Broadband Investment Will Build the Next Generation Workforce
Jan 20, 2021
Lydia Kidder, Consultant
Washington, D.C.
COVID-19 has changed the traditional employment needs of communities across the nation. To maintain productivity, many businesses have adopted a remote model of working. New data suggests that many employers have also considered plans to make their remote work policies permanent. A predominantly remote model presents significant opportunities for both businesses and employees, especially in non-urban areas, but these benefits will be realized only if these communities are equipped with accessible, robust broadband internet.
This quick shift to the “work from home” model has further illuminated the need for critical investment in infrastructure to meet our nation’s surging demands for high-speed internet. “The digital divide is one of those areas where technology is not just a passive consumption among people, but it's actively something that produces the next generation of our economy,” said Dr. Nicol Turner-Lee, Senior Fellow and the Director of the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution.
On Corner Alliance’s recent “Investing in Our Future” webinar , Dr. Turner-Lee noted that federal investment in broadband infrastructure is “really critical going forward because our economy is not going to be the same. There are 100,000 businesses that have closed permanently.” Planning for a future of more remote work requires multipart solutions to combine expansion of our nation’s broadband infrastructure with pathways to train individuals for the jobs created by these investments.
Infrastructure returns on investment are undoubtedly diminished in value if there is a shortage of skilled and specialized workers to execute the project at hand. The highest impact solutions must tie the threads of infrastructure investments with expanded avenues to the occupations critical to the buildout of broadband and 5G networks. Dr. Turner-Lee noted that the federal government must consider ways to leverage innovative technologies, expanded broadband access, and a skilled workforce “as one of the pathways towards American competitiveness. This is the path of a tech New Deal in this country.”
A foundation for growth
Any infrastructure job opportunities are a chance to establish a foundation for growth by fixing and improving our infrastructure while preparing a new generation of workers for stable, long-term careers. A major factor in expanding any industry (but in this case, the telecommunications industry) is the availability of training for individuals who wish to build a career within that industry. One potential solution is a competitive grant program to make funding available to develop certificate programs, classroom, and field-based curricula. Widely implemented certificate programs in telecommunications industry occupations at community colleges, vocational institutes, and military organizations would serve to attract and train a future pipeline of workers to build, deploy, and maintain the next generation of wireless networks and related infrastructure.
On-the-job learning is key for many of these positions; therefore, apprenticeship or pre-apprenticeship programs are vital conduits for infrastructure careers. Expansions of public funding for apprenticeship programs may be beneficial, but incentivizing private industry and employers to invest in on-the-job training through tax cuts, grants, loans, or public-private partnerships would make a difference, too.
While investment in updated job-training solutions is necessary, it is crucial to consider the needs for targeted support in existing public education gaps as well. “A community's ability to connect broadband for job skills training in the digital age is tied to the success of our economy as much as it is in education,” noted Antonio Tijerino, President and CEO of the Hispanic Heritage Foundation, a national nonprofit focused on education, workforce leadership, and culture. When planning for workforce recruiting and training, it is imperative that the necessary technology access and skill building begin at school-age.
On the Corner Alliance webinar, Tijerino explained how the pandemic will continue to expand the “tech equity gap” and impact the nation’s future workforce, especially those already from under-represented communities. “We're touring the middle of a workforce crisis and if this digital gap persists, studies have shown the negative consequences: ‘76% of black people and 62% of Latinos being shut out, or under-prepared for 86% of US jobs by 2045.’ Our community's ability to connect broadband for job skills training in the digital age is tied to the success of our economy as much as it is in education."
Investing for the long term
Undoubtedly, federal and state governments investing in the expansion of broadband and fiber infrastructure will have a significant impact on the economy. These investments have the capacity to stimulate growth and employment in the short, medium, and long term. “What we're realizing across the country,” said Dr. Turner-Lee, “is that there must be synergy that exists between the federal government, local governments, as well as community-based partners and other civil society organizations that are doing this work.”
Cultivating a vision for the future intersections of broadband internet, infrastructure, and employment requires a long-term investment strategy. The careers created by this investment will eventually serve as a power source to build, deploy and maintain the next generation of high-speed internet and related infrastructure to support the future of working--remote work. While it is possible that some of these programs may not have demonstrable economic returns for multiple years, investments of this nature would have invaluable benefit to the future of our workforce due to the projected expansion of long-term career opportunities in the telecommunications and wireless industry.
Our next conversation
As we begin to explore plans for a future state, we must not only focus on short-term relief. Instead, we must take steps that will establish a pathway to long-term success for tomorrow’s workforce and tomorrow’s connectivity demands. Coordinated efforts to expand investment in our essential infrastructure workers can help us achieve both. “This country needs to fully establish a combination of infrastructure assets investments in addition to workforce investments,” said Dr. Turner-Lee.
Corner Alliance understands the need for innovative solutions to build a more connected future. Our current “Investing in Our Future” webinar series discusses actionable ideas to achieve the future state of digital broadband infrastructure as well as the government’s role in supporting specific priorities. By leveraging relationships with thought leaders and partners in this space, Corner Alliance is prepared to support the next generation of wireless networks and infrastructure jobs created to ensure the United States remains the global leader in wireless innovation.
Author
Lydia Kidder, Consultant to the Department of Commerce, works to help government grant programs create measurable and demonstrable impact through data-driven assessments. After attending graduate school in Cincinnati, Ohio, Lydia worked as a monitoring and evaluation contractor at the Department of Labor before joining Corner Alliance.
Equitable Broadband Expansion: How the Federal Government Can Combat the Digital Divide and COVID-19
Jan 13, 2021
Lindsey McGuire, Consultant
Washington, D.C.
The gap between those with access to high-speed broadband and those without has accelerated due to COVID-19. In the U.S., this digital divide is disproportionately affecting rural and lower-income communities. The quick shift to remote work and distance-only learning has highlighted many challenges primed to worsen as our society becomes increasingly digitized.
“We have to meet this moment,” said Antonio Tijerino, President and CEO of the Hispanic Heritage Foundation, a national nonprofit focused on education, workforce leadership and culture. On Corner Alliance’s recent “Investing in Our Future” webinar, Tijerino detailed how COVID-19 has had a disproportionate effect on minority communities and expanded the “tech equity gap.” According to Tijerino, the pandemic calls for urgent action from the federal government. “This gap is negatively affecting our communities not just in the area of education, but also in job opportunities, gathering information, accessing healthcare, [and] even in the ability to mobilize our communities during this time of social unrest.”
Dr. Nicol Turner-Lee, Senior Fellow and the Director of the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution, echoed Tijerino and noted how the pandemic is worsening the already disparate broadband access across the nation. “There are 18 million people that before the pandemic did not have broadband access,” Dr. Turner-Lee noted on the webinar. “That number will probably be higher because now we are dealing with the overlap of other systemic inequalities—foreclosures, evictions, job loss—that are going to limit people's ability to get and stay connected.”
This widespread disruption of broadband connectivity comes amidst the increasing need for broadband. To mitigate the spread of the pandemic, more workers and students are forced to work and learn from home. “COVID has actually shown the intersectionality of other systemic inequalities with the likelihood of not having digital access,” added Dr. Turner-Lee.
The digital divide did not begin with COVID-19 and it will not disappear with a vaccine. The federal government should focus on identifying and funding solutions that will close the digital divide and increase tech equity by expanding broadband access to everyone in America—across all facets of life.
The tools we have available now
The panelists on the Corner Alliance webinar outlined several actions the federal government can take to begin expanding access to broadband. Anna M. Gomez asserted that solving the digital divide cannot “be done by a single agency in the federal government” and that “it has got to be all hands-on deck at all levels of government.” Gomez has experience coordinating multi-agency responses to expanding broadband access as a former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Communications and Information for the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) of the U.S. Department of Commerce (DOC) and newly appointed member of the Biden-Harris Transition Team.
A first step identified to close the digital divide is to start with a comprehensive data collection strategy to pinpoint where funds for broadband are needed the most. Dr. Turner Lee provided a real-world challenge facing many local school officials as they try to ensure unconnected students obtain broadband access. “Superintendents had no idea who was serving their kids [with the internet] because we have no national broadband map.”
The current FCC broadband map was created using data submitted biannually by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) on where they provide service and it is broken down to the census block-level. There are issues with the accuracy of the map because entire census blocks may be marked as “served” by high-speed internet even if just one household in the block has this service. Dr. Turner Lee suggested federal investment to fund the Broadband Deployment Accuracy and Technological Availability (DATA) Act, which was passed by Congress in 2019 to address problems with the current map and create a National Broadband Map. Additionally, instead of relying on ISPs to self-report which areas they serve, this new initiative may benefit from collecting this information directly from Americans, perhaps by using the census to identify which households do not have broadband.
An accurate, up-to-date National Broadband Map would have many benefits and support a data-driven effort to direct federal funding. It would also be a helpful baseline data point to support future real time measurement of the impact of investments as they are implemented to enhance nationwide coverage. As Gomez put it, “We really do need to identify the efficacy of the current programs. We need to understand why we have so many unconnected people today.”
The panelists also outlined how beneficial it would be for the federal government to reshape engagement with ISPs. Currently, the internet service industry is incentivized to provide service to the areas with the highest density of customers to maximize profits. It is essential to motivate ISPs to serve rural and/or low-income communities through targeted federal funding and incentives. Gomez noted that the government could use tax incentives, subsidies, and regulatory support to do this, explaining that “We cannot expect [ISPs] to simply step up to the plate 100% on their own.”
Panelists also raised that racial equity must be at the center of all actions taken to close the digital divide. Tijerino cited a 2020 Report by Deutsche Bank which found that access to broadband for Black and Hispanic Americans is an estimated ten years behind White Americans, adding that racial equity “cannot get left out of the conversation in terms of education, workforce development, access to information, being able to communicate with each other, and mobilizing communities.”
Bridging the digital divide by investing in equitable access to broadband technology is key to creating a resilient economy that can adapt quickly to the next challenge. “If it was not the pandemic today, it would be California wildfires tomorrow,” said Dr. Turner-Lee. The COVID-19 crisis has shown how important access to technology is for businesses and schools to successfully adapt during a crisis.
Through the creation of an accurate National Broadband Map, the incentivization of ISPs to invest in under-served areas, and a continued commitment to racial equity, the federal government and its partners have the ability to quickly and directly improve the lives of millions of Americans.
Our next conversation
With more than a decade of experience in this domain, Corner Alliance is here to help federal agencies navigate these challenges to close the digital divide. We use our proven and customizable stakeholder-driven approach to deliver solutions aligned with our client’s mission. Read more insights from the “Investing in Our Future” webinar and sign up to attend the next conversation here.
Author
Lindsey McGuire, Consultant to the USDA’s Rural Utilities Service, is on a mission to stay curious while developing herself professionally. She is a Las Vegas native and proud alumna of the George Washington University.
Award-Winning Team Pioneers Digital Experience for NIST PSCR
Dec 22, 2020
Corner Alliance Successfully Pivots to Virtual Engagement
WASHINGTON, D.C. — In March 2020, COVID-19 upended the conference design that Corner Alliance drafted for their client, the Public Safety Communications Research (PSCR) Division within the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The PSCR Annual Stakeholder Meeting is an opportunity for PSCR's community of researchers to exchange valuable information about their work with leaders in industry, government, and public safety. The Corner Alliance team knew that canceling the meeting, without an innovative substitution, would have been a loss to their client and the agency’s mission.
With just two and a half months before the original meeting date, Corner Alliance and their client saw the need to change the traditional meeting experience as an opportunity to create something innovative. The consultant team conducted thorough research, held virtual brainstorms, and—keeping their client’s stakeholders in mind—recommended a never-before-tried and custom-built platform to maximize engagement. Last month, Corner Alliance’s support of PSCR 2020: The Digital Experience was recognized with a Platinum MarCom Award for its “excellence in marketing and communications.”
Securing client buy-in
“With only three months to develop and launch PSCR 2020, we immediately recognized our need to divide and conquer,” said Brianna Vendetti, Senior Consultant supporting PSCR. “We formed ‘tackle teams,’ each dedicated to one specific component of The Digital Experience for the team to own and execute.” Vendetti served as the overarching event lead that set up each tackle team to operate independently and integrate with the other teams.
“Since we were building the event platform at the same time we were promoting it, a large part of the campaign aimed to educate the target audience on the tools they would be using,” Vendetti explained. “We kept our client’s stakeholders top of mind and started solutions with them, selecting tool integrations familiar to them—leveraged in new and enhanced ways.” The team built a video tutorial walking attendees through the platform navigation they would use in the event and developed a user guide that recommended optimal browser settings, suggested available navigation aids, and informed them of the different event features at their disposal.
Drafting compelling government visuals
Knowing that the entire world was going digital at the same time, the team honed in on the communications challenge to overcome: the need to convince stakeholders - who prefer and rely on in person events - to participate in a virtual one. To combat this, the team used tactics new to their client, including education promotional videos and webinars to “disrupt the feed” and catch the stakeholders in a format more attractive and less taxing to consume.
“From day one, we saw this as an opportunity to create a positive and innovative experience for our client’s stakeholders,” said Katarina Mandiola, Corner Alliance’s graphic designer. Mandiola believes graphic design is vital to demonstrating the approachability of a government agency.
