 All right. Well, hello everybody. Welcome to another Let's Discuss with Parsons TKO. As always, I'm your host Tony Cappuccini And I'm excited to see you again for a rare opportunity today It is not that often that all of us get together here For the leadership team of Parsons TKO to just hang out and have discussions and today we are going to discuss Engagement architecture So as always these are informed but informal conversations and we would love your feedback You can leave a comment and YouTube leave a comment on our website. Share this with your friends Spread the word like cream cheese on a bagel because we love audiences And we really are in a mandate to change the mission-driven sector and we want to get these words out there for you And I apologize in advance if my four-legged friends were defending my house decide to chime in today But apparently the mailman might be showing up All right y'all so Engagement architecture. I'm just gonna throw it out here. What is it? Who wants to dive in and Nate are you talking because you're muted? I was gonna say I wasn't sure who wanted to get first, but I'm happy to dive in You know, so for me engagement architecture is a mental model like first and foremost and it's a way to kind of approach you know things that are often Complex because there's a lot of different moving parts together in a way that everyone can understand and everyone can contribute to and You know in the technology world, you know The technology itself is often a black box to a lot of decision-makers You know, they don't know the different ins and outs of it It's hard to judge the relative merits of different pieces of it and it's also hard to gauge the value of it You know, should we spend a hundred thousand dollars on this and we'll organization move a hundred thousand dollars For further to the future towards our goals and what engagement architecture does is it helps connect? You know people to technology and the processes that result from that, you know to your Decision-making process into your planning and management process And so engagement architecture is a framework in addition to the event model that kind of helps Organizations plan and use technology in a really practical and value delivering way Yeah, yeah, I think that's right, you know, and I think you know the like you just said there Engagement architecture is the people the platforms and the processes that help an organization successfully engage its audiences And you know, I think within that there's a there's a lot of how our clients work together But it's also such a big part of how we deliver our service to our clients You know you the way we started talking about it was very much the philosophy It is the core philosophy of Parsons TKO And I think it is actually moved beyond that now it's become our methodology So that sense of looking at the holistic picture What are all of the aspects all of the elements of an organization that work together to engage your audiences? You know our process of working through those helping clients understand what they have the role of that And how they are supposed to work together even if they don't currently All of that is what stems out of engagement architecture And I would add my summary to that which is I think of engagement architecture as the building blocks of audience engagement And it's kind of why I like that phrase so much because each word is so Significant engagement for audience engagement and architecture is what are all the pieces that you need? And as you know both Nate and Stefan said yes, it's the platforms of technologies. It's the people. It's the process It's the strategy. It's the governance. It's all of those things together And you know a part of what makes it a really interesting model and framework is that it often exposes for organizations and some of the challenges they have in doing all of that In you know in sync with one another. They're often organizational silos And even if you just start to list out You know who owns the different platforms your crm versus your email platform versus your website And who's in charge of the governance across these things who decides when an email can go out to a particular audience Who sets the goals for these things you start to see How they sit in very different places and how they can often be misaligned So I really like this you know framework and mental model as a way to start exposing some of the ways organizations work Or in some cases don't to effectively engage their audiences Awesome. I mean my next question is probably a why but I might even just segue in I mean it seems from that what Of engagement architecture that there is a lot of pieces there and those pieces tend to be Things that are spread out across organizational silos sometimes Whether it's because one department does the hiring and another does the budgeting and another actually does the tactical outreach And another actually puts processing governments in place So it seems like one why might be Framework for helping people see it as a whole rather than the separate pieces But you know why is that effective? So I might I'm gonna now it's the why question of engagement architecture over to my colleagues Yeah, I mean I'll take that one first. I think in a lot of the cases we encounter where leadership or staff are for whatever reason Unhappy with their performance and engaging audiences or feel like there's missed opportunities They can blame it on the org chart. I think org charts are you know Central to a lot of how all organizations organize themselves and we could do a whole other let's discuss just on org charts They're very important very powerful. But I think they are anathema to a modern idea of a cohesive audience experience And and so I think engagement architecture does a lot of work in not necessarily fixing or overriding But helping an org chart understand how the different branches of an organization are supposed