Author Archive for John Craig

SoLoMo: How governments are engaging their constituents

SoMoLO 300x225 SoLoMo: How governments are engaging their constituentsBy John Craig

My firm, Purple Forge, has developed a meaningful relationship as a supplier of mobile applications to governments at the municipal and federal level over the past two years. Given the integration of social and location-based information into our applications, we have been the defacto leader in implementing what is termed SoLoMo (or Social, Mobile, Local) with these institutions and borne witness to their trials and successes in leveraging mobile technology to engage with their constituents.

SoLoMo: Powered by open data

The past four years have seen an incredible demand for governments to move towards “open data,” whereby they can stream municipal and federal data into the public’s hands permitting them to create “mashup” applications that, for example, can juxtapose police crime reports against neighborhood maps. And while I always suspected that neighbor who never mowed his lawn or opened his curtains was growing weed in his basement, open data managed to confirm it!

This mashup trend first materialized on websites, and over the past two years, as mobile devices became the preferred mechanism for accessing the Internet, has become the basis of mobile application contests. Here the municipality or government runs a competition to see who can make the best mobile application out of the open data sources they have released to the public.

Where mobile application contests fall short

The attractive nature of mobile application contests is that for a very small financial incentive, the government can have some very cool apps quickly created for its citizens that showcase the data it has released.

The underlying issue with the contests is that governments have a fiduciary duty to their citizens to provide services year round.  The challenge with mobile applications is that Apple, BlackBerry and Android are constantly updating their operating systems, and Facebook, Twitter, Google Maps and YouTube are always changing the application programming interfaces (known as APIs) that developers need to make the mashups work with the available open data.

This implicit volatility in mobile application development means that the application developed for the competition often breaks not long after the prize is handed out. The altruistic view is that the winning developer will take pride in updating their app. The reality is that app winners will often return to their regular jobs or move onto other contests without any further economic incentive to drive them to maintain their app. This means that mobile application competitions fail the test of providing sustainable, year round service to citizens.

This implicit volatility and the expense required to hire, train and maintain in-house resources across multiple mobile device types has become a barrier for many governments in deploying mobile applications. This is an issue we have helped a number of governments overcome.

Keys to SoLoMo success for governments

Governments that have been successful in deploying mobile applications, and evolving them within the turbulent world of mobile application development have focused on three key things. The first is sustainable app-development techniques to avoid the issues caused by the constant churn of operating systems and third party APIs in the application development world. The second is opening up quality data that has daily meaning to its constituents. And the third is effectively marketing those services to their constituents.

Sustainable mobile application development can be obtained at expensive per project rates from custom application development houses, or affordable software-as-a-service firms. Our approach is a hybrid of the two, permitting custom flexibility residing on robust application templates.

Choosing the right data to publish through a mobile application is also key.  Services that are frequently accessed through the web are good starting points, and particular attention should be paid to metrics around what services are being accesses through mobile browsers.  These are the services you want to focus your application development on.

Build it and (hope) they will come approaches to mobile application marketing are a waste of time. You have to market your apps to the public, and that means news releases and integration into traditional print and TV advertisements, as well as using the latest social media approaches.

Case studies in success: Calgary and Regina

Both Calgary and Regina have used our mobile app service platform to sustainably develop applications for their citizens while our firm takes care of all the “rocket science” behind producing mobile apps.

In Calgary’s case, this has allowed them to focus on building apps with the open data Calgarians want to consume, and marketing it in a timely and effective fashion. The most popular app deployed to date as been the Calgary Road conditions application that not only alerts Calgarians when there is a parking ban in effect because of a snowfall, but also showcases the GPS locations of the plows and street cams so they can see the conditions of roads in their community before they set out on the road.

The application has been heavily marketed using traditional media such as newspapers and radio, and through social media channels such as YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.

Regina enjoyed a different kind of success with its CityApp as it proved effective during a community emergency. When the water treatment plan had a failure, our mobile application service was used to send push notifications with a boil water advisory out to constituents using the app.  In turn, users of the app could share the boil-water advisory information and updates with their friends using email, Facebook and Twitter and lead to the app spreading in a more viral fashion.

Next-gen SoLoMo: Responding to incoming service requests

A trend that’s also becoming more apparent is how cities are finding out about accidents and issues more quickly through social media than through traditional media or even their internal communications systems. GPS-tagged accident reports are being shared on Twitter before 911 calls are being placed.