Through compelling visuals, she says government agencies can make complex subjects more digestible and foster enhanced connections with all kinds of stakeholders, regardless of their background. “Graphics are responsible for the ‘first impressions’ your audience creates about your client or agency - even more so when everything has become virtual,” explained Mandiola. According to Mandiola, the visuals associated with the impactful research done at PSCR amplifies and underscores the importance of their mission. “Through powerful imagery of first responders and innovative communications technology, along with consistent branding, we can attract more eyes and stakeholders toward PSCR’s novel work,” said Manidola.
PSCR 2020: The Digital Experience earned a Platinum MarCom Award
Achieving success for the client
Although traditional networking wasn’t part of The Digital Experience, the team’s innovative virtual meeting platform produced exciting new engagement opportunities and raised awareness with new audiences. “Hosting the event virtually allowed us to forgo registration fees, allowing stakeholders previously unable to join with a cost barrier new access,” said Vendetti. “Ultimately, we reached new stakeholders across the world and time zones with flexible viewing that enabled attendees to choose their own experience with the content most interesting to them at the time most convenient for them.”
The success of PSCR 2020: The Digital Experience exceeded both the team’s and their client’s expectations. “We increased attendance by 132% from the 2019 Stakeholder Meeting, achieving a total of 1,041 attendees signed up, which is the greatest attendance PSCR has seen across the decade during which they’ve hosted this annual event,” explained Emily Hartmann, Corner Alliance’s team member responsible for managing promotions and marketing. In total, 640 participants were new to PSCR and had not attended the 2019 in-person meeting.
In addition to the Platinum Award that Corner Alliance earned for PSCR 2020: The Digital Experience, the firm was also recognized for its pre-pandemic in-person event promotions—including Consumer Electronic Show (CES) and South by Southwest (SXSW) accolades. “We’re extremely grateful to our collaborative clients for their trust in letting us push the creative envelope,” remarked Stacey Trunnell, Senior Communications and Outreach Specialist. “An innovative federal program such as PSCR deserves to have breakthrough communications and branding, and we’re proud to have effectively delivered on that charge for our client.”
PSCR Trade Show Exhibit earned a Platinum MarCom Award
Corner Alliance can help
Corner Alliance can help you design innovative graphics and branding; choose or build a virtual platform, customized for your needs; maximize your virtual attendance and participation; and measure the success of your virtual engagement. Our iterative stakeholder-driven process focuses on producing high-impact experiences for all of your participants. Our promise to our clients is to always have their back and present innovative solutions to address their most challenging needs. Read more of our virtual engagement insights here.
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Why Every Federal Agency is a Technology Agency
Dec 04, 2020
Evan Janis, Senior Consultant
Washington, D.C.
COVID-19 changed the way that most federal agencies do business overnight. In March 2020, the federal government adopted the public health protocol of physical distancing, sending thousands of federal workers and contractors to work from home. It was as if a light switch had been flicked and with it came the big question: how would the government operate without an onsite presence?
Agencies had historically operated with an in-person approach that emphasized face-to-face interactions among government partners and with the public. This was no longer possible with the “work from home” mandate to ensure proper physical distancing. Employees quickly shifted to home offices and agencies swiftly worked to try to support the rapid influx of digital tools needed by remote users. “Digital is now the new normal,” said Dr. Nicol Turner-Lee, Senior Fellow and the Director of the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution. The need for physical distance to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 quickly brought broadband to the forefront of agencies' challenges and served as a top priority. As she put it, “This social distancing has made broadband become an instant sensation.”
On Corner Alliance’s recent “Investing in Our Future” webinar, Dr. Turner-Lee noted the possibility of federal agencies becoming more accessible to the public through technological innovation. Government services will continue to expand their reliance on web-facing and cloud-based solutions, which affords more people more access. Though, Dr. Turner-Lee emphasized that federal agencies must concentrate on overcoming connectivity barriers nationwide to ensure existing solutions can be accessed regardless of location.
Investing in our future
The digital divide that federal agencies must address requires significant funding and a plan. On the webinar Dr. Turner-Lee called for a “technology new deal.” Dr. Turner-Lee elaborated, “That's been the challenge in the U.S. Broadband has not been a core part of the main tools to achieve economic stability and educational advancement, or even stabilize the public health of people that live in our society.”
Dr. Turner-Lee detailed the needed investment in not just infrastructure such as broadband and 5G, but also an investment in the workforce. “The digital divide is one of those areas where technology is not just about passive consumption anymore. It’s actively producing the next generation of products for our economy.” For federal agencies, this means the expansion of grant programs for accessible and affordable broadband as well as the hardware needed to support it. Routers, cellular towers, backhauls, and even devices are needed. It also means investing in grassroots outreach and engagement to train the workforce in how to use the infrastructure, especially in rural and underserved communities in which technology is not widely accessible. This two-pronged approach is key because the existence of infrastructure does not necessarily result in the effective use of it.
A more online, more accessible federal government
The pandemic has demonstrated that decades of innovation have laid a functional foundation for a more online, more accessible federal government. Further investment in closing the digital divide will position federal agencies to better and more quickly deliver services to communities across the nation through accessible and digital platforms. Content, information collection forms, and communication could all be delivered to the public in minutes instead of days or weeks. A reliance on branch locations for in-person services would be reduced in favor of teleconferencing and self-service portals. Routine services, such as obtaining a passport, could be expedited, more accommodating, and more accessible for the public and for the government office.
By prioritizing equitable broadband expansion, the federal government can increase its efficiency while expanding access and services to previously underserved and unconnected populations. Moreover, the investment could expand federal efforts to protect privacy and sensitive data. This would ensure that shifting federal services online would be more secure and more accommodating for end-users and easier for the federal government to maintain at scale.
This new investment in broadband expansion would also support a decentralized federal workforce that is more diverse and flexible to change. Talent across the nation could be accessed and would not be constrained by different workplace restrictions. Federal services would not have to be constrained to heavily populated urban areas where branches are currently located. Rural communities could obtain quicker access to federal services and expanded career opportunities. The “work from home” model, which exists today due to the pandemic, helps prove this is possible and can be even more successful with a targeted federal investment.
Our next conversation
With ten plus years of experience in this domain, Corner Alliance is here to help federal agencies navigate this challenge to close the digital divide. We use our proven and customizable stakeholder-driven approach to deliver solutions aligned with our client’s mission. Read more insights from the “Investing in Our Future” webinar and sign up to attend the next conversation here.
Author
Evan Janis, PMP, Senior Consultant supporting Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science & Technology Directorate (S&T), has a mission to build trusted relationships that empower teams to tackle the challenges that the government faces. Before joining Corner Alliance, he spent 10+ years supporting public safety across all levels of government.
The Dos and Don’ts of Planning Your Virtual Event
Sep 30, 2020
Kerianne Gibney, Consultant
Boulder, CO
As many of our clients continue to make the transition from in-person events to various forms of virtual engagement, Corner Alliance has identified what works well and what could be improved for future virtual engagement opportunities as they become the norm.
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While virtual engagement is not a “one-size-fits-all” approach for clients, there are inevitable hurdles to overcome and challenges to navigate. Our lessons learned will help you avoid tricky situations, traverse new territory, and lead to successful execution.
The Dos
Corner Alliance adheres to similar Dos when planning and executing in-person events, however, we’re here to tell you which Dos are even more critical for your virtual engagement. Coordinating the execution of an event on a digital platform with a team in remote environments is no simple feat. The following actions will keep your plan synchronized and on track.
Planning
Set a realistic timeline with an attainable end goal. Outline key performance indicators (KPIs) upfront and determine how your team will meet them. Confirm the timeline, milestones, and end goal with all team members before getting started.
Divide and conquer. Identify and assign roles to your team members in advance. For larger engagements, designate task leads for various components of the project, empowering each of them to prioritize and delegate assignments, conduct iterative reviews, and make some of their own choices.
Make it attractive. Create branding and style guidance to consistently use throughout your engagement campaign. Remember, all content will be produced in a digital format. Stakeholders are already consuming so much digital content and yours needs to stand out. Think sleek, bold, and intriguing.
Over-communicate everything. Check-in often with both your team and stakeholders – clear communication is key. Without the ability to meet regularly in-person, you will be relying solely on electronic communication and conference calls. Emails may get lost in inboxes and verbal communication may be forgotten. Don’t hesitate to repeat yourself, follow-up, and frequently emphasize the most important details and deadlines. While over-communicating the engagement details, tasks, and logistics, be sure to also build enthusiasm throughout the entire planning process.
Just because the planning stage is through and your communications campaign and virtual engagement are prepared for launch, doesn’t mean your job is complete. As you get ready to launch your virtual engagement be prepared, be ready, and be available for your attendees. Even while your engagement takes off, it’s important to remain focused and keep your end goal in mind.
Execution
Engage partners and influencers early on. These parties are key players in the promotion of your “event.” Share any branded materials such as outreach flyers, social media tiles, and complementary messaging to make their promotions as easy as possible.
Practice. Practice. Practice. Test the audiovisual controls, platform capabilities, and user experience. Recruit others who are unfamiliar with the platform to test them too. Conduct dry runs with any speakers, providing constructive feedback to keep audience members engaged without the in-person interaction. Allow any opportunity to detect A/V issues before they happen and create a risk mitigation plan in case they arise.
Be a reliable resource. Consider developing a recorded webinar, video tutorial, or user-guide if your engagement platform is new to your client or their stakeholders and requires some education. Publicize the available channels in which attendees can contact you for technical support throughout the virtual engagement.
Collect and respond to feedback. Participants may not be able to get their questions answered on the spot while they’re digesting content from behind a screen. Create an effective feedback loop to solicit reactions and questions from attendees during and after your virtual engagement. Deploy satisfaction surveys and follow-up with responses to any questions submitted.
The Don’ts
Some challenges of virtual engagements may differ from those experienced while planning and executing a typical in-person event. For example, meeting space, lodging, and travel logistics are non-issues for virtual engagements. However, that doesn’t mean there are no roadblocks when it comes to virtual engagement. In fact, there are some challenges entirely unique to virtual engagements. We’re here to tell you what not to do in order to avoid potential traps as you plan and execute and provide alternate solutions to reach success.
Planning
Don’t overlook the Assess and Plan phases. Instead, analyze all available data about your client’s stakeholders or past engagements. What worked? What didn’t work? What is most important to your stakeholders? Spend adequate time in the assess and plan phases before implementing. Once you have an approved strategy, then you can create tactics.
Don’tset obscure goals. Instead,set clear, specific, measurable goals for your engagement. Do you want to gain new stakeholders? Do you want to drive interest in a new research area? Additionally, consider the metrics you can track online: number of session views, number of new followers on Twitter, number of virtual networking sign-ups, number of new newsletter subscribers, etc. Check out another blog post in this series about measuring success to learn more!
Don’tovercommit your resources. Instead,refer to your strategy and goals when determining when to say “yes.” It’s okay to not say “yes” to everything. If your goal is to gain new stakeholders, say “yes” to a detailed outreach plan, but not individualized emails for invitees already in your network. If your goal is to drive interest in a new research area, say “yes” to promotional videos highlighting the importance and impact of the research area, but not the production of additional videos for regularly scheduled content. Consider what will be manageable for your team to do and to do well.
Execution
Don’t use chain of command approvals. Instead,identify a single decision maker; this is especially crucial during tight turnarounds. While there may be empowered task leads, they are ultimately serving as team contributors with designated thresholds for their independent decisions. Don’t use too many platforms for a single engagement. Instead,keep the user experience as seamless as possible. Have a single point of entry to access your virtual engagement (e.g., website landing page, mobile application, virtual conference lobby, etc.). If you are going to use various platforms, make sure they are integrated in a way that is easy to follow.
Corner Alliance Can Help
At Corner Alliance, we view change as opportunity. Change allows us to learn, grow, and evolve. As more and more events go virtual, we must adapt to meet our stakeholders in the middle. These Dos and Don'ts have helped us exceed expectations when leading and supporting several recent innovative efforts. With credible experience transforming events into an entirely digital format, we hope the insight we’ve gained can help you too. So you don’t have to learn lessons the hard way, check out our downloadable content, Getting Started with Virtual Engagements for Government: Five Key Variables to Consider, demonstrating how Corner Alliance can help you achieve success with your next virtual engagement.
Author
Kerianne Gibney, Consultant to NIST’s PSCR Division, has a mission to make a powerful impact. She has experience with meeting design, meeting facilitation, and virtual engagement, most recently with PSCR 2020: The Digital Experience. With a background in Public Health Science, she is passionate about improving public safety by helping to advance communications technology for first responders.
The 12 Questions to Ask Yourself to Measure the Success of Your Virtual Event
Sep 29, 2020
Emily Hartmann, Consultant
Boulder, CO
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In the wake of COVID-19, events across the globe have been canceled, postponed, or transformed into a virtual engagement. As this pandemic voraciously swept over the world with no clear path to eradication, organizations have been left scrambling to plan and execute virtual solutions to their in-person events.
Translating to a virtual environment comes with several challenges. The most ubiquitous being a newfound competition with the entire internet for stakeholders’ attention. From behind a screen, it is imperative to consider success metrics from the start and to employ mechanisms designed to maintain audience engagement.