to work together Because when you're outside the organization, you don't care Which department is which and who's in which column and who reports to whom You just want to work with an organization? And so I think engagement architecture helps you reframe everything that you have all the people all the technology that you have And sort of see what the experience is supposed to be outside of those silos And so I think being able to to accommodate that and overcome some of those Mental limitations. I think is very often what a engagement architecture helps you do I might just build on that and say I think there's there's both that internal component around the the org chart and what you know challenges that creates for organizations and also the external audiences have their sort of own version of an org chart So to speak in dealing with your organization You know in a lot of ways engagement architecture is an empathy building exercise You know it helps people understand what the experience is and I think that's why the architecture metaphor is so valuable because Buildings are meant to be lived in and worked in and moved through and you know If you have a five-story building and the only bathroom is on the fifth floor and you don't have an elevator You know you're going to find that really uncomfortable and that's not going to be a great space to work in You know, and I think everyone instinctively is like, oh my god, I hope I never have to work in that office You know, but people build these digital offices all the time like that And I think engagement architecture helps people understand what it's like to live and move through your digital ecosystem That's both internally like oh, I never get to talk to this other person in another division Who would be really helpful for my work or not coordinated? But it's also your audiences who come in and find these weird, you know Hallways that lead to nowhere and these staircases that have like no banisters And they're easy to fall off and all these other sorts of architectural oddities that you're creating Because you don't have a metaphor to help make it cohesive and plan and thoughtful And so that's part of what engagement architecture is about it's about Visualizing and empathizing with the experience of living within your, you know, digital ecosystem And you used the the famous phrase of digital ecosystem, Nate, which we like to Hotly contest and debate around here and and how is that the same or different from engagement architecture? I mean lots of our clients use it And talk about their digital ecosystem and you know in the Venn diagram of these two worlds They're probably largely overlapping But one of the reasons I really like engagement architecture as a framework is it Includes the possibilities of non digital interactions, right, which most organizations have with their audiences Many of the organizations we work with think tanks policy ords You know cultural institutions have events and offline interactions and that necessarily needs to be part of the thinking And you know as some organizations have tried to tackle this problem internally by doing things like Creating a chief digital officer or you know having a digital services team There are pieces that can be missed about that audience journey You know, what do you do to capture and have continuous engagement with someone who shows up in an event and may or may not have registered online May have stumbled into your building because they're a tourist in town and they wander into a museum or something You know, those are very important parts of engagement architecture and certainly Finding ways to you know capture track manage all of that digitally is great Um, but recognizing that from an audience perspective And across channel experience is not just across web and email and social It's also across their offline interactions with you, whatever those might be Oh, that's such a great point patty I would double down or reiterate that many times because I think that it's all about intentionality, you know, like Engagement architecture is about designing and building something for engagement. I mean, that's why that's that first word And I think so many organizations have an ecosystem rather than an intention You know, like they have things they've built things their audience can find water Maybe or maybe like some fruit to eat or whatnot But it's not necessarily a planned experience to live there and to experience it well And I think that that's part of what engagement architecture is supposed to do is to put that intentionality of the organizations Desire that interact with their internal audiences and their external audiences into a place that feels well and thoughtfully Built and and constructed and I think a lot of organizations struggle with that They oh that department worries about this and we worry about this and from the outside It just looks like a sort of lowest entropy level state as opposed to a you know intentional plan And just to chime in on that as well, you know When we think about engagement architecture all of the elements that we consider a lot of it are the the pieces You know the things within the organization The the stakeholders within the organization the products that they produce the channels through which they can communicate Even the audiences that they're that they're you know targeting And the types of interactions they want to create with those audiences But we really think of the goals the goals all of that leads towards a certain goal And that flows from the mission, you know, whether or not you think the mission is a part of the architecture You know we could discuss that But ultimately there are outcomes that all of this work is supposed to accomplish You are communicating with people you are engaging with people for a reason And and having that at the heart of engagement architecture Is is really crucial and and I think a lot of that story