So while SoLoMo becomes one way of getting valuable information out to the public, it also creates a new challenge for the government to be able to keep pace with the new speed at which incoming information can be received and handled.

This bi-directional and soon to be transactional nature of SoLoMo is opening up a whole new era in constituent communications for governments around the world.

John Craig is the co-founder and VP of Sales and Marketing for Purple Forge.

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John Craig

Posted by: John Craig on March 27, 2012

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The prime minister is calling: Are you prepared for success?

This is the next commentary from guest blogger John Craig, a veteran of commercializing mobile technologies. We welcome your feedback.

success1 The prime minister is calling: Are you prepared for success?By John Craig

Obtaining a lighthouse customer is a critical first step in starting a business. It establishes your credibility as a seller, and creates a repeatable case study that captures the needs of your target market. The follow-on step is differentiating your business relative to the competition. Having something that others cannot easily duplicate or manufacture is critical to establishing a secure beachhead in your chosen market.

Sales may now be the least of your concerns. What may now undo you is your own marketing prowess. Your reputation is now dependant on how you execute on your next contract, and there are a number of key factors that hopefully you have prepared for.

Can you scale?

Can you handle the incoming onslaught of sales? How fast can you turn work around? In the mobile app development world, it was important for our firm, Purple Forge, to have a way of handling both large volumes of customers at the same time and customers with tight timelines. Our approach to this problem was to develop a streamlined app factory, one that would allow us to mint apps at an incredible rate and speed our customers to market. The app factory consisted of a cloud-based content management system that could push content and graphics to templated mobile applications. Our factory approach allowed us to compile and deliver draft applications as fast as our customers could provide us with the content to display.

The value of this decision soon became apparent. After establishing ourselves as a leading mobile app development firm for the government with our initial success on the Canada Day application in 2010, we were approached by the Department of Heritage to develop an application for the Royal Tour of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. To this point the fastest app we had ever built and had approved by the Apple store was 15 working days from start to finish. This time we were being asked to have it done and approved in five working days.

Now, this was William and Kate’s first trip abroad, and as far as we could distinguish, the first official app ever produced for British royalty. There was an incredible amount of pressure to get this right, with visibility on the app all the way up to the prime minister’s office. With the tour starting on June 30, 2011, we had a firm commitment on the afternoon of June 15 to proceed. Working closely with the Department of Heritage’s exceptional graphics design team over the next two days (and nights) I was reviewing the app with the prime minister’s principal secretary on Friday afternoon, and we were able to submit for Apple’s accelerated approval that evening. The app was available on Tuesday of the following week.

Boom! Our app factory approach allowed us to execute on this unique opportunity and move into the mainstream of mobile app development for the Canadian government.

How do I remain consistent in my offer?

Speed can sometimes bring all the scale you need, but can you be consistent? This was another critical theme for us in the design of our app factory. We achieved this by building out template applications outfitted with the major required features already baked in. For example, in the tourism space, our standard applications all came with location-enabled directories to allow users to find the nearest attractions and restaurants, postcard features to allow users to share their journey with friends, and survey capabilities to capture traveler feedback.

These features are all battle-tested and proven in previous accounts, only needing content and graphics to be changed to meet the new client’s needs. This ensures that not only are we quick to deliver, but we are also reliable and robust. Government customers in particular, as mentioned in my last blog, “A small business guide to working with government,” do not like to play guinea pigs for new technology. It also ensures a consistent look and feel and a common management of language and accessibility.

Can I be flexible?

But not every customer you serve is going to want the same set of features or functions. Customization capabilities are critical, as well as the ability to change content on the fly. A smart move for us was to invest in developing an app factory that not only allowed us to update the content in our currently deployed apps, but to add in new modular features as we progressed.

A great example was the introduction of our mapping module allowing us to display GPS-enabled snow ploughs and city cameras on a map for the City of Calgary. We were able to have the Calgary Road Conditions app available for the first major snowfall. Its popularity sent the application to #1 in the Apple app store in the navigation category.

We learned some valuable lessons here as well. For every new module developed, it was important for us to understand our ability to potentially adapt and sell it to another customer. In some cases we have turned down customers who were too heavily focused on features that could not be reused elsewhere. Too much flexibility eats into your margins and can hurt the consistency and scale of your offer. Balancing opportunity cost with customization requires a very soft touch.

Winning your first account is key, but it’s critical to understand how you are going to win your next account and repeat that with greater efficiency and consistency without sacrificing your ability to adapt to customers’ changing requirements. It’s the difference between being a one-hit wonder and building a long-term business.