So, how can you measure the success of your virtual event?
Pre-Event: Planning Phase
The number one metric that will define the success of your virtual engagement depends on your goal. One popular metric is the number of stakeholders that register. This metric informs whether your communications are effective, how engaged your stakeholders are, and if there is a clear benefit to attending. Here are some questions to consider during the Pre-Event phase:
How do registration numbers compare to the stakeholder group you are targeting?
Oftentimes, online events may reach more people than in-person events because of the low barrier to entry. Consider the number of stakeholders you are targeting with your event promotions, how does this compare? For example, if you send an event announcement email to 1,000 stakeholders, what percentage of that group registers?
How many people are registering for my event the day a promotion is sent?
Your promotional platforms may include email, blogs, social media, webpages, etc. Track the performance metrics per each promotion and correlate to your sign-up data. See which messages and media are getting the most traction. By qualifying the success of your promotions with registration numbers, you can hone your messaging and communications platforms to continue to boost your sign-ups.
During Event: Implement Phase
When you are ready to broadcast your virtual content to the world, your primary focus should be on audience engagement. It can be hard to tell if your audience is enthralled with your content in a virtual setting - there’s no way to tell if they’re falling asleep or scrolling through Facebook from behind a screen. That’s why it’s imperative to implement opportunities for questions and feedback to ensure your delivery is successful. You should also consider these questions:
If the event is live, what percentage of people who registered actually attended?
Regularly, people will sign up for a live event to receive the recording post-event. You’ll need to create a sense of urgency in your communications to convince registrants to tune in live. Is it a live Q&A with the presenters? Will they be the first to hear a special announcement? What’s in it for them?
For typical live webinars supported by Corner Alliance, we see a 50% attendance rate, on average.
If the event is live, are attendee numbers holding steady throughout the engagement? Or, are they dropping off during a portion of your presentation?
During a live presentation, record your attendance every 10 to 15 minutes throughout the engagement. This way, you can tell if stakeholders are uninterested during a piece of the live session. A drop in attendance rate at the end of the presentation could mean people have meetings at the next hour, or maybe don’t want to stick around for the live Q&A.
Are stakeholders asking questions or responding to requests for feedback?
A great way to temperature check a live audience is to use a virtual platform that will allow you to deploy poll questions (Check out another blog in this series, “Deciding Your Platform” for more insight). This can showcase which audience members are truly engaged with your event and who is not paying attention.
Tip: To keep your audience even more engaged, consider tailoring your presentation to poll results. For example, if you ask “Why are you attending this virtual event?”, you’ll get immediate audience insight and can spend extra time diving into what your audience is most interested in.
You can also measure how engaged your audience is by tracking the number of questions asked during a virtual event. Audibly prompting the audience to ask questions or give feedback can be a great way to reel wandering stakeholders back in to re-engage with your content.
What are stakeholders asking about during the virtual event?
Consider the types of questions being asked during your virtual event. Are stakeholders asking for more clarity, or are they asking questions to dig deeper into your content? Questions asking to clarify a point may mean that your presentation’s message was not clearly explained the first time around. On the other hand, questions that suggest your audience is ready to dive deeper are a testament to your content’s relevance.
How satisfied are stakeholders with the content of your virtual event?
By implementing a simple scale rating system for your stakeholders at the close of your presentation, you can easily obtain a valuable metric that informs how worthwhile a presentation was to your audience.
For a Corner Alliance-hosted virtual event, we tend to observe a satisfaction rating between 4 and 5 on a 1-5 scale. (1 - Poor, 2- Fair, 3 -Good, 4 -Very Good, 5-Excellent)
Has your website traffic increased?
When hosting a virtual engagement, you should expect to see an uptick in traffic to your organization’s website or specific webpage(s) (especially if any event content is hosted there). Record the average number of visitors to your website the week preceding your event and compare it to the week of your event. This baseline data will allow you to quantify an event-induced surge in visitors.
During a recent Corner Alliance-hosted virtual event, we observed a total website traffic increase of over 80% compared to our client’s average.
If your event is recorded, how many views does it have?
Similar to the attendees of a live event, evaluate the number of people that have signed up for your event and the number of people viewing the content. You should continue monitoring this metric while you are sustaining content promotions. This ratio will inform how exciting and engaging stakeholders find the content you’ve delivered.
Post Event: Creating Results
When your event comes to a close, the full arc of the data becomes available to analyze your event’s success. Here are some questions to consider:
How did your total registration number compare to a similar in-person event or virtual event?
The results are in, so you can look even deeper into the comparison data from similar events (whether in-person or virtual). Did registration surpass what you expected?
During a recent virtual event hosted by Corner Alliance, our consultants achieved a 100% increase in attendance compared to a similar in-person event. The virtual and accessible format significantly increased reach versus an in-person gathering.
How are stakeholders responding to your post-event survey?
Following up with an easy way for stakeholders to give their feedback is a great way to learn about your audience and understand their event experience. In a virtual setting, there’s no way to walk up to an audience member and ask them on the spot. A post-event survey can capture feedback, and is a valuable tool to measure the success of your event.
Did your organization gain new followers on your blog, social media, email, website, etc. as a result of your virtual event?
By tracking new followers on all communications platforms, you can understand the reach the virtual event had online. While you may not be able to count the number of people in a conference hall, you can track an increase in page views or followers on Twitter. Do these numbers exceed your average increased follower count or email subscribers in any given week? Can you correlate the increases to specific promotions in the pre, during, or post event phases?
Corner Alliance can help
Planning a virtual event can be daunting, and it’s hard to know where to start. Let alone, how to ensure it’s successful. Your success measurements should be identified early, and integrated into a dashboard or report for efficient monitoring and evaluation and those metrics may vary depending on your event’s size, purpose, or outcomes. Other metrics that could be helpful to measure include: data collected, feedback and ratings, general sentiment, media coverage, email open rates, email click through rates, social media engagement, and impacts.
Corner Alliance consultants have a proven track record of designing and executing successful virtual engagements. We understand that the need to convene a community of stakeholders cannot be postponed or canceled.
Author
Emily Hartmann, Consultant to NIST PSCR, seeks to inspire positive change through her work in communications. Her passion for mission-driven work began in her experience with environmental non-profits and has translated into her position with Corner Alliance.
How to Maximize Virtual Attendance and Participation
Sep 24, 2020
Stacey Trunnell, Consultant
Boulder, CO
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Scenario: you’re responsible for convening stakeholders as part of delivering success for your Federal government program when suddenly disaster strikes and you can no longer facilitate critical discussions in person. Not to worry - this is the time of virtual engagements!
Adapting your conference, workshop, or event to the digital landscape is entirely possible. The question is, given the change in circumstances, how can you ensure your virtual engagement is well attended? Looking a step further, what value proposition should you promise to truly maximize participation that makes an impact?
If you’re like a lot of government program managers, you don’t have a generous budget to pay for advertising. You may not have an ad budget at all! As good stewards of taxpayer dollars, it’s difficult to justify allocating funds on flashy media campaigns when that money could better be spent on stimulating research and development.
Moreover, you may be used to successfully recruiting attendees via in-person events. However, the circumstances of 2020 have shown that reliance on in-person events alone is no longer viable. The handshake may be a thing of the past. In the current climate, it’s likely your outreach efforts will be with people you’ve never met before.
At Corner Alliance, we’re familiar with increasing virtual engagement reach and awareness despite these obstacles. No ad spend? No problem. Event marketing options fall through? Time to lean on partners and influencers. One of my favorite sayings is, problems are opportunities in less attractive packaging. In other words, it’s time to embrace the opportunity in these new challenges.
Read below for our suggestions on successfully engaging and attracting stakeholders to your virtual engagement. You may find, as we have, your virtual engagement sees participation that far exceeds that which has taken place in-person.
Part 1: Know Who You’re Talking To, Why, and What You Want Them To Do
If there’s one thing I’d like to stop at all costs, it’s this: stop starting with tactics. You need to have a well-informed plan to solidify success. What I find is that it’s best to assess what you have and what you know, use those facts as anchor points, then design for your engagement’s goal. You can’t attract people to your engagement with fluff; you have to provide value to them. To do that, it’s imperative to ask a series of questions. Like Simon Sinek said, “start with why.”
Step 1. Have a firm grasp on the engagement’s purpose and clearly document it.
Why does this engagement exist? What would happen if this engagement didn’t take place? What problem does it solve? Those might sound like lofty questions; but, it’s best to start broad then narrow your focus the more information you acquire. Why are we here? Why do this? You can’t make a plan unless you’re clear on why. Your audience won’t believe your engagement’s worth giving any attention to unless you can give them a genuine reason to care. Begin building your value proposition when you start with why.
Step 2. Identify your target audience and write out everything you know about them.
Who do you need to recruit? What do you want them to do? I always talk to my clients about who they want in attendance. We may start with demographics - especially with regard to job titles and industry affiliations - as an anchor point, then start to contextualize our ideal recruit even further. What do they know about my brand, and how and when do they interact with it? What do they expect from my organization? Is there something they need they’re not getting from anyone else? Why is that important? It takes a robust research plan to truly understand an audience’s motivation(s), but you can start by examining the contacts you have. Consider crafting a short questionnaire to learn more about them. In-depth interviews and focus groups can help educate you while building relationships at the same time.
Step 3. Determine the benefits of participation in your virtual engagement - and the challenges.
Why should your target audience participate? What’s in it for them? Chances are, they have to spend money, take off work, skip lunch, or otherwise adjust their lives to join your engagement, so what’s the real benefit they get from doing that? Know the opportunity costs and remember them when crafting your message. Part of your promise is what stakeholders “get” when they choose to spend time and attention on your brand. Communicating this value is essential.
Another way to position benefits is to think about what happens if your audience doesn’t take the desired action. Put simply, identify the stakes. If your stakeholders don’t participate, they’ll be missing an opportunity. They may not have a voice. They’ll have to wait to have the latest information. They may miss the chance to get funding, win an award, or meet a potential partner. Weave this into your story to emphasize your engagement’s purpose and create a sense of urgency. Benefits look even more attractive when you know what’s at stake.
Step 4. Craft a brand script.
Storytelling is an underutilized tool. Yet humans are triggered emotionally and psychologically by stories of heroism. Donald Miller, author of Building a StoryBrand, says your customer is the hero (because we’re all the heroes in our own lives). Therefore, it’s best to position your brand, program, or virtual engagement as helpful to the hero. Consider how your stakeholder’s job or life is improved as a result of attending your event. Think realistically and creatively.
Step 5. Create your communications plan.
I recently crafted a campaign with this simple goal: to inspire participation in [virtual engagement 2020]. Thinking of what our target audience knows about us and what we’re asking them to do, I break down the overarching goal into phases. If the engagement is new - or the stakeholders are new to my brand - I’m going to need to educate before I can convince them to do anything. You can look at different marketing and user journey models to get a sense of which steps to account for in your plan.
I won’t go into it here but I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to build KPIs into your plan. My colleague’s blog post next week will cover how to measure the effectiveness of your virtual engagement. Don’t save this part for last! Build it into your plan at the forefront.
Part 2: Identify the Resources You Have to Aid in Reaching Your Goal
So you have your goal, know your audience, have written your story, and crafted a plan. Now what? You need to bring this story to life to recruit attendees and prompt participation. The two key points in this section are: 1) Identify your outreach resources and potential partners and 2) Create relevant, actionable assets tailored to your audiences. Let’s review each below.
Identify your outreach resources and potential partners
Assuming paid media is not an option, identify your owned, borrowed, and earned media options. For owned media, examine the tools, talents, and outlets you have to promote and share your message. Below are some of the ingredients I’m currently cooking with:
Tools
MarketingCloud
A brand style guide
A streaming video conferencing service
The Adobe Creative Suite
Talents
A brand, marketing, or communications strategist
A writer/editor
A video editor
A graphic designer
Outlets
A website and blog
Social media
A “customer” mailing list
For borrowed and earned media opportunities, there are two important types of partners to engage: 1) complementary organizations with similar / related audience constituencies and 2) Influencers in your industry - ideally, those who are champions of your brand. In identifying the first group, study businesses and institutions with stakeholders or members similar to yours. Determine the benefits - what they “get” - when they engage with your brand. It’s likely you can develop a partnership around your complementary missions.
For the second group, ask yourself a series of questions: Who are the people interacting with your content? Attending your events? Reaching out via your website or CRM software? If you have this data available, start here. It’s likely they believe in your mission and find value in your promise. Build and maintain relationships with these people. They may be your most influential stakeholders; regularly check in and invite feedback.
Create relevant, actionable assets tailored to your audiences
Give people the digestible, engaging assets they want using your owned and borrowed communications channels. Infuse your message throughout clearly and simply. Understand the best practices per each platform and marry them to your audiences’ behaviors and preferences. Align on how your target audience uses different media platforms and craft assets tailored to their behaviors, beliefs, and expectations. Tell your story in a way that resonates and prompts desired action. Measure. Measure. Measure.
At Corner Alliance, we use the trusted APIC model - Assess, Plan, Implement, Create Results - for maximizing virtual engagement attendance and participation. Admittedly, this blog is about doubling down on assessment and planning to achieve your desired results (and make implementation as turnkey as possible). But we’ve only just scratched the surface in this blog. You can dive deeper with our free Virtual Engagement Assessment Tool. Download it at the form above.