a lot of that impact Doesn't just happen at one moment. It doesn't happen in one place These are based on relationships that you drive over time and patty I think so important the point you made that a lot of this happens offline. It happens in between your touch points It's what are those people doing in between your digital touch points rather? It's what are they doing in their own lives? What are they doing? You know with your organization or or even without And and how can we make that a part of the story? That comes back to your organization all of that fits within engagement architecture Well, and your point about goals stuff in two is is one I would love to dive into because I think we often find Organizations who may have set digital goals or even outreach goals That include things like page views and website traffic and you know Unless the mission of your organization is to increase the amount of time people spend on the internet That is probably not the ultimate goal of your outreach activity And you know, I think while engagement architecture is not a framework for setting your organizational strategy or defining your mission It is a method through which to translate that into If this is our goal Okay, what are we needing to do with our audiences and getting them to our website might be a step in that journey But it is not the goal And so, you know, it may be that somewhere a few steps down in your organization around some team Someone does have a goal to drive website traffic, but if that person doesn't understand Why are we driving people to the website and what are we trying to get them to do once they're there? Um, it can feel really devoid of any meaning and connection. Um, and frankly can get off track pretty quickly in terms of Um, you know, we continued to drive people to this page But somebody moved the conversion button off that page six months ago and no one's signing up for emails anymore And we don't know why So that connection is really really critical to the efficacy of engagement architecture So let's let's tie into that efficacy word there and you've talked you've started diving a little bit there patty into measurements I mean, where does data strategy? You know data and analytics play into the engagement architecture framework Well, I'll certainly take that one um, so, you know data Often becomes the connective tissue in organizations, especially when they're just starting down the pathway Figuring out what their ecosystem should look like When you think about people moving through digital systems Very often, you know that that's interaction. That's those are touch points and very often That's information about those people that needs to move across So a lot of our data strategy work in the engagement architecture context Has to do with data integration So how can we understand what somebody is doing on the website? So that we can make that information available in the email marketing system so that when we do outreach We do that with the context of their experience with us So it's maintaining that understanding and the information back and forth So I think that's a very operational role of data strategy in an engagement architecture But I think it has just as much if not a more important role in terms of guiding processes within the organization So data's highest and best use is in helping your staff your team make decisions And so figuring out where in your day to day whether you're creating content You know pushing content out Coming up with new goals coming up with new strategies for a particular campaign Figuring out what are the opportunities to surface data and more importantly insights from that data to help your staff make those decisions And so in the operation of engagement architecture data becomes an invaluable resource and just to tag on to that from a From a An outreach or a user experience design perspective You know data strategy is a critical component of Engagement architecture because if you don't know Where people are getting stuck in your architecture and you don't know where the the drop-off points are or the awkward places in your architecture You know, it's easy for the internal team Which isn't doing the same things as their external audiences in their day to day lives To not run into the same problems or encounter the same friction points in the same way And I think data strategy is another piece of the empathy building Exercise if you have a good data strategy You are soliciting and understanding your audience in a more robust and wholesome way And that is super important for actually helping your organization achieve its particular goals because You know a smooth and powerful audience experience builds affinity and builds support for those goals The organization is trying to promote and I think that's Overlooked a lot of times. I think that you know There's a lot of focus on the volume of interaction and not the quality of interaction And one of the things that data strategy also does is it changes the perception of data from being about Growing a number to make it bigger into Changing the quality of an audience experience to make it better And I think that's an important transition for organizations is they want to become more mature and more effective Yeah, I mean I'd say you know I like you know in the beginning we talk their intentionality and then we talk about context You know and you you talk and hear stiffen about integration of data, you know and that You know does it always seem to come from one source or is that again just the heart of engagement architecture and thinking whether it's a data strategy entry Point and what you're trying to do to pull that data to integrate it or to look across systems, you know How does an organization start with this where how do we enter organizations when we start with this? I mean, where's the optimal way to start this and then there's reality, right? What's the best way to just