Harnessing Technology to Advance Our Ideas
Doing more with less – The Bluegrass Story
By Christopher Derry
Published on Monday, May 01, 2006
ARTICLES
“Doing more with less” may as well be our middle name at the Bluegrass Institute. From the beginning, without the availability of deep-pocketed donors, we wanted to make a free market impact in Kentucky in a short time. As a consequence, we use technology to reduce our costs, work successfully in a virtual-team environment and obtain measurable results. Let me explain how we do this.
We started the Institute on September 2, 2003. Here is our current team: I am President, Director of our Center for High-Performance Government and Director of Development. I spend my time either in my home office or on the road raising money. We have a three-room office in Bowling Green that houses Jim Waters and Joel Peyton. Jim’s lead responsibilities are Media Coordinator, Director of our Center to Renew Public Education and editor. Joel is our Research Analyst. Aaron Morris, who lives in Lexington, is our Fiscal Policy Analyst, economist, technology guru and webmaster. Caleb Brown in Frankfort, an experienced radio broadcaster, is our Director of KentuckyVotes.org and Legislative Analyst. Dick Innes, our Education Analyst, lives in Villa Hills.
Our week starts on Friday at 3 p.m. with our virtual weekly staff meeting. “Virtual” is a twenty-something word that means we have a physical meeting place but our staff can be located anywhere. Skype, a Web-based tool, allows us to conduct these virtual meetings free of charge. A service of eBay, Skype is an audio conferencing tool that allows all of us to converse as long as we have access to a high-speed Internet connection.
Success in the policy analysis and formulation business today increasingly requires us to bring intelligent, informed people together who live in different locales. Skype enables essential communication to occur using typical laptop configurations without paying Ma Bell a dime.
We hold our two-hour staff meeting on Friday afternoon. It converts a typically low-productivity time into a high-performance one that enables us to focus our attention on what we intend to accomplish in the approaching week.
We begin with a discussion of ideas and finish by assigning action items – specific, measurable tasks we each agree to complete during the coming week. All action items are posted on FolderShare, a free Web service, which makes it possible for us to share folders and keep shared files synchronized across all of our laptops. Joel is the keeper of action items.
At this meeting, we also review each action item we agreed to accomplish the previous week. Caleb keeps our publication schedule up to date on Foldershare. When we finish, everyone knows the priority of the work they must do and how it relates to what others are doing.
This mutual sharing of our work provides the opportunity for everyone to see their personal tasks and the entire team’s workload. For example, this holistic perspective lets Caleb offer to help Jim when he has a larger than normal editing load in the coming week. In addition, the sharing of setting and accomplishing goals is a constant reinforcement of the level of success we are attaining.
We communicate continuously as we work separately on our laptops through another Web-based tool called AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), a free service provided by America Online. AIM allows us to “instant message” with each other as we do our work. Sometimes the message we want to convey to someone doesn’t warrant an e-mail clogging up their box, or even a phone call, which can waste time. A quick “IM” to let a team member know “I got that message” saves time and minimizes distractions. Yahoo! provides a similar free service.
AIM enables us to think, write, edit and rewrite using the brains of our entire team without the distraction of side conversations. With AIM, we believe the virtual nature of our team adds measurable value to the process of idea creation and formulation.
If you have noticed “free” is so often attached to our technology tools it’s because the Web is extraordinarily inexpensive. We always seek ways to better leverage our time, contributions and other resources. For instance, while Bluegrass distributes some paper copies of its commentaries and policy briefs, we couldn’t afford to send each new one to a printer for a run of 1,000+ copies. So Aaron priced color laser printers on the Web and I approached a donor with the idea of printing our own publications when we needed them. I showed the donor how much we could save by printing them ourselves without sacrificing quality. As a result, he donated $3,000 for this specific purpose. Now we print-to-order, saving us thousands of dollars and lots of office shelf space.
Fellow State Policy Network members, the Mackinac Center for Public Policy (MCPP) and Evergreen Freedom Foundation (EFF), have helped us continuously. To set up our primary Web site, www.bipps.org, we hired a programmer who had worked on MCPP’s site. MCPP taught us that our publications have to look great before most people will read them. (We also contract with MCPP’s graphic artist, Daniel Montgomery, who designs our publications in his free time.)
EFF continues to help us improve our accounting and donor-management systems. Both MCPP and EFF have allowed us to republish some of their publications. By and large, the free market, state-based think tanks are remarkably generous in sharing information and best practices with their peers in the network. This peer mentoring has proven invaluable to the Bluegrass Institute’s start-up efforts.
I also knew we had to use e-mail and the World Wide Web as the primary communicators of our ideas instead of sending them by “snail mail.” Frankly, we couldn’t afford the postage required to do that in the beginning. Our web programmer recommended we use Alentus, a Web-hosting company located in Edmonton, Alberta (www.alentus.com). Alentus hosts our e-mail database with a Web service called eNewsletterPro.
Aaron heads up this important process for us. Once Jim finishes his final edit of a new publication, he IM’s Aaron telling him he has moved the publication from his to Aaron’s folder on Foldershare. Aaron then uses eNewsletterPro to post the publication and schedule it for distribution to our 4,100+ e-mail subscribers. Our only expense for all of this activity is a flat fee to Alentus that totals about $400 per quarter. As a result, we documented 86,892 visitors who frequented www.bipps.org in March, compared with 25,725 just a year ago.
This unbelievably inexpensive e-mail publishing technology has dramatically expanded the reach of our ideas. At our homepage we regularly web cast in print, and by streaming audio and video. The extended reach of our e-mail is the ammunition with which we are arming a new cadre of Kentuckians who are beginning to level dastardly legislation.
We are insanely conscious of getting our free-market message into every form of the “new media.” We host our Blog at www.bluegrassblog.org and post a link to it from our home page. Caleb introduced us to www.iTunes.com, a free Web service from Apple Computer, and helped us understand why we should own an iPod. You should, too.
Knowing this new medium is growing fast, we “pod cast” audio broadcasts at Bluegrass Policy Blog, which are available as a free subscription on iTunes. Pod casting enables us to convey free-market audio messages to anyone who owns an iPod. Once you buy yours, almost everything you want to hear on the Web is downloadable free of charge.
Finally, we try to measure the effectiveness of everything we do and we focus intently on results. Rick Loghry, a member of our BIPPS Board of Directors, has recently agreed to become our Chief Operations Officer (COO). He will run our staff meetings, keep us focused and improve how we operate. And he will do all of this from his office in Lexington.
With the help of our Board, we have established generational objectives for the institute through our mission, “Best practices for a better Kentucky.” We won’t be through until Kentucky is the safe haven for entrepreneurs across America and our public-education system is acknowledged as being the most rigorous anywhere.
To realize this vision, we will continue to leverage the World Wide Web as a low-cost reference and communications tool, realizing it is the greatest boon to liberty in human history. By doing more with less we can effectively engage the policy debate and bring best practices to -- and expand liberty in -- Kentucky.
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– Christopher J. Derry is president of the Bluegrass Institute, Kentucky’s free-market think tank. Contact Chris at derry@bipps.org
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