We’ve witnessed the how-tos in this model inform and deliver virtual engagements with attendance and participation that far exceeds in-person events. If you need to convene stakeholders successfully - especially if you’re pivoting from in-person to virtual - reach out to our sales team to learn more about how we can help.
Author
Stacey Trunnell is a Corner Alliance, Inc. consultant specializing in communications and outreach. She has supported PSCR since March 2018, where her mission has been to energize the program and its people through the implementation of a strategic communications plan. Prior to joining Corner Alliance, Stacey worked inside some of the most awarded advertising agencies and branding firms in North America and the world. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in American Studies from the University of Maryland Baltimore County and a Master’s in Advertising from the University of Texas at Austin.
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The future of work and communications is changing. Amid a new environment of reduced face-to-face meetings, the demand for remote and online engagements with stakeholders is growing. Luckily, there have been significant advances in communications tools, platforms, and capabilities providing opportunities for organizations to design and execute interactive digital experiences. The desire to learn from experts and build networks is still of the utmost importance, but in this “new normal” the ability to host successful events requires virtual engagement. Through these channels government agencies can continue to educate, inform, and train their stakeholders.
Virtual events, like in-person ones, can convene innovators and promote networking. They can also complement physical events by filling in the gaps left by larger in-person engagements, at less cost, reaching an audience that is not geographically-restricted.
Digital Engagement Options
There are many different types of digital engagements. Deciding which one is right for you requires an understanding of your goals and desired outcomes. You’ve probably heard many terms used to describe them, but what exactly is the difference between a webinar, a virtual meeting, and a virtual event?
Webinars, short for web and seminars, tend to be one dimensional with speakers using audio—often accompanied with slides and graphics—and offer limited speaker-audience engagement. Some examples of this would be a workshop, lecture, training, or presentation.
Prospective Features:
Text chats - allows hosts and panelists to communicate with attendees. The ability for attendees to chat with other attendees versus just the host depends on the platform and the settings selected by the host.
Question box - allows audience members an opportunity to ask questions to the presenters and organizers.
Slide decks - help facilitate the agenda, promote engagement, and give the audience information to walk away with.
Recordings - posting pre-recorded information gives the audience options to view content.
Screen sharing - allows presenters to share what they’re doing on their screen with the audience.
Polling - allows presenters to survey the audience for information that may influence their presentation (i.e. demographic, familiarity with the topic); polls are also an excellent method for collecting satisfaction ratings at a webinar close.
Challenges:
Limited capabilities with sharing files and engaging audiences.
Limited number of presenters and attendees.
Designed for 100-500 attendees.
Usually live, not pre-recorded.
Usually a stand alone digital engagement.
No real-time networking.
Virtual Meetings allow for interaction between more people and may include audio with slides and graphics. These options can include multiple presenters and speaker-audience engagement.
Prospective Features:
Text chats - allows audience members to ask questions to the presenter.
Live discussion - potentially enabling decision making and interactive Q&A.
Slide decks - help facilitate the agenda, promote engagement, and give the audience information to walk away with.
Recordings - virtual meetings may be recorded for future reference.
Screen sharing - allows attendees to share their desktop screen or select documents to provide a greater opportunity for demonstrating thought and reviewing materials with a larger group.
Challenges:
Limited ability to design recording/live space area.
Difficult to keep attendees engaged and ensure they return for multiple sessions.
Define Your Format
In deciding which option will be most beneficial for your target audience and stakeholders, you should consider your desired session format. The delivery style may impact the platform you choose. There are three main session formats:
Presentation: you have a presenter that delivers a lecture to attendees;
Panel Discussion: a couple of presenters discuss a topic or answer questions; and
Workshop: attendees can do activities and then report back to the group.
Defining your format can help to narrow down which platform could be the best route for your virtual event, given that only certain platforms can offer the capabilities needed to deliver on your goals. For example, a seminar with one person speaking may be best suited for a webinar, while a tradeshow or workshop would be better suited for a virtual event with multiple training sessions.
Ask yourself these follow up questions to narrow down your options:
Will content be live, on-demand, or a mix?
What’s the best measure of success for your event? Stay tuned for our upcoming blog on determining your Return on Investments (ROIs).
Do you want on-demand sessions to be available after the event?
How many sessions are there?
Do you plan to allow attendees to network and schedule appointments? If so, what tools will attendees need to do so?
Find Your Tools
When selecting a virtual engagement platform, it is imperative you first identify the tools currently available to you. This includes video conferencing software, contact record management, creative email platforms, graphic design, scheduling tools, file sharing programs. Once you have identified all tools currently at your disposal, find the overlap of those that are also accessible to your audience.
Set your key parameters, such as:
The items you must deliver or collect (to include updates, announcements, feedback, etc.);
The brevity or longevity of your event, communication, or engagement materials; and
Minimum usability requirements for ease of navigation.
It is important to ensure that your format caters to stakeholder information requirements, AND competes with other digital learning options. Your platform should provide a comprehensive learning format for those eager to invest their time for a deeper understanding. In addition, aim to be unique from other digital platforms and find a novel method that stimulates your clients’ stakeholders.
You also need to assess which tools and features you can use to help deliver your message. To help the audience ingest the information and stay engaged, you’ll want to leverage presentation platforms like PowerPoint and video, and audience engagement tools like, polling on Twitter.
These are some of the types of resources that as an organizer you may want to utilize:
Content Development Tools (Adobe Platforms, PowerPoint, Prezi, Canva, Drupal, SketchUp, Unsplash, QuickTime Media Player, Windows GameBar)
Social Media Platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Periscope, Sprout Social, Hootsuite)
Organizational/ Project Planning Tools (SmartSheets, Google Data Studio, Tableau, Asana)
Video Conferencing and Webinar Platforms (GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar, Adobe Connect, Zoom, Google Hangouts, Microsoft Teams)
It is helpful to know how you intend to use the above resources. This allows you to more accurately tailor how you’ll not only collect and manage information, but also disseminate that information to your intended audience. For example, your audience may be short on time, meaning quick concise videos shared on social media could be the best option. If your topic is complex you can offer informational webinars through a video conferencing platform for a deeper dive into topic areas.
Whether you’re planning a completely virtual event, or a hybrid of in-person and online, technology is paving the way for new avenues to connect stakeholders virtually. With dozens of virtual event platforms available, it may be difficult navigating which one is right for you. Corner Alliance has experience working with several platforms and customizing them to fit your specific event needs. Our team can help provide effective solutions and deploy proven successful virtual engagement. To learn more, download Getting Started with Virtual Engagements for Government, available at the form above! Though there are many options for "your" virtual engagement, remember this process is about making the choice that's right for you.
Author
Jaimi Welch, Consultant to DHS S&T, helps to develop nationwide event outreach campaigns through cross collaboration between multiple organizations. Before joining Corner Alliance, she managed multi-faceted issue advocacy campaigns and provided public affairs counsel.
Adapting Your Event For A Successful Digital Experience
Sep 16, 2020
Brianna Vendetti, Consultant Boulder, CO
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On March 15, 2020 the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended cancelling events with greater than 50 participants, and maintaining a social distance of at least six feet between yourself and others. To this date, that recommendation remains in effect. For many event organizers, presenters, meeting coordinators, and workshop hosts, this guidance means the cancellation or virtualization of planned activities.
If you’re like our clients, your event was purposefully planned to provide critical outcomes; a cancellation would leave you in default with your stakeholders. Moreover, in our current age of technological advancement and digital connectedness, a cancellation is unnecessary. Virtual engagement has seen rapid growth and now meets its catalyst in the 2020 pandemic.
This isn’t a “Plan B”
A digital experience needn’t even be considered as merely Plan B, and I expect that virtual engagements will continue to trend even after COVID-19 restrictions are lifted. There are many benefits to virtual engagement, including:
Cost savings on travel, rental space, and refreshments
Sustainable practices found in the reduction of printed materials
Expanded reach to any audience with an internet connection or telephone
Traceability and record of all shared transactions, knowledge, and information
In a virtual world, your event should be custom-designed to meet your goals, especially in the absence of once-physical parameters such as geographical location, venue availability and structure, and attendee time zones. There are numerous ways to adapt your planned event to a digital environment, and one great appeal is your ability to choose how.
Our clients have varying missions, requirements, and abilities; I believe their virtual engagements should be just as unique. Although many virtual packages are currently marketed, why choose a one-size-fits all approach if your goals and stakeholders are particular to you? To effectively adapt your event for a successful digital experience, you must first revisit what’s core to your engagement.
We find that for our clients, often the benefit of meetings, events, or similar is a communal exchange of ideas via a dedicated space and time to driving outcomes. Whether it be consuming, providing, networking, or transacting, the occasion provides an opportunity for engagement: the most valuable outcome of an event. In order for your organization to prosper, you must gather a fierce community of advocates; virtual engagement is your new avenue.
Corner Alliance can help you choose or build a virtual platform, customized for your needs; maximize your virtual attendance and participation; and measure the success of your virtual engagement. Watch for each of these elements in upcoming blog articles.
Our promise to our clients to always have their back and present creative solutions to address their most challenging needs is why we’ve leaned in to digital expositions. Having consultants positioned across the U.S., virtual engagement is not new to Corner Alliance.
Author
Brianna Vendetti is a Corner Alliance, Inc. consultant specializing in project management and stakeholder engagement. She has challenged her client at NIST PSCR with innovative meeting and event design since September 2017. Most recently, Brianna led the effort to convert the fast approaching 2020 PSCR Annual Public Safety Broadband Stakeholder Meeting into an entirely virtual engagement -- PSCR 2020: The Digital Experience -- an event that reached 1000+ in the three months her team had to imagine, build, and deploy it. Brianna’s expertise lies in strategic meeting design, facilitation, and stakeholder engagement.
TikTok and the Long Competition
Sep 01, 2020
Alan Pentz, CEO
If you have kids you know what TikTok is. Increasingly you know what it is if you read the news. The Trump Administration is currently pressuring the company’s Chinese owner to sell the part of the service that operates in the US, New Zealand, Australia and Canada. An odd assortment of companies has come out of the woodwork to make a bid: Microsoft, Oracle, and Twitter so far. All of these suitors strike me as bizarre. Microsoft is focused more on productivity and cloud computing as a service. Oracle sells stuff like cloud budgeting software to businesses and governments and Twitter is about half the rumored size of TikTok itself.
I think this incident is a sign of things to come. It is an opening battle in the Long Competition between China and the US that will play out across multiple arenas. What the Berlin Airlift was to the Cold War is what the TikTok divestiture is to the Long Competition. It’s a defining moment and gives us clues about what’s to come. First it shows that the US will no longer allow China to get away with restricting its own market while participating fully in ours. No American social network operates in China and US media is severely restricted. What’s good for the goose has to be good for the gander.
Second, I think this incident says a lot about how US tech is positioned for the Long Competition. This incident shows us three emerging trends. The first trend is obvious. Everything is a national security issue now. If the junk that’s on TikTok is subject to national security reviews then anything is. The US is clearly saying it won’t tolerate non-aligned powers to serve the US market at least as far as intellectual property goes.
Second is the rise of antitrust concerns. Facebook, Google, and Apple won’t be able to buy anything else and the second tier tech players (Snap, Twitter, etc.) aren’t big enough to digest anything as viral and valuable as TikTok. It seems old-line companies are either leery of dipping their toes into the social media space or aren’t big enough to do so. For example, Disney hasn’t made a bid reportedly due to a worry about toxic content on TikTok. I don’t see Berkshire Hathaway making any moves in that direction either. So really that leaves big tech companies without much consumer presence: enter Microsoft and Oracle.
That brings us to our last trend: technology convergence. As fewer companies dominate their space more completely, the new ground they can capture in tech without triggering antitrust concerns is shrinking. That’s why I think you see Microsoft as a leading bidder. They might not be able to buy another large cloud computing provider but social media is wide open for Microsoft. If they want to grow and maintain software margins, there aren’t that many areas left. So I think we will see a form of conglomerate come to big tech similar to what we saw in the 60s with companies like GE, Teledyne, and other conglomerates.
These developments show how interwoven our economic and military competition with China will be. It will play out with jerky dance and cat videos as well as autonomous jets. Welcome to the Long Competition. It’s going to be a wild ride.
How to Convince Your Government Colleagues to Use Social Media
Jul 30, 2020
There are a lot of tech-savvy folks working in the government today. Many use social media in their personal lives and are familiar with the various platforms that are out there. However, many are uncomfortable with the idea of putting it all out there on social media, especially when it comes to their professional lives and projects they’re working on. While there are many rules and regulations about what can be shared publicly and what is confidential, many times the aversion to social media is due to these folks not seeing the value that social media can add to their government program. They often ask themselves, “does anyone actually read this stuff?”
Despite these misgivings, sharing program information with your stakeholders is a great way to keep them informed and foster dialogue—and there’s no better time than now to get your colleagues on board.
The Harris Poll conducted a poll between the end of March through early May and found that 46-51% of U.S. adults are using social media more since the COVID-19 outbreak began. In the most recent survey, taken between May 1-3, 51% of total respondents (60% of those ages 18 to 34, 64% of those ages 35 to 49, and 34% of those ages 65 and up) reported increased usage on various social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.