put one foot in front of the other and start walking? I don't know if you guys have thoughts on that I mean, I think the answer to that does come back a little bit to your question of why and you know Why do we use engagement architecture and how does it help organizations and often the first use the first value of of engagement architecture and data strategy is giving staff and giving leadership in particular awareness and and ultimately some level of control over the entire Set of tools the entire engagement experience And so that that awareness piece is really valuable So our first work and one on the data side Is usually helping people understand what they have what actually is available Do they have the data that they need to measure engagement? You know, does the data match up what they think of as engagement or are their entire pieces of the story that they're not even tracking right now And in so many organizations we have, you know because of the org chart because of siloing a completely fractured experience And so you might have good data in this one place on your website But in terms of what they might do in an app or some tool that they use to you know, have meaningful interactions There is no data there And so very often we are it's not one source of truth that you know You have to now inform your whole ecosystem with it's a lot of different pieces that all have to talk to each other And so, you know, maybe you can go from there to a place where you create a data lake or some You know essential repository of information about your audiences about your outreach But but all of that has to be driven towards very intentionally One thing I would add about data too is I think You know, we talked earlier about making sure things are tied to goals and and sometimes there's these what we call vanity metrics of you know page views or something click-throughs You know, but I've often found that when you really talk to folks people don't lack for the right questions You know, and if you put the can you actually measure it question aside? Most folks at an organization can really pretty quickly get to like wish I knew this about my audience I wish I knew you know, how many people Came to a subsequent event after their first one. I wish I knew which subset of this audience was really You know engaging the most with our website or our email. I wish I could know the kinds and types of people You know, I wish I could draw more strategic conclusions from some of their interactions And so I think people are naturally doing that but sometimes have been conditioned just because of you know, organizational constraints or You know Not having a background in data to say like that's hard or impossible to answer um And some of them are some of them are tougher to answer than others and stefan will truly set me straight if I Don't get that right, but um, you know, they are many of those strategic questions are answerable And so it's sort of kind of taking those two ends as stefan said starting with a just well, what do we have? Um, you don't even necessarily have to change a lot or do a lot more But just really inventorying what you have with your data and what are we trying to answer? And then slowly marching towards like how do we connect those two and how do we find the right? you know integrations or reporting or Even processes around Using our data because that can be a big part of it too. It might just exist, but nobody ever looks at it Yeah, oh, that's exactly right. Uh, you know step one is awareness. What do I have but step two or the last step Which however many many steps you do the last step needs to be adoption And uh, and you know figuring out ways to actually weave it in you know, where on your calendar Are you going to do data today? um, I think that's that's often the kind of question that we try to answer from a process perspective And uh, I mean, I love what you were saying before patty you would make a great client Um, uh, because those those questions are at the heart of success with data You know, we like to say in our team answers get all the credit but questions do all the work And uh, and I think having those questions and encouraging those questions are central to creating what we think of as a data culture Um, and you're exactly right that a lot of those questions are discouraged because you know When you ask them whoever the data person is shrinks and they're like, I don't know and I don't know how to answer that but But it is I think asking the unanswerable questions is critical because it helps highlight what you need in terms of capabilities Whether they're data capabilities or outreach capabilities. Um, what's the missing component? You know, if you ask a question about a certain interaction that you know You have with audiences and you realize that nobody's actually having that interaction Now you've uncovered not just a hole in your data, but a hole in the experience You know, there is no part that lets us follow up with people who showed interest But then abandon for whatever reason and we didn't know before we started tracking data to Nate's point before and so being able to Feel comfortable asking those unanswerable questions drive so much progress in organizations One more thought on that for me when I talk about I think you just reminded me of the fourth the what I call the the Invisible building block of engagement architecture, which is time You know, I think that time within organizations is so overlooked and it's it's it's a you know It's like air it's like all around us it happens to all of us but no one really considers it and I think engagement architecture creates a framework for those kind of discussions because I think You know to your point patty like people want to figure out why they didn't come to the second event You know and that's separated by time And often that reactivation is where engagement architecture helps the most because The person