data to support the work I’m doing, why do I always feel like an outsider at the education reform conferences where the conversation is dominated by in-classroom learning?

Three quick stories, one important point.

Story #1:
Last week, before my soccer match, I watched a little league softball game on the field next to us. Surrounding the field was a collection of parents multitasking between the game, their blackberries, and babysitting their, even younger, offspring. One parent in particular was having a hard time keeping her little one under control. Her kid kept racing up and down the sidelines while mimicking a train. He put his hand in the air, pumped his fist, and as he passed us let out a loud, “Choo Choo!” Then 30 seconds later he’d come steamrolling back. The kid clearly had extra energy and needed to let it out. The parent, and most parents would agree, didn’t try and stop him from running, instead she calming kept looking a few yards ahead to clear away any dangers that might be in his way. The little kid was motivated to run, so instead of trying to stop him, the parent took on the role of laying tracks for him to keep running.

Story #2:
My brother and I were playing Frisbee Golf and he lodged his frisbee square in the middle of a mud pit. I quickly looked around for a large stick and without much thinking took two steps into the mud pit, reached out my arm, and started to retrieve his frisbee for him. With my foot half covered in mud, my brother said, “never get in the way of a motivated individual.”

Story #3:
At this year’s ACPA conference in Philadelphia, the conference organizers hosted a special social media strategy session with several individuals to talk about how they could better leverage social media for the ACPA community. Throughout the session it was clear that someone needed to step up and lead the charge. Looking around the room, there were many capable individuals, but the question was who was the most motivated and ready? Kathy Petras raised her hand and agreed to lead the group. Since then,  she has been a wonderful leader, and had we had enough data to work with, probably could have predicted so because Kathy was already a trending leader in the community. She was a newer associate that recently took on a leadership position in another committee as well as led an ed session for the first time this year. If we were to tally up her actions, we would’ve seen she was a trending leader and was hunting for her next level of growth. In this case, leading the social media adoption committee was a perfect fit for her.

Point:
Every community can be broken up into varying levels of engagement. Based on a specific member’s engagement level, they want to be treated in different ways. A fully involved leader wants to be treated in a totally different way than someone lurking on the edge of the wall. An individual’s engagement level is constantly shifting though, with a hope of always trending towards more involvement. It’s up to the leaders of the community to thus recognize the individual engagement level of each member, and also to recognize how an individual is trending. Find out who the Kathy is of your community that is trending towards being a leader, then lay down tracks for her to continue to be great, because the worst thing a leader can do is get in the way of a motivated train.

A couple months ago, a debate erupted over the possible elitist nature of the popular online student affairs community, #SAchat. The discussion lasted for several days, before trailing off. But the idea of elitism stayed with me for a while afterwards because back in college, my student activities group was also accused of a similar thing. Ironically, the whole purpose of our student group was to promote student involvement on campus.

Thinking back on my time being involved in college and my experience of being with #SAchat since the beginning, I think I have another view on the elitist debate that I need to go back to a dance floor to help explain.

Let’s start with the idea that on any dance floor there are varying levels of engagement from five, being the most engaged, to neutrals, being the least engaged.

The most engaged people will tend towards the middle of the dance floor and the least engaged people will camp out next to the wall. Go to just about any dance around the world and you’ll see this same structure.

Most of the time the most engaged people tend to stay dancing in the middle of the dance floor because that’s where they’ll have the most fun. They get to interact with other fives who are just as excited as they are. And the longer they stay in the middle, the stronger the relational bonds between the other fives, and thus they’ll want to stick around even longer. Being a five in the middle is addictive and will make you forget that there are other people on the dance floor. Rarely will a five unconsciously break away from the other fives and spread out to the neutrals on the edge.

Unconsciously we all want to continue to hang around the people with whom we’ve built up the strongest relationships with and who are excited about the same things as we are.

Leadership is about consciously thinking about how you interact within any situation. It’s easy for leaders to clump together and celebrate how cool it is to be a five. But that doesn’t help the greater cause of bringing more people onto the dance floor. It’s hard to break away from your group and reach out to someone brand new. But if fives continue to only interact with fellow fives, I can see how easy it is for someone to call them elitist, and over time, for the fives to be the only ones left within the community.