Additionally, Business Insider reported that this year, U.S. adult social network users will spend 7 more minutes per day on social networks than in 2019. With more people on social media and spending longer periods of time on it than ever, it’s important to take advantage of the boosted visibility and utilize social media resources.
Here are four ways you can make the case for using social media as a communications platform in the government:
Share the data. When it comes to social media, there’s a lot of data available. Sharing some of this information with your program managers can open their eyes to the potential communities they can tap into online. For example, by using Twitter’s free analytics tool, you can share a high-level breakdown of who your organization’s followers are, where they’re coming from, what they’re interested in, and who they represent. As a next step, Content Management Systems (CMS) like Hootsuite and SproutSocial offer even more data tracking capabilities, and with customized dashboards through Google Data Studio, you’re well on your way to showing your colleagues the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) that demonstrate the power of your social media. This data may inspire your colleagues to take a leap of faith, knowing that they’re talking to their stakeholders directly.
Acknowledge the risks. The Internet can be a tough crowd. We’ve all seen the angry commenter – you know, the one who WRITES IN ALL CAPS. Or, the “trolls” who insist on focusing on the negative solely to get a rise out of the poor social media manager of the organization. It’s important to acknowledge that these people exist, but remind project managers that they are often the minority. After you post content, show your co-workers the responses, and encourage them to keep in mind the percentage of positive to negative. It will help reinforce that most responses are positive and represent curiosity, not anger. However, in the case that the troll is overly aggressive, it’s important to remind your colleagues to review their organization’s social media comment policies.
Show Examples. There are a number of great examples of social media in the government. You likely have several success stories of your own on your agency’s various platforms. Share these examples with your colleagues and show them how you can use social media to seriously engage with your target audiences. If that doesn’t convince them, introduce them to fellow program managers who have successfully used social media at work. Let these folks champion your cause and demonstrate the value.
Follow up. After you post about a project, share data about the response with the program manager. Showing the positive response from followers can encourage them that there is interest in their work and will, hopefully, lead to future collaboration. Encourage them to contact you if they have a project milestone, and if they seem hesitant, don’t be afraid to check in with them periodically to ask for content ideas.
Getting your colleagues on board can be a challenge, but we’re certain that when you present the facts, you’ll be able to get them excited and ready to approach this medium of communication.
Have you had to convince your colleagues to get social online? Drop a comment and let us know what methods worked best for you!
Founded in 2007, Corner Alliance is a government consulting firm that serves federal clients primarily in the public safety, emergency management and business intelligence spaces. Corner Alliance is a company where your mission matters, driving change in government through stakeholder-centered solutions, innovative ideas and client loyalty.
Meet Evan Janis
Jul 22, 2020
STAFF SPOTLIGHT: EVAN JANIS, SENIOR CONSULTANT
July 22, 2020 — Evan Janis, PMP, Consultant to DHS S&T, has a mission to build trusted relationships that empower teams to tackle the challenges that the Government faces. Before joining Corner Alliance, he spent 10+ years supporting public safety across all levels of government.
This week we chose to spotlight Evan because of his amazing insight into government and shared mission with his client.
Tell me about yourself - how did you get into government consulting? How long have you been doing it? When did you start working for Corner Alliance, and what made you choose Corner over other consulting firms?
Evan Janis: I have spent the better part of 13 years working with the government ranging from my beginnings at the local municipal level to progressing to the Congressional level on Capitol Hill. Over the course of that time, I have done everything from spending the summer in the trunks of police cars installing in-car video systems to helping the State of Maryland develop a regional interoperability platform that provides vital situational awareness for first responders to emergency preparedness and response for the government.
About six months ago I made the move to the consulting world after realizing that I was moving further away from supporting the public safety community. I wanted to get back to my passion of working in support of them. Corner Alliance just happened to be looking for someone with a passion and a desire to be part of their journey to grow as a company. These were of importance to me as I’ve often heard stories of how competitive advancement can be at large consulting firms. As an athlete, it’s in my nature not to shy away from competition, but it was important for me to be honest that consulting was a new world to me. As a result, the smaller size of Corner Alliance has afforded me the opportunity to grow at a Senior level and help shape the company to reflect values that I share.
What client do you currently work for? What is their mission?
EJ: I currently support the Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate (DHS S&T), whose mission is to “enable effective, efficient, and secure operations across all homeland security missions by applying scientific, engineering, analytic, and innovative approaches to deliver timely solutions and support departmental acquisitions”
What do you do for your client, and how does that work support your client’s mission?
EJ: I manage a team that supports DHS S&T initiatives involving the first responder community. This has strong correlations to the passion that I sought to reconnect with since my team works to conduct research and development of resources for communities that I started my career supporting. Presently, we are developing solutions for three particular challenges the first responders and public safety officials are facing: are we as an agency sharing information effectively, how do I as a public safety official create a social media program from the ground up, and how we as the Government ensure Alerting Authorities are getting the most out of their alerts, warnings, and notification (AWN) resources. A solution that my team is delivering to address the first of these challenges is an information sharing assessment platform that helps agencies assess their information sharing capabilities as well as their gaps. My team is also developing a social media program planning tool that helps build robust social media programs and resources that support the use of technologies such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Integrated Public Alert & Warning System (IPAWS). Almost all of these solutions have served particular importance recently as public safety and public health officials seek ways to better their COVID-19 pandemic response.
How does the work you do support their mission?
EJ: DHS S&T is heavily focused on providing effective and efficient operations using innovative approaches for solutions. My team supports this mission with a research and development focused lens to deliver solutions that address the core challenges of the public safety community. This is important as often their needs are assumed based on significant events and commonly not a good representation of the real issues that need to be addressed. Knowing this from my personal experience and Corner Alliance’s belief that solutions should be stakeholder-driven, my team actively engages with public safety officials nationwide daily to ensure that the real needs are understood. This combined with Corner Alliance’s best practice of not designing solutions in a vacuum pushes my team to ensure stakeholders are involved throughout the development process to design, build, test, and deliver solutions created by first responders for first responders.
Tell me about a success your client had, and how you participated.
EJ: The COVID-19 pandemic has been a focal point for the public safety community as they are constantly looking for solutions that help them adapt to the evolving situation. Recognizing this, my team collaborated with DHS S&T to develop a customized information sharing assessment platform from the ground up. It helps the public safety community understand their information sharing capabilities and identify their most pressing gaps in an easy and intuitive way. This has been a huge success within the public safety community and has provided agencies and even states with tremendous insight into their information sharing capabilities. Most recently, my team expanded the platform to include a pandemic-specific scenario as a planning resource for the public safety community. It has empowered agencies to understand how to share information within their agencies and with other agencies during a pandemic. In turn, they have a clear understanding of where they can focus constrained resources to improve information sharing.
What is your personal mission, and how does it support the Government?
EJ: Spending most of my career working directly for the Government, I have found that agencies have enormous responsibilities in adapting to the needs of the public. To overcome this, the Government as a whole is constantly looking for ways to quickly provide innovative solutions while limiting their exposure to the associated risks. Their ability to accomplish this is even more critical in the COVID-19 pandemic response as rapid solutions are needed to address the evolving situations. The Government often looks to companies such as Corner Alliance to help with these challenges to include ensuring that solutions are not addressing just the present needs but can stand the test of time. Team’s such as mine bring a programmatic approach to innovation that enables the Government to deliver solutions efficiently and effectively and with the future in mind. Knowing this, I get out of bed each day with the mission to empower teams to tackle the challenges that the Government faces and to quickly provide solutions that address the present and future needs of the public safety community.
What are you excited to see the federal Government do in the future?
EJ: The public safety community lives in a world of adaptation with the need to continually find solutions to evolving challenges such as the pandemic. Technology has already outpaced agency’s ability to implement solutions that can make them more efficient and effective. As a result, first responders are often left using antiquated solutions or ones that do not efficiently bridge new and old technology. The cloud presents a unique opportunity for the public safety community to overcome this challenge by providing cost effective scalable solutions that can be quickly implemented. The Government as a whole is well positioned to help spur the public safety communities use of these technologies by providing unified guidance based on best practices and also working to spur innovation within private industry to offer solutions for first responders.
Founded in 2007, Corner Alliance is a government consulting firm that serves federal clients primarily in the public safety, emergency management and business intelligence spaces. Corner Alliance is a company where your mission matters, driving change in government through stakeholder-centered solutions, innovative ideas and client loyalty.
Tech Gadgets that Make WFH Bearable
Jul 09, 2020
Helena Black, Corner Alliance Operations Washington D.C.
July 9, 2020 - The onset of COVID-19 in the U.S. caused a massive relocation of employees from the office to the home, and companies had to create the infrastructure necessary to support a remote workforce. Nearly seven in 10 employees in the U.S. switched to remote work after COVID-19 hit1—higher than ever before.
Our employees are no exception - Corner Alliance swiftly transitioned our consultants to be 100% remote. We have made a few adjustments to help us be as productive at home as we are in the office. Here are the gadgets that made our transition to remote work easier.
1. Blue light Glasses
Alright, we know blue light glasses aren’t technically a gadget. However, they provide relief when staring at a screen for long amounts of time. Blue-blocking (BB) spectacle lenses, or blue light glasses, were found to partially filter high-energy short-wavelength light without substantially degrading visual performance and sleep quality
2
. In other words—they filter out the light that causes damage to your eyes and lower rates of insomnia without making it harder to see your screen.
Additionally, blue light glasses help to lower reduction in Critical Flicker Frequency (CFF)
3
, the frequency at which a flickering light is indistinguishable from a steady, non-flickering light
4
. This means there is less strain on your eyes at the end of the day—saving you from constant headaches and reliance on eye drops.
We have found that using dual monitors helps us increase productivity at home while using our normally-portable laptops and hardware.
Dual monitors are a good idea for four key reasons:
Dual monitors allow applications to work together seamlessly, especially when work requires quickly referencing other materials, transferring data from one application to another, or watching instructional videos.
They increase collaboration and communication when you have a video meeting app like Slack, Zoom, or Google Hangouts running on one screen and your source of reference on the other.
Setting up a docking station is a breeze (so long as you have the hardware to do it—users with newer Apple products should remember to get an adapter!)
They’re seriously simple—they don’t require extra software to communicate with your main device, and you can drag and drop applications from one monitor to another. As an added bonus, operating systems remember which application you opened on which monitor, so jumping back into work after a night off is easier than ever.
Odds are you’re wearing headphones and earbuds way more than you ever have before, especially while working alongside a spouse, partner, roommate, or child(ren). It’s important to find comfortable earbuds that you can tolerate having in your ears for long periods of time. Many come with built-in microphones, which beat using your laptop microphones that are further from your mouth and more likely to pick up outside noises (Hello, screaming kids or barking dogs!)
It’s also important to keep your earbuds set to an appropriate volume. Former National Institute of Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) Director James F. Battey, Jr., M.D., Ph.D., said in a 2017 podcast interview, "if an individual is standing at arm's length from you and they can hear your earbuds, that noise is probably too loud, and if delivered for a long enough time will cause noise-induced hearing loss." We want to avoid that!
Working remotely has added several communication challenges - especially when it comes to nonverbal cues. Many laptops have built-in webcams, but the video is usually choppy and grainy. Laptop webcams are often limited to 720p resolution, with sensors below five megapixels. In non-technical terms—very slow. This can result in frustrating video conference calls.
We’ve been enjoying some fun customization by adding unique backgrounds to our Zoom meetings (we use Canva to create the image).
Modern computer users use their mouse almost three times more than their keyboard4. For those of us using laptops with touchpads, a good mouse is essential. Finding one that has ergonomic support to protect yourself is even better, since musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) like tendonitis, carpal tunnel syndrome, and epicondylitis cases are among the most frequently reported causes of lost or restricted work time, accounting for 33% of all worker injury and illness cases5. A study conducted by the National Institute of Health (NIH) showed that increasing mouse height and angling the mouse topcase can improve wrist posture without negatively affecting performance6. In fact, using a vertical mouse can decrease the exposure to biomechanical risk factors for computer mouse use-related musculoskeletal disorders7. That’s a mouthful; but basically your hand will feel a lot better!
Upgrading your home office with these essentials will improve communication between you, your colleagues, and your clients, and increase your productivity. In some cases, you may even be preserving your long-term health.
What are your recommendations for gadgets that make remote work easier? Drop a comment below!