planning the second event may not have planned the first event They may not interact or create the same content and marketing that went on with the first event But they still want to build a cohesive audience experience for somebody who enjoyed the first event might enjoy the second event And you need to have a plan for time in that, you know Oh, they came here and here's what we're going to do in the interim to get into that next point And I think if you don't have a framework and an architecture for that It makes that really difficult to achieve and the tooling component of that is that You know time has overlooked and planning for tooling all the time, you know People don't have life cycle plans for how long they're going to keep the system They don't have data retention models for how long they're going to keep data And their conception of their audiences are also very thymeral They're like here's who came to the website last month not who are our two year supporters who are still engaged with us Which is really more valuable for the organization And if you ask them that question point blank most organizations say yes We care a lot about those folks and then when you say point to them in your data They look at you like that would be an impossible little task and you're like well No, that's very very possible very very practical An engagement architecture is a framework that helps you kind of build and design for that kind of experience And I think that's one of the aha moments for a lot of clients when they start to think about it that way is that Oh, we've always wondered what happens when our comms personally is the new comm person comes in Do we have a whole new external audience? No, you really shouldn't but the way to actually support that kind of internal change moment Is with this engagement architecture approach I'm glad you threw the word change in there because as you guys are talking I mean I just keep thinking You know I could see the applicability of this framework right because it puts a lot of pieces and starts to put them into At least a board we can all look at Start to get to an equal understanding Of what it takes and really is sort of the expectation of how it could happen, but then time and change I mean these feel like A way to change an organization that could take it out of what I like to say is put it into transformation which is Targeted change rather than change happening to you being overcome by it right and I think too often It's they seem to be technology projects that are forcing mechanisms within organizations because they spend a lot of money And then it brings people to the table to say oh my gosh do everything now As opposed to hey look we could stair step this and go cumulative over time and this is just one piece of all of that And oh it's going to take four different departments to weigh in and they're busy Right, so we don't have as much time as we think we do and this isn't going to happen in six months This is probably three years and that's okay Um, but you know how much how what do you guys sit where where do we all think about that? I mean what's the experience that happens there and you know that Also would mean that at some point there's maybe someone internally at these organizations who's guiding this You know, we've been asked to point blank this before you know, who does this internally? Um as a company you all know we came up with what we call the integrator Role that we like to work with groups with which is someone has to sit between all of those departments to get the ball moving but I wonder if you y'all could talk about that for a little bit and talk about change management transformation Context and moving organizations forward I guess the thought that comes to mind for me is you know people often think about change management in sort of very Narrow terms of we're rolling out a new product. Um, what do we do? It's the change moment and that is absolutely critical right the adoption and planning and Risk management to make sure those things are successful Um is really important, but you know engagement architecture is not a destination like you know a checklist We did them all great. We have engagement architecture. Um, it's a framework and it is a living breathing constantly evolving thing Um, and so to me change is a critical part of it always. Um, something you should be Monitoring and thinking about whether it's from a product lifecycle perspective You know engagement architecture includes a large number of technology platforms like your website your crm your email platform data and analytics platforms You know all of those have natural life cycles where you know, you may be replatforming You may be needing to do constant enhancements. You know things may need to be sunset and there is change through all of that But even things like processes. I mean those can change on annual monthly weekly bases just as Even if it doesn't change on paper it will change as people just sort of inform the process And keeping that as a constant thread to how does your engagement architecture evolve over time? um, you know, I think about it more from the perspective of evolution and Making sure that that is something that you know, whoever is working on these various components of your engagement architecture Is aware of in the day-to-day it will change And there are not just particular moments that change it will change on its own day to day I I think that's uh Very very important and I think a part of why We emphasize engagement architecture why we talk about it so much Is it is such an important even at the just philosophical level let aside the methodologies of it philosophically thinking about engagement architecture when you are undertaking any big change project Will help you make sure you consider all the aspects of it. Um, so take web builds and web redesigns You know, that's one of the biggest types of projects that you know folks