1Hickman, B. A. (2020, June 30). Reviewing Remote Work in the U.S. Under COVID-19. Gallup. https://news.gallup.com/poll/311375/reviewing-remote-work-covid.aspx 2Leung, T. W., Li, R. W., & Kee, C. S. (2017). Blue-Light Filtering Spectacle Lenses: Optical and Clinical Performances. PloS one, 12(1), e0169114. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0169114 3Ide, T., Toda, I., Miki, E., & Tsubota, K. (2015). Effect of Blue Light-Reducing Eye Glasses on Critical Flicker Frequency. Asia-Pacific journal of ophthalmology (Philadelphia, Pa.), 4(2), 80–85. https://doi.org/10.1097/APO.0000000000000069 4Wells, E. F., Bernstein, G. M., Scott, B. W., Bennett, P. J., & Mendelson, J. R. (2001). Critical flicker frequency responses in visual cortex. Experimental brain research, 139(1), 106–110. https://doi.org/10.1007/s002210100721 5Occupational Safety and Health Administration. (n.d.). Safety and Health Topics | Ergonomics | Occupational Safety and Health Administration. U.S. Department of Labor. Retrieved July 2, 2020, from https://www.osha.gov/SLTC/ergonomics/ 6Odell, D., & Johnson, P. (2015). Evaluation of flat, angled, and vertical computer mice and their effects on wrist posture, pointing performance, and preference. Work (Reading, Mass.), 52(2), 245–253. https://doi.org/10.3233/WOR-152167 7Quemelo PR, Vieira ER. Biomechanics and performance when using a standard and a vertical computer mouse. Ergonomics. 2013;56(8):1336-1344. doi:10.1080/00140139.2013.805251
Author
Helena Black, Content Marketing Specialist for Corner Alliance, supports her mission to bring empathy to the workplace through thoughtful communication. The Minnesotan-native worked across many industries before settling in at Corner Alliance.
The Era of the Global Citizen is Over
Jul 01, 2020
Alan Pentz, CEO Washington DC
July 1, 2020 - China’s meteoric rise to world power status has created what I call the Long Competition between China and the U.S. We are now seeing this competition beginning to play out in the business community. North American corporations that considered themselves less as “American” and more as “global citizens,” are getting a rude awakening in today’s world caught between the U.S.’ Scylla and China’s Charybdis (in other words - a rock and a hard place).
Being a global citizen was easy during a time of U.S. dominance. Corporations like Google and Amazon rose to prominence before China emerged as a clear competitor. In such an environment, it was easy to expand to other markets. But, that period is over.
China now poses a clear threat to our technological supremacy, and North American companies must recognize that the balancing act between the U.S. and China is becoming increasingly difficult. In recent years, China has shut Google, Amazon, and Facebook out of their country in favor of their own companies - and it doesn’t stop there.
As countless other companies (from Starbucks to Apple) have come to realize, such is the new reality of playing “global citizen” between the U.S. and China; you’re damned if you do, and damned if you don’t. The effects of this phenomenon will only accelerate in the post-COVID-19 landscape, as critical supply chains in manufacturing and health care come under the scrutiny of governments worldwide and areas we thought were open to free trade are suddenly very problematic. The more its economy grows, the more China will insist on using its power to try to force Western companies to adopt its message, and Western companies will come under fire from their governments and fellow citizens to resist the pressure.
This has happened with the NBA in the Darrely Morley case. It’s happening to Zoom as they cut off the accounts of U.S. citizens who dare to engage in conversations the Chinese government disapproves of. It happened with TikTok, now facing the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States investigation. I’m not sure former Disney execs can paper over the fact that Hong Kong protests disappear from the site. In our COVID-19 world, the pressures have intensified.
Joseph Stalin once said, “If I could control the American motion picture, I would need nothing else to convert the entire world to communism.” China has read its share of history and knows exactly what Stalin meant. However, they’ve also learned that they don’t have to take Hollywood by force. They just have to threaten Hollywood’s global distribution rights, and suddenly there are no Chinese villains in any movies—and Taiwan doesn’t exist.
I don’t blame the companies themselves. They want to make money for their shareholders, and China has plenty of money. But, while they are not in the business of global politics, bipartisan pressure from their home government and increasing demands from the Chinese government will leave many of these companies with no choice but to choose sides. COVID-19 might have shut down international travel, but the Long Competition permanently grounded the global citizen.
Author
Alan Pentz, CEO and Founder of Corner Alliance, has worked with government leaders in the R&D and innovation communities across DHS, Commerce, NIH, state and local government, and the non-profit sector among others. He has worked in the consulting industry for over ten years with Corner Alliance, SRA, Touchstone Consulting, and Witt O'Brien's. Before consulting, Alan served as a speechwriter and press secretary for former U.S. Senator Max Baucus and as a legislative assistant for former U.S. Representative Paul Kanjorski. He holds an MBA from the University of Texas at Austin.
Read Alan’s Other Insights
What You Need to Know Before Setting Up a Federal Grant Program Part II
Jun 24, 2020
Roxy Barboza, Washington D.C.
Joan Keiser, Washington D.C.
This is the second blog post in this series. For “What You Need to Know Before Setting Up a Federal Grant Program Part I” click here. To download our “Guiding Principles for Grants Management”, click here.
In fiscal 2019, the federal government made more than 435,000 grant awards, totaling an estimated $766 billion. Grants are a big deal and can be complex to implement and administer. If you work in the federal grants space, you might be familiar with the Uniform Guidance for financial assistance codified at 2 CFR 200. This guidance is important and there are many resources available to help you apply it.
In our last blog we covered the importance of knowing your authorities and knowing your objectives and expectations. This blog covers two other basic building blocks:
Knowing who’s on your team, and
Knowing your timeline and process
These building blocks help you construct and manage an effective grant program because:
Grant programs are under constant pressure to make awards quickly. A basic understanding of the legal underpinnings of your program makes up-front planning faster and easier.
Your program’s legal basis helps you clarify grant program, stakeholder, and agency objectives, which provide the boundaries that shape early discussions.
Setting and communicating your program’s objectives and expectations is crucial to program success. If your internal team doesn’t have a grasp of what’s expected and when, the program will encounter obstacles. Similarly, clear objectives and expectations effectively communicated to the applicant community result in well-organized, high-quality applications.
Understanding the role of your team, including where they can help and where they can’t, helps determine whether additional resources are needed to make the program work.
Knowing the grants lifecycle helps you set a realistic timeline and plan for approvals and interactions with other internal parties like your finance office.
Knowing Who’s On Your Team
Federal agencies are often big, complex organizations. Seek out the federal employees identified in the table below to help you set up and manage your grant program. As a program manager, you will likely be responsible for making connections, but it’s possible that your grants office will reach out to you to get the process started.
Team Member
Role
Activities
Considerations
Program Office (PO)
Program Manager, Program Staff
Determine objectives and goals, outreach to stakeholders and beneficiaries, design the program. Assess and monitor risk. Interact with agency management and finance office.
Do you have enough staff to handle outreach and reviews, as well as post-award monitoring?
Grants Office (GO)
Grants Officer, Grants Specialist
Help the PO shape the program, manage application intake, negotiate and administer awards. Interpret and apply 2 CFR 200. Liaison to grants policy office.
Knowledge of program and objectives. Program timeline could affect availability of GO staff. Grants policy office reviews can take significant time.
Office of General Counsel (OGC)
Program Attorney, Grants Counsel
Review legal authorities to ensure all are in place, advise on program construction and selection of award instruments. Advise on 2 CFR 200.
Build their availability into the grant program’s timeline. Reviews can take time. OGC can also advise during monitoring.
All of your teammates need to fully understand your expectations for the program. Clearly documented and communicated objectives, deadlines, and requirements establish a shared understanding of each team member's roles and responsibilities, and ensures everyone is working toward the same goal.
The need to physically distance to hinder the spread of the corona virus has caused our federal clients to re-think how they interact with both internal and external stakeholders. Recently Corner Alliance transitioned a key multi-day workshop for awardees from in-person to virtual for our client at USDA.This workshop brought together recent award recipients and federal staff for key discussions on how to administer awards for a new assistance program. The team surmounted logistical, scheduling and technology challenges to help the client reach 1,888 attendees across 10 sessions.
Program award schedules compress as review periods lengthen, putting pressure on both the PO and GO staff to make awards while ensuring that awardees are capable and funded projects will meet statutory and program objectives. Before getting started, you’ll want to ask if you have enough staff to effectively review funding applications and monitor awards.
Corner Alliance has successfully assisted federal agencies with program design and implementation, as well as providing experienced consultant staff to assist with review coordination and award monitoring. For example, Corner Alliance supports a $116.5 million grant program at the Department of Commerce by pre-screening electronic applications to ensure that all application components are present, as well as reviewing budget calculations and modifications for accuracy. During the post-award phase, Corner Alliance conceptualized, designed, developed, deployed, and managed the Grants Data Center (GDC), a cloud-based software tool that assists the client with data management and reporting on awards.
Know Your Process and Timeline
Here’s the grants management life cycle:
Pre-Award Planning involves the PO staff, the GO, and counsel. You might want to include other stakeholders such as related agencies or senior management. Be sure to use this time to create your project timeline, consider risks and mitigation, and obtain all necessary approvals.
Your GO can help you ensure that all of the relevant steps to Commit Funding are completed. As you might expect, your agency’s financial team will be involved with this phase.
Your GO Announces the Funding Opportunity on grants.gov, after you’ve all worked hard to draft a clear, cogent, and helpful announcement. This announcement governs all of the activities of the program.
Your PO team has a big role to play in Reviewing Applications. While your GO may be able to assist in the reviews, if you have a popular program with many applicants, you might need additional resources.
Your GO will Negotiate and Make Awards, but your PO team will play key roles in determining the reasonableness of funding requests and recommending awards to your agency’s decision-maker.
The PO team is also a vital part of Administering and Monitoring awards, to ensure that awardees fulfill their grant agreements and execute the approved projects.
Closeout involves your team’s input on final performance reports and ensuring that all funds are properly accounted for.
Understanding this process at a high level helps you determine a project timeline and allocate sufficient resources to ensure that you can move through every phase with confidence.
Corner Alliance can help Manage Grant Programs from Planning to Closeout
Developing, executing and monitoring grant programs can be complex and frustrating at times. But being very clear about your program’s authority, objectives and expectations, your team’s strengths, weaknesses and availability, and the process itself provides a solid foundation for success.
Corner Alliance aims to empower our clients to reach new heights and achieve their goals. By understanding a program’s current state, we help our clients establish clear objectives and a customized approach to measure impact. To address what can often be a complicated process to complete funding packages, Corner Alliance follows the most current and up-to-date detailed processes, procedures, and requirements to guarantee these packages are submitted correctly and on time. We leverage our extensive experience in the rigorous day-to-day management that a grant program requires, ensuring that our clients can have the utmost confidence that their programs will succeed. Corner Alliance promises to always have our clients back and to present creative solutions to address their most challenging needs.
Our guiding principles for grants management are:
Accurate understanding of recipient’s current state.
Clear objectives and a way to measure impact.
Complete funding packages with detailed processes, procedures, and requirements.
Rigorous day-to-day management and oversight.
Learn More About Our Guiding Principles of Grants Management
Roxanna (Roxy) Barboza, MPA, Consultant to the USDA, has cultivated a passion for mission-driven work through her personal connection with broadband access. A California native, her dedication to serving others led her to a career with Corner Alliance after earning her Master’s in Public Administration from the University of Southern California.
Joan Keiser, Consultant to the USDA, has a mission to leave the world a better place than she found it. That mission has been the thread that flows throughout her careers as an advocate for rural America, a federal civil servant and now at Corner Alliance. Joan is a native Pennsylvanian and a proud alumna of the University of Pittsburgh.
Read More Grants Management Insights
What You Need to Know Before Setting Up a Federal Grant Program Part I
Jun 17, 2020
Roxy Barboza, Washington D.C.
Joan Keiser, Washington D.C.
This is the first blog post in this series. For “What You Need to Know Before Setting Up a Federal Grant Program Part II” click here. To download our “Guiding Principles for Grants Management”, click here.
In fiscal 2019, the federal government made more than 435,000 grant awards, totalling an estimated $766 billion. Grants are a big deal and can be complex to implement and administer. If you work in the federal grants space, you might be familiar with the Uniform Guidance for financial assistance codified at 2 CFR 200. This guidance is important and there are many resources available to help you apply it. That said, effective grants management really starts with a good grasp of the basic building blocks, which are:
Knowing your authorities
Knowing your objectives and expectations
Understanding these key components helps you construct and manage an effective grant program because:
Grant programs are under constant pressure to make awards quickly. A basic understanding of the legal underpinnings of your program makes up-front planning faster and easier.
Your program’s legal basis helps you clarify grant program, stakeholder, and agency objectives, which provide the boundaries that shape early discussions.
Setting and communicating your program’s objectives and expectations is crucial to program success. If your internal team doesn’t have a grasp of what’s expected and when, the program will encounter obstacles. Similarly, clear objectives and expectations effectively communicated to the applicant community result in well-organized, high-quality applications.
Understanding the role of your team, including where they can help and where they can’t, helps determine whether additional resources are needed to make the program work.
Knowing the grants lifecycle helps you set a realistic timeline and plan for approvals and interactions with other internal parties like your finance office.
Know your Authorities
A federal grant program (often referred to as “financial assistance”) needs three types of legal authority:
Financial assistance (grants) authority: usually provided in the statute that created or governs your agency. This authority is usually delegated from the agency head to divisions, directorates, bureaus, sub-agencies. You can often find it in management directives.
Program authority: statutory language authorizing a program or activity. Often found in authorizing statutes but sometimes, Congress places this kind of language in appropriations statutes.
Appropriations authority: statutory language in appropriations legislation that provides funding for the program.
There are also differences between formula grant programs and “discretionary” programs? A formula grant doesn’t require state and local governments to compete against for formula grant funds. Each grant is based on a specific formula established by law. “Discretionary” programs, on the other hand, either explicitly or implicitly provide agencies the authority to select recipients based on merit or eligibility.
Principal Purpose Test
You also need to decide which “legal instrument” -- procurement contract, grant agreement, or cooperative agreement -- is the best option to execute your program’s mission. The go-to resource on this is 31 USC 6301 et seq. (formerly known as the Federal Grant and Cooperative Agreement Act).noda.
Know Your Objectives and Expectations
Successful awards share the following characteristics:
Strong, clear, and measurable objectives
Knowing how much funding is available and the specific objective of the funding
Being acutely aware the program’s primary beneficiary and stakeholders
With so many expectations to meet during the grants management life cycle, you will have to have clear expectations from the start until the end. Clear expectations help by:
Enhancing and encouraging open and consistent communication among staff, stakeholders, applicants and awardees.
Establishing a baseline of measurement for program and awardee performance during the program.
Empowering federal to act and take responsibility because they have documented operating guidelines and structure.
Creating a reference point when expectations and deadlines are not met.
Providing a way to hold staff and awardees accountable.
In “What You Need to Know Before Setting Up a Federal Grant Program Part II,” we will detail two additional building blocks for establishing an effective grants management program: knowing who’s on your team and knowing your timeline and process.
Corner Alliance can help Manage Grant Programs from Planning to Closeout
Developing, executing and monitoring grant programs can be complex and frustrating at times. But being very clear about your program’s authority, objectives and expectations, your team’s strengths, weaknesses and availability, and the process itself provides a solid foundation for success.
Corner Alliance aims to empower our clients to reach new heights and achieve their goals. By understanding a program’s current state, we help our clients establish clear objectives and a customized approach to measure impact. To address what can often be a complicated process to complete funding packages, Corner Alliance follows the most current and up-to-date detailed processes, procedures, and requirements to guarantee these packages are submitted correctly and on time. We leverage our extensive experience in the rigorous day-to-day management that a grant program requires, ensuring that our clients can have the utmost confidence that their programs will succeed. Corner Alliance promises to always have our clients back and to present creative solutions to address their most challenging needs.
Our guiding principles for grants management are:
Accurate understanding of recipient’s current state.
Clear objectives and a way to measure impact.
Complete funding packages with detailed processes, procedures, and requirements.
Rigorous day-to-day management and oversight.
Learn More About Our Guiding Principles of Grants Management
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Roxanna (Roxy) Barboza, MPA, Consultant to the USDA, has cultivated a passion for mission-driven work through her personal connection with broadband access. A California native, her dedication to serving others led her to a career with Corner Alliance after earning her Master’s in Public Administration from the University of Southern California.
Joan Keiser, Consultant to the USDA, has a mission to leave the world a better place than she found it. That mission has been the thread that flows throughout her careers as an advocate for rural America, a federal civil servant and now at Corner Alliance. Joan is a native Pennsylvanian and a proud alumna of the University of Pittsburgh.
Read More Grants Management Insights
How Clear Expectations will Establish a Successful Grants Program
Jun 10, 2020
Rob Trader, Corner Alliance Consultant Washington, D.C.
Download our free Guiding Principles for Grants Management Cheat Sheet
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Federal grants are critical to supporting some of the nation’s most important initiatives and research that provide public service. Throughout a program’s lifecycle, the managing team must strategically plan, execute, and constantly monitor to ensure objectives are being met in a timely and cost effective manner. Expectations are the key to establishing a program that provides clarity for both the granting agency and the applicants.
The benefits of setting clear expectations are that they:
Enhance and encourage open and consistent communication;
Establish a baseline of measurement for performance during the program lifecycle;
Empower employees to act more freely and take responsibility because they have documented operating guidelines and structure;
Create a reference point when expectations and deadlines are not met; and
Provide a way to hold employees accountable
One of the most important steps is to document and incorporate how you set your expectations into your grants management standard operating procedure (SOP). By using proven and consistent procedures to effectively establish expectations during the planning phase, federal grant programs will continue to successfully accomplish their goals and mission.
Communicating Clear Expectations
Before a grant program can award any funding, the management teams should set expectations during the design and development phase of the program. To form a clear foundation, grant programs need to clearly state the expectations for the internal program team. By clearly documenting these objectives, deadlines and requirements can be generated to ensure the program can be effectively executed. Establishing a shared understanding of each member's roles and responsibilities will ensure everyone is working towards the same end goal. Whether your grants are managed by a single person or a team, day to day, finance, and legal responsibilities must be understood. If there are multiple departments involved, consistent cadence and open lines of communication should be established. An agency can help their program managers by providing annual training to make sure the grants they award reflect the agency's overall administrative and programmatic goals.
Whether grant applicants are experienced or new with the application process, grantees will rely heavily on the guidance and expectations of the awarding agency. Corner Alliance has helped numerous clients effectively communicate the program’s mission and pre-award screening process to ensure that applicants know exactly what they are applying for, and what the granting agency is requesting. Corner Alliance has also developed additional ways for agencies to increase communication with their grantees through the use of blogs, forums, and instruction guides on the application website. Providing new educational material in which program managers discuss frequently asked questions and problem areas grantees experience would ensure all applicants have equal knowledge of the process. As a result, the granting agency will be more likely to select the applicants who best meet the solicitation requirements and have the highest chance for success.
Corner Alliance understands that when expectations are not clearly stated or identified, participants both internally and externally will naturally have different interpretations of the desired outcomes. A number of issues will quickly present themselves and potentially cause great harm to the program. Confusion, frustration, missed deadlines, and a breakdown in communication can all result and lead to lost opportunities in achieving a program’s objectives. Whether it is during the design, application, award, or delivery phase, clear expectations for all stakeholders and participants will ensure all efforts go towards achieving a common goal.
Effective Performance Metrics and Managing Risk
Many times the most difficult challenge to establish an effective grant program is the implementation of the correct performance metrics, monitoring tools, and risk management. With established program objectives in place, managers can begin to decide which performance metrics are best to effectively track the status and success of the program. These statements of outcome indicators will ensure each participant is in agreement of what will constitute as achieving the overall objectives. Whether it is participation, percentage of populations served, or a certain number of people trained, Corner Alliance understands that each program is different and performance metrics must be strategically planned to ensure program activities can be accurately captured. This will avoid implementing any meaningless or misleading metrics that could inaccurately influence the program outcomes.
Implementing effective reporting tools that allow constant monitoring of the program is vital. Having regular weekly or bi-weekly cadence between the agency team and with the grantee can be used to discuss updates, specific tasks, and to answer questions or concerns. Using tools such as status reports, project quad charts, kanban boards, or compliance monitoring plans are all ways to consistently document the program from start to finish. This information will be important for records keeping, program evaluation, and discussing lessons learned upon completion of the program.
For any grants program, the number one priority for any program manager is to always manage the risk. During a program’s lifecycle risk can and will present itself. Discussing potential challenges is never easy, however being proactive instead of reactive will ensure that risk is addressed the moment it is identified. One of the first steps while planning a grants program is to create a detailed mitigation plan. This document will outline the specific steps that the program team and grantees will execute whenever any issue or risk is identified. To be proactive it is imperative to establish a culture of openness, and to encourage open communication of all risk by both the program team and the grantee. If each participant feels comfortable identifying these potential hurdles early on, solutions can be put in place before it becomes a threat to the overall program objectives.
Corner Alliance can help Manage Grant Programs from Implementation to Closeout
In order to have a successful grant program, the awarding agency must be willing to take the time to communicate consistently both internally and externally. Through open communication and sharing the program’s expectations, participants will be able to manage risk through the use of effective reporting tools and strategic performance metrics, ensuring that all effort is pointed towards achieving one cohesive mission.
Corner Alliance aims to empower our clients to reach new heights and achieve their goals. By understanding our recipient’s current state, we help our clients establish clear objectives and a customized approach to measure impact. What can often be a complicated process to complete funding packages, Corner Alliance follows the most current and up to date detailed processes, procedures, and requirements to guarantee these packages are submitted correctly and on time. We leverage our extensive experience in the rigorous day-to-day management that a grant program requires, ensuring that our clients can have the utmost confidence that their programs will succeed. Corner Alliance promises to always have our clients back and to present creative solutions to address their most challenging needs.
Our guiding principles for grants management are:
Accurate understanding of recipient’s current state
Clear objectives and a way to measure impact
Complete funding packages with detailed processes, procedures, and requirements
Rigorous day-to-day management and oversight
Author
Rob Trader, Consultant to DHS S&T, strives to provide strategic and creative solutions for the public safety community to achieve their goals. Before joining Corner Alliance, he worked as an engineer in software automation and robotics systems.
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Allegiance in the Time of COVID
Jun 05, 2020
Alan Pentz, CEO Washington DC
June 5, 2020 - I’ve been writing about the emerging Long Competition between the U.S. and China for a while now. My guess has always been that there would come a time when most companies and, to some degree, most countries, would have to choose to join one side or the other. Originally, I thought that choice wouldn’t be so binary. I believed there would be a spectrum of allegiance. Canada and Mexico operate in the U.S. sphere of influence and have economies deeply intertwined with ours; so, there isn’t much of a choice. They are all in on Uncle Sam. Likewise, countries like Japan, South Korea, and Australia will need to keep close to the U.S., though maybe not quite as close as Mexico. With China so nearby, they will trade with the Big Kahuna at their doorstep but to adhere to China’s geopolitical sphere of influence would risk losing all independence and sovereignty. And as we’ve seen recently, countries will choose sovereignty over economics almost always. Europe is somewhere in between and I thought it would spend most of its time playing the U.S. off of China and vice versa to extract maximum benefits from each. To some extent, that will happen; but, China’s latest moves in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak have dramatically accelerated and raised the stakes of the allegiance process. What some observers such as Peter Zeihan and Bill Bishop have pointed out is that China’s power structure is fundamentally insecure. The Communist Party is a self-serving elite focused mainly on self-preservation and the return of China to world power status. But, the recent wolf warrior diplomatic movement seems to show that the Party will choose self-preservation over world power status. They will hold tightly onto the benefits of zombie state-owned enterprise companies that pump out empty apartments, ghost cities, and bridges to nowhere rather than enrich their own populace. Of course, that was all fine when China’s economy was growing at 15% a year. Even at 9%, the Party and its cronies took 7% and the workers got only 2%. Everyone is getting more, but at 1-3% growth or in a contraction that the U.S. experienced during COVID-19, splitting the pie isn’t as easy. So, China has opted instead to rally around the nationalist sentiment and isn’t reserving their ire for the U.S. Europe, India, and many other countries are targets as well. It’s China against the world in an effort to keep the Party in power and to direct public anger outwards. China and the world will be left poorer; but, it’s worth it to the elites to maintain order and their status. Companies will not be spared either. Multinationals operating in China are going to get squeezed as part of this process. China has made sure to target R&D and 5G deployment money to Chinese companies and has taken a “shop local” approach by limiting American and other Western countries’ access to this market. China has little choice now but to fund domestic alternatives to key Western suppliers for fear of being cut off as they recently were from key semiconductor technologies. Right on queue, the Chinese government is rumored to be readying a series of restrictions on Apple, Boeing, and others. Cisco may have helped build the Great Firewall but it won’t get the upgrade contract. The U.S., in contrast, will always be more open. But, even here, there is bipartisan pressure for CFIUS to prevent Chinese acquisitions of American companies and recent legislative efforts to delist Chinese companies from American stock exchanges. The pressure to bring suppliers back to the U.S. or to redeploy supply chains to friendlier countries like Taiwan, South Korea, or, even better, Mexico will increase as will the incentives to do so. I’m not a believer in the more radical visions of this future. Despite the rhetoric, the U.S. and China will continue to trade for mutual benefit. It’s hard to move billions of dollars of equipment, retrain workers, and create an advanced semiconductor industry from scratch. The rhetoric will escalate, the changes on the ground will be slower, but these last few months have convinced me that they will move. It seems like decades since the CEO of Microsoft could credibly give a speech claiming that China cared as much about privacy regulation for Artificial Intelligence as the West did and called for global cooperation. That might have seemed unrealistic at the time, now it just seems ludicrous. That world ended a couple of years ago and those with large interests in China deliberately ignored those facts for a while. However, the accelerant that is COVID-19 has made the conclusions unavoidable. So given all that, what does the U.S. need to do now? First, we need to be realistic. China is going to be a problem for decades to come. American companies will continue to trade there but they cannot be dependent. The current tensions will quiet down in a year or two but I believe there has been a permanent rupture that makes going back to the time of the mid 2010s when China and the U.S. were “partners” a fantasy. Even if we wanted that, the Communist Party needs us as a villain to keep themselves in power. It’s also largely a fantasy in Europe. It’s clear now that only the countries truly on China’s side will be China and the few countries fully bought in on the Belt and Road with no other options. Second, the U.S. needs to move decisively to invest in core technologies and supply chain diversification through a large digital infrastructure and R&D program. It’s time to build the future now.
Author
Alan Pentz, CEO and Founder of Corner Alliance, has worked with government leaders in the R&D and innovation communities across DHS, Commerce, NIH, state and local government, and the non-profit sector among others. He has worked in the consulting industry for over ten years with Corner Alliance, SRA, Touchstone Consulting, and Witt O'Brien's. Before consulting, Alan served as a speechwriter and press secretary for former U.S. Senator Max Baucus and as a legislative assistant for former U.S. Representative Paul Kanjorski. He holds an MBA from the University of Texas at Austin.