in in the non-profit sector will encounter Um, but unless you come at it with that holistic mindset of engagement architecture How does this project change the overall experience? You're not going to think about the fact that this is going to have implications for how you do email outreach That this is going to have implications for how people learn about your events and how that might change the on-the-ground experience And very commonly and you know, this is very personal to me and my team People often say oh, well, we can't do analytics now because we're changing the website And that break is just catastrophic because it means you're not using this entire Set of value that you could use to help guide the process And and I think just as hobbling people go through the whole redesign process and then they're done and they're like, all right Tell me how it's doing. It's like well We can't tell you anything because you didn't think about analytics So you're not measuring your new definition of engagement You're not measuring your new channels that you created in order to drive traffic to this Um, and so being able to think about the big picture when you're doing any one of these projects Will help make sure that that new product that you've rolled out Fits into your organization that much better And and I'm also very conscious that this goes against, you know, just like I said before we're we're we're pushing against Some some norms, you know things like org charts. We are creating connections where the arch org chart doesn't show them And I think just as important and and I think often the most challenging for our clients Is that engagement architecture as a mindset doesn't line up with their budgets people don't budget for this kind of Integration across organizations and so I think that's that's another big challenge And and why it's important to talk about it and make sure that, you know, you are educating up To leadership and if you are leadership educating up to funders and if you are a funder educating across to your program managers Um and program officers to help understand that all of these things nothing is an isolation So everything you do you have to do it with that engagement architecture mindset You know, one of the things I would love to see in an evolution of how organizations think of their structure in org charts is is some an external audience focused department thread across their org chart because when you think about the way Typical organizations are structured. There are lots of functions that cross Programmatic or departmental silos, but they're all internal and we create departments for those. There's an it department for enterprise it There's finance. There's hr And that's sort of the norm Um today, but no one has said hey, who's drawing the thread for our external facing Um organizations and maybe that used to be a comms and marketing department But as you know, the world of user engagement has evolved as digital tools have evolved And as they're thinking about user experience and audience engagement has evolved and you know the last years and decades Um, that's a pretty big gap in the way most organizations are structured because to stefan's point It means not only do you not have budget for it You don't have staff who are assigned to think about this on a day-to-day basis You don't have anyone responsible for connecting all the data points here Um and you know, there can become these quite, you know Siloed uh little fiefdoms across an organization that say nope I'm only responsible for events and I don't care if the email works. That's in the worst case scenario, but um You know those sorts of things can be really detrimental to the success of your outreach goals Yeah, I think that's exactly right a lot of the crimes against audience engagement happen in the division between comms uh government relations Development and conferences events, you know, whatever the on-the-ground experience is Anytime you have those divisions, you're introducing opportunities to break that consistency break the experience break the data about the experience Break your ability to to measure and manage it So I think that that's often where we we look first to try to try to stitch together both the data But the the engagement architecture itself is spanning across those Yeah, that's such a good point. I just one thing that I think is it's worth mentioning about Change management and organizations is that it's not uncommon to find one department speaking swedish and another department speaking russian And you know wonder why they don't speak together and I mean that metaphorically more than literal though That's literally happened sometimes too In the sense that there's different vocabularies for the same activities and the same components and even the same tools within different divisions and One thing engagement architecture gives as a lingua franca kind of cohesive language and Metaphor and understanding for what these different things are and what these different departments with their particular goals are doing In concert with the organization's larger goals And I think that's a really important part of change management because I think every organization We've seen a major system changed that has had some department A little blindsided by how that was going to impact their day-to-day operations, you know And that kind of change management is partly because people don't understand that Multiple people are relying on a tool But maybe relying on a different ways it may sit in different parts of their Outreach planning it might be initial engagement for one department and final engagement for another For one might be the heart of their digital engagement for another it might be about offline And how they decide who to talk to one-on-one in person about things And so I think that's an important part of engagement architecture too Which is just allowing all these different groups