A New Normal: Recommendations for Grants Management
Jun 02, 2020
Meredith Morrison, Corner Alliance Consultant Washington D.C.
Download our free Guiding Principles for Grants Management Cheat Sheet
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In the last three months, you have likely read, wrote, heard, or referred to . . .
Unprecedented circumstances
Trying times
Moments of uncertainty
A new normal
COVID-19 clichés became the new normal (or broken record) pervading many Zoom conversations and email openers. Pandemic lingo only captures a small snapshot of recent unprecedented changes. In March, Congress passed the CARES Act, a $2.3 trillion stimulus package and the nation’s largest relief bill. Through CARES, the government can provide up to $230 billion total in grants and other forms of financial assistance. Federal grant makers now face their usual challenges (identifying impact measurements, reviewing applications, efficiently deploying tax-payer dollars, etc.) in the wake of a global crisis.
From small talk to public policy, our “normal” is changing. Therefore, this marks a pivotal moment for federal grant makers to improve grants management. The following recommendations will help agencies efficiently manage grants during routine and unprecedented circumstances:
1. Adopt a centralized, government-wide grants management platform.
Grants.gov serves as the central hub for those seeking federal funding; however, the platform applies only to the pre-award phase of the grants process. For post-award procedures, agencies employ a lengthy list of different systems and tools depending on the program.1 Learning, using, and even duplicating data in these platforms can prove burdensome for awardees—especially those who receive numerous federal grants. A centralized, government-wide grants management platform could alleviate administrative stress for awardees. Similar to Grants.gov, awardees would submit consolidated sets of forms and documents to federal grant makers through one website. Not only would this save awardees time (and likely several calls to their respective IT departments), the platform would increase transparency and data sharing between agencies.
2. Establish a comprehensive risk assessment database.
Each year the federal government rigorously reviews applications then awards a sizable number of grants. In Fiscal Year 2020 alone, 81,844 grants have been awarded, totaling $437,300,600,1192. A single, comprehensive database would help streamline grants makers’ risk analysis of the numerous potential awardees—specifically recipients of various forms of federal financial assistance. The Past Performance Information Retrieval System and the Tracking Accountability in Government Grants System currently help grants makers track spending and evaluate past performance of contract awards. While useful, the sites lack overall risk assessment profiles that could influence quick and informed decision making. A risk assessment database would also allow agencies to identify their most impactful awardees then evaluate factors contributing to success.
3. Apply Corner Alliance’s guiding principles for grants management.
From managing awards online to reviewing thousands of applications, many factors contribute to the awardee’s and grant maker’s experience. Federal agencies do not need to tackle these hefty grants management responsibilities alone. Corner Alliance helps federal agencies distribute emergency funds quickly—with the right process, systems, people, and priorities. We apply our proven, customizable processes, as well as our trusted administration, management, and reporting capabilities to achieve maximum impact toward relief efforts, including those presented in the CARES Act.
Grants management is not our new normal; Corner Alliance has administered $2 billion+ across 2,000 awardees with an ‘audit-proof’ approach. Our extensive experience and the following principles help guide our clients through successful grants management, regardless of unprecedented circumstances:
Accurate understanding of recipient’s current state
Clear objectives and a way to measure impact
Detailed processes, procedures, and requirements for funding packages
Meredith Morrison, Consultant to USDA, passionately pursues her mission to empower people and communities. The Missouri-native and Arkansas-transplant worked in equity-focused philanthropy and politics before joining Corner Alliance.
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Software Will Eat the Rest of the World
May 27, 2020
Alan Pentz, CEO Washington DC
May 27, 2020 - Software’s Not Done Eating.
Nine years ago, Marc Andreessen wrote a seminal op-ed in the Wall Street Journal entitled Software is Eating the World. The piece embodied the subsequent era of cloud-based companies taking over the economy while they led a rebound in the U.S. stock markets following the Great Financial Crisis. Software enabled by rent-as-needed servers from Amazon Web Services; widespread deployment and adoption of broadband, 3G, and then 4G; and the rise of the smartphone dramatically increased the reach and profitability of software companies. One need only look at the top 10 companies as measured by market capitalization in 2008 and 2020.
In 2008, the most valuable companies were oil and gas and banks. The only software company on the list was Microsoft, milking a legacy Windows monopoly, which had yet to implement its very successful and profitable cloud strategy. By the time Andreessen wrote his op-ed in 2011, Apple climbed almost to the top of the charts and Microsoft held on by its fingernails (sans cloud strategy).
By March 31, 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold of the world, the top seven most valuable companies were primarily software companies (one could argue about Apple). Two of them were also Chinese, demonstrating the rapid rise of their tech economy. We’ve also seen many other start-up companies emerge as unicorns rocketing to billions of dollars in revenue; meanwhile, incumbent (i.e. non-software-based) players watch their businesses wither.
So, Andreessen was right? Did software eat the world? Well, not quite all of it.
In April 2020, Andreessen released a blog called It’s Time to Build, where he makes the case that COVID-19 revealed software’s failure to eat the entire world. While the price of running a web application fell 99% over the last decade, the cost of many other goods and services has done nothing but grow. Healthcare, housing, and education have continued to increase far beyond the rate of inflation and now, for many, these goods are nearly unaffordable. Additionally, our cities, transportation systems, and other infrastructure suffer from a lack of investment. Why? While the virtual world of the internet, mobility, and the cloud thrive even as it rides down the cost curve, more traditional, physical, protected, and regulated industries have taken more of a share of our collective wallets (healthcare, education) or suffered from underinvestment (infrastructure).
Andreessen’s answer for why this happened is a lack of will, a lack of desire to overcome not in backyard development or rent-seeking higher educational institutions, and a lack of desire to invest in 21st century infrastructure. I agree, but only partially. I see another chapter in an ongoing story of technological investment and progress. Software hasn’t eaten the whole world; but, it also isn’t full yet.
Boom, Bust, and Progress
Technology has a tendency to invite over-investment. If you can see the future, you want to own it. This isn’t just a modern phenomenon. Building out America’s railroads consumed enormous amounts of capital from American, British, and other investors. Many of them faced catastrophic financial losses; but, railroads became the backbone of the 19th century and early 20th century economy nonetheless. There were thousands of car companies in the early 1900s. Most of them amounted to nothing or were bought-up by GM.
As Andreessen wrote in Software is Eating the World, many of the businesses thriving in 2011 had predecessors who failed spectacularly in the early 2000s Tech Bubble. Pets.com failed but Chewy.com is a nearly $18B market cap publicly traded company today. The world didn’t have the broadband, mobility, and logistics networks or the penetration of those networks it needed to make Pets.com a success in 2000; but, it did by 2019.
I think a similar dynamic is playing out today. The most successful companies over the last decade have structured their operations in a virtual context and have reaped the benefits: Netflix, Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. The unicorns that emerged from the deluge of cheap venture capital during that time are a more mixed story. In general, the more virtual the business model, the more profitable the company: Anaplan, Roku, Smartsheet, Twilio, etc. The unicorns that lagged tended to mix software with higher cost elements of the physical world. Uber and Grubhub are the canonical examples of this phenomenon (not to mention, WeWork, which might not survive this downturn)
The Baumol Effect
Making profits in the physical world is harder and these are exactly the places Andreessen wants us to invest. This is particularly true when the physical world involves labor. Paying all those Uber and Grubhub drivers is expensive, not to mention, the people who run the restaurants. Much of the inflation in education expenses is driven by the proliferation of administrative staff and the lack of productivity growth in other staff. The story in healthcare is more complicated. But, the lack of growth in the productivity of labor is at least one of the primary drivers in increasing costs. People, in contrast to servers, don’t like it when you run them down the cost curve.
One reason for this is something called the Baumol Effect. When a company can make something cheaper and/or more efficiently, it can lower the price it charges and pay workers more at the same time. That’s the beauty of productivity growth. But, that also creates wage and cost pressures in industries that aren’t experiencing productivity growth. As the economist William Baumol observed, it took the same number of musicians the same amount of time to produce the same string quartet when Beethoven lived as it does today. But, today, the musicians get paid a lot more and we all pay a lot more for the tickets. Why is that? Because many other things became cheaper and more productive.
For example, as computers get better and/or cheaper every year, some of that excess wealth goes to wages for computer executives. Pretty soon, the string quartet has to pay more too or else all the musicians will become computer executives. Workers in less efficient sectors will leave those sectors if their wages don’t rise as well. But, that is only part of the story. The other factor that increases the Baumol Effect is that you can only buy so many computers before you have two in every room of your house and the last thing you ever want to see is another computer. Those computer executives start thinking about how great it would be to put their kids into fancy schools. Johnny can’t go to community college after all. He needs to express his creativity at NYU Film School and NYU only takes so many people because it isn’t getting more productive; so, the costs go up.
That’s the problem with the sectors where we need to build; they suffer from a cost disease. They aren’t becoming more efficient, and as the rest of the economy becomes more efficient, the more wealth there is to bid up the costs of the desirable but non-efficient services.
I don’t dismiss the regulatory factors. While they contribute, I think they could be overcome if productivity exposed them as the only cause for increasing costs. “You can’t build in my backyard,” pushes up housing costs but construction’s lack of productivity is a major contributor to the issue as well.
The Solution: 5G
I think the boom we saw in startups that brought more technology and software to the physical world in the 2010s was the harbinger of the future (just as Pets.com was the harbinger of Chewy.com). 4G enabled Netflix, Spotify, Zoom, and Instagram. It also enabled Uber and Grubhub; but, they just couldn’t turn a profit. 5G will solve many of these problems. (Note: I am using 5G as a catch all term for many technologies associated with the 4th Industrial Revolution: AI, Virtual Reality, 5G, Machine Learning, etc.) If we succeed in developing autonomous vehicles, Uber will suddenly be profitable because it won’t have to pay drivers. Similarly, if we build out a network of ghost kitchens, Grubhub can cut out the restaurant and the driver.
This also applies to your doctor. If a surgeon can operate remotely through robotic machines on a patient hundreds or thousands of miles away, their productivity goes through the roof. Additionally, if that doctor can replace 40% of their job using an AI bot to answer basic questions or diagnose ailments, etc. then, the doctor can spend 40% of their time on higher-value projects. That’s how you increase productivity.
If a college professor were to stream their course to thousands or even millions of students, their relative productivity would skyrocket. While a Coursera course today might seem like a pale reflection of your seminar class on 19th century French poetry at Reed College, it’s only because the technology and tools are 4G. 5G will create virtual experiences, unlike anything we observe today. So, we might not replace Reed College but couldn’t we make Penn State open to many more students at a vastly reduced cost?
Personally speaking, I see another area where 5G could improve my life. My wife doesn't like getting online groceries delivered and I have to agree that it just doesn’t work that well. The store is inevitably out of things. The shopper substitutes the wrong kind of apples. If I’d been there I might have gotten pears instead of another kind of apple. Add to that the fact that I still have to be online, approving or not approving changes, and it makes for a pretty terrible experience. I’ve had similar glitchy experiences with restaurant delivery. It just isn’t the seamless experience you want.
But what if the grocery store only did delivery? It’s inventory system would be built into the app so you never selected something the store was out of? And what if your groceries were gathered and packed automatically by a robot that used machine learning to learn that you prefer Bosc pears to Macintosh apples if they are out of Fuji? What if the store messaged you when you needed things because it tracked your consumption habits and what if that delivery were cheaper than actually going to the store? I’m guessing we’d switch.
The pandemic forced us to try online delivery. For every old school family like mine, there’s another that is learning they could live with the glitches. That brings in new customers and revenue but it’s also spurring massive investments to improve. I’m guessing we just accelerated the grocery delivery service by a decade. 5G will allow software to eat much more of the physical world. Industries that have been safe until now: healthcare, education, construction, etc. will be disrupted. This will be great for some like the college professor who will make three times as much serving 100 times as many students. It’ll be not so great for others like the other college professor that no one needs anymore. Most importantly, it’ll be infinitely better for society as a whole by bringing these high costs services to more people.
So, I agree with Andreeson that we need to build and what we need to build is 5G and the technologies that it will enable. It’s time to enter the next phase of technological development. It’s also crucial that our government partner with the private sector by investing in that 5G infrastructure and R&D to ensure that the U.S. leads the world in these new industries. That kind of investment will deliver the results implied by companies like Uber and WeWork and it will deliver a new American century. It’s all a part of the inexorable advance of technology. Software just had it’s mid-morning snack and lunch is the biggest meal of the day.
Author
Alan Pentz, CEO and Founder of Corner Alliance, has worked with government leaders in the R&D and innovation communities across DHS, Commerce, NIH, state and local government, and the non-profit sector among others. He has worked in the consulting industry for over ten years with Corner Alliance, SRA, Touchstone Consulting, and Witt O'Brien's. Before consulting, Alan served as a speechwriter and press secretary for former U.S. Senator Max Baucus and as a legislative assistant for former U.S. Representative Paul Kanjorski. He holds an MBA from the University of Texas at Austin.
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