to communicate using the same ideas the same thoughts and The best case scenario documented in the same place, you know, so the engagement architecture is Maybe informed by many departments, but uniformly understood by all departments I was going to add that point about language is so good Nate because I think You know while we may have our own preferred set of language and vocabulary to talk about engagement architecture It's not perfectly rigid, but we often find ourselves in a position of pushing clients on that And there are reasons for it, right? I mean we work with a ton of associations and membership organizations and Many of them use the language of no, it's member outreach or member engagement And we like to push and say it's actually audience engagement Because you have lots of audiences that aren't your members including potential members, right? Who are not yet members and have a very different experience You know you may not like to believe it or prioritize it, but the board of your organization is an audience and Probably needs to be considered in some way And so, you know some of those language things, you know, they really Get into the psyche of how people think about and conceptualize their work how they're prioritizing the things they focus on And can be pretty critical to framing all of it So i'm gonna i'm gonna tap in on the language there back to the word change because the word change is also anxiety Producing, you know, and we run into groups and over the last several years. I keep hearing the word change fatigue Or the term I guess change fatigue And this just makes me think about it because we we talk about the most will change well That'll change and this is going to change What I think engagement architecture y'all could dive in and correct me but I think it provides a pathway for that change that can make it visible In a way where I can actually start to expect what's coming You know between the common language of these components. There's actually a pathway. It's not just oh this thing's happening Oh, we had budget and now this thing's happening I find change fatigue is there's a little less about things are going to be Different because everything needs to change and more just I didn't expect it Uh, or why did somebody come up with this plan? Why didn't we do this other one? This was really important to me. So it feels like engagement architecture can be a a tool to start helping battle back against the change fatigue because you know in my experience That's just going to be the status quo like technology changes too fast too many things happen too quickly your budgets go up and down like Change is the constant And so how do you actually manage for that in a way that doesn't burn your staff out or cause General anxiety on a day-to-day basis so people can actually focus and do their day jobs and get it done So it feels like engagement architecture could be another method that could be in the toolkit there I don't know if you have thoughts on that Yeah, I think it is that consensus building piece again, you know, if there's an engagement architecture model and you know One team let's say the comms team proposes changing an important component on it And that is circulated people can start to imagine and plan for the disruption that may cause and it makes them Have lots of multiple change management moments across the organization as opposed to just within one team that may have an Imperfect understanding of the other teams change management needs and I think that's really critical because You know for a lot of organizations, they're most worried about hard costs like Sending money out for a software system or paying a vendor or whatnot But their staff time costs are often more impactful to their mission and what they're really trying to do And those are the ones that don't get well served when Departments have firewalls between them and have imperfect understandings of how they use those tools Or even just don't communicate that something needs to change other process or a system or even a personnel change Like we used to have an infographics person and now we're going to use this infographic surface service online Because we're going to save a bunch of money which will be great But now all these teams that used to be able to go to the expert and not know anything about infographic making Now have to use this tool where they're expected to know more about infographic making and that kind of stuff happens all the time And if you had an engagement architecture approach that said this person is providing these services And we're going to change that and still have those services but provided a different way Suddenly other organizations can weigh in and raise their hand and be like, oh, hey, that's great But remember I just used to have like a 10 minute conversation with bob and it was all done You know and now you're asking me to spend four hours You know, I didn't have four hours dedicated infographic making of my team And that's a great discussion to have because that helps avoid the change management fatigue of people Just being set upon and feeling like the teams are Creating these burdens for them and not caring about them and not being empathetic And that's part of why there are such strong walls between departments because people get armored up against those kind of Interactions and you know, I think engagement architecture helps Smooth those waters, you know, I think it is about How well you communicate with your engagement architecture. It's not a panacea It does give you something to focus on and talk through that But you still do need to have the the group discussions and have a mechanism within your organization to have People contribute to the engagement architecture I think it also It exposes the interconnectedness of all of these things and how moving one part Impacts all the others right and you know, I think we've talked and probably written before on You know the idea like how do you know when making a changes, right? Particularly around a tool and not get distracted by like a shiny New thing that seems really great because you're going to save all this money on this cool new like infographic tool That's online and but thinking through what does it mean? You know, we're used to thinking about like integrations and technical Kind of relationships, but then you layer in the people the process the goals Maybe you start to question like do we even need infographics? Is that serving our purpose? Have we looked at data? Does anyone use our infographics? And and looking at all of those interconnected pieces where You know one tool and maybe even the efficiency of it suddenly becomes this part of a hole Where every little piece of that shifts when you move one, which is you know, get another reason I love the architecture Kind of metaphor here because you cannot just swap out one thing and not expect every other Part of that you know set of building blocks to shift along with it Excellent Steph and I was waiting to see if you were going to unmute to try to weigh in but we're probably getting up on time here So I don't maybe we go to I don't if you have closing thoughts You'd like to share with our audience each one of you about engagement architecture or ways to think about Uh, we've entered into organizations may all step in you're in my upper left Yeah, that's perfect. I you know, I think One of the things I love about engagement architecture and What it inspires in terms of looking across the entire Set of people set of platforms instead of the processes is that it becomes a pathway to superpowers for the organization Um Helping each of these elements work together starts to create new capabilities things that Any one of your tools or any one of your departments could never have done on their own Um, and and I think you know a great example of that is uh, you know Which requires both technical integration and process integration is if you look between comms in marketing and say a development department The development department always starts the conversation at a certain point and often with just a certain number of people Whereas the comms department is often the first touch They are often the the ones who published the first thing that somebody saw and that person's probably come back to the website They've probably seen emails seen pressed releases And and all of that experience spanning across these two departments If you can put them together if comms can give data to the development team When the development team starts that conversation with a potential donor They know so much more about what their experience was what they've resonated with Why they are interested in the organization to begin with and and in addition to helping guide those conversations Helping to identify people who they might not have known to reach out to Um, so there's just so much so many new capabilities that an organization can have when they think with engagement architecture All right, Nate you're next on my list go and counter clockwise Well, yeah, just the building on what stefan is saying I think um one also Great benefit to organizations for engagement architecture is that it acts sort of like a personal trainer for your organization You know when we go into organizations, they're often really sophisticated and conducting powerful outreach in certain areas But their overall audience engagement has some weak places Like you're skipping leg day when they go to the gym and engagement architecture Helps you see the places that you're kind of not focusing on for whatever reason That are really part of a holistic healthy engagement with your audiences And I think that's extremely valuable for a lot of organizations Especially if you happen to be very strong in one area And that may be masking or helping shadow some of the places where you could Improve and have dramatic impacts And I think if you don't have a mental framework that helps you think about all these things holistically It's easy to look at the shiny bright parts of your organization and not so much the places that could really use the improvement Patty All right, I guess my parting thought would be um create your own definition of engagement architecture So I think you'll you'll notice that we do not give a definitive list of engagement architecture Is these 15 things and go check up on those 15 things? And make sure they're all functioning well and that's because not only do we debate that list but also It evolves. Um, it's really different by organization Probably, you know, I would not have thought to add an infographic tool to the technology stack part of engagement architecture But that might be really critical for where you work and and how you engage with audiences Um, and so it is more a way of thinking than a checklist. Um, or a static model and You know, we use these big buckets of people process technology. Maybe goals, right? But those are really fluid And you know, even across all the clients we work with it looks really different We it includes different things. Um, and so I think we'd love to hear from people who have their own definitions of it and You know their own ideas of what that includes at their organization Excellent. Well, thank you all for your time today. Uh, I think my takeaway is that engagement architecture is your pathway to superpowers Uh, that was my note from stephen there. Uh, looks like my internet might be going on us here at the last couple minutes But as always, thank you for hanging with us If you'd like this, please leave some comments if you've got ideas put them in there You can reach out to us on email But there should be common fields right here in youtube if you are watching on our website You can leave them in the common field there if you're seeing this on linkedin hit us up there as well And we will see you next time Thanks everybody