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John Craig is the co-founder and VP of Sales and Marketing for Purple Forge.

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John Craig

Posted by: John Craig on January 16, 2012

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A small business guide to working with government

This is the next commentary from guest blogger John Craig, a veteran of commercializing mobile technologies. We welcome your feedback.

Procurement 300x128 A small business guide to working with governmentBy John Craig

On Oct. 17, the Government Technology Exhibition and Conference (GTEC) honoured some of the best innovations in government technology at the municipal, provincial and federal levels. Our client, the City of Calgary, was runner-up in the Transforming the Business of Government category for the iPhone application we developed for the city’s 2010 municipal election.

What was notable about the event was the number of honourees who were involved in mobile projects. The City of Mississauga won a gold medal for its MiWay mobile website for public transportation and the Ontario government’s OSAP group was also an honoree for its mobile application.

This is a good sign for Purple Forge. As a provider of mobile apps, we are glad to see the increasing interest in the development of mobile applications for constituent communications and delivery of services to the public. Mobile apps also represent the next generation of “green” digital solutions, which will help the government to reduce mail and print budgets over the next 10 years.

The wheels turn slow, but they do turn consistently

But our company likely would have died waiting to see this day come if we had not had other sources of revenue. As mentioned in my first blog, new companies need to export or die. This is particularly true in the public sector, considering that the sales cycle for Canadian governments is at least 18 months. We started soliciting government departments at all levels in 2009, but it wasn’t until late 2010 that we saw our first agreements signed, and not until mid-2011 before we started to unlock real revenue potential. Here are some of the key tips I can share on being a small company doing business with governments in Canada.

Government managers are busy, be prepared to wait

It’s a widely held belief that the people who work in government are lazy. This couldn’t be farther from the truth. Senior managers in government work as hard as people in the private sector, and also have to deal with the volatility of the political infrastructure that oversees them. Your project may be of significant interest to the manager you are working with, but the minister may have other work in store for your manager. Be prepared to wait at least a fiscal budget cycle to get your project into the work rotation, and even longer if there is an election in the works. Changes in power and cabinet shuffles can play havoc with the prioritization of work in government.

Government managers are people too – treat them like real customers

Relationships are as important in the public sector as they are in the private sector. Government is not a monolithic Borg-like entity; it is filled with managers looking to serve the public in the best way possible. Even though you can’t take them out for a meal as you would a private sector customer, there are plenty of professional ways to engage and understand their needs.

One of our key lessons learned is that they make acquisition decisions based on “best value” and not always lowest cost, so it is important that you spend time and explain the advantages of your offer to them. The discussion will not begin and end on price. “Best value” has many forms of expression, and government managers do understand that what might be lowest cost now might not work for them in the long term.

Procurement vehicles are confusing, help managers figure out how they can buy your product

Be prepared to spend some effort on finding out the best way for your government customer to purchase your product. Sole sourcing, whereby they pay you as a specialist without a competitive bid process, is popular, but can be limiting as you might be sacrificing profitability to meet their sole-source purchasing limit. Sole-source bids can be extended, but this may create more headaches for your customer as they navigate their internal procurement processes and policies.

Competitive bidding processes also pose issues. If the government manager picks the wrong procurement vehicle for the project, they may be asking you to bid on a professional services agreement, when they really need to be asking vendors to bid on a goods and materials contract. This can lead to lots of wasted time for government managers in evaluating spurious bids or non-bids. Educating the customer on how they can best develop a request for proposal to acquire your product or service is as important as understanding their requirements for the project.

Government is not a good guinea pig – have your act together

If you are piloting something new with the government, you are in for trouble. You should have the kinks worked out of your product before serving it to them. Given managers’ busy schedules, unforeseen delays or quality issues can derail a project and bring embarrassment to the political hierarchy. A demonstrated track record will go a long way to helping you start a conversation with a government manager on procurement.

Our experience with the government has been fruitful, with occasional delays and procurement frustrations that have in general been worked out because of the relationships we have developed. We feel we have developed a solid portfolio of work that will serve as our calling card into other departments. As government does begin to come around (those wheels turn slowly) to deploying more mobile apps, we are extremely well positioned to serve the government and the public with a strong, battletested service offering.

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John Craig is the co-founder and VP of Sales and Marketing for Purple Forge.

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John Craig

Posted by: John Craig on November 2, 2011

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Small Business Philosophy 101: Making waves in a sea of competitors

This is the next commentary from guest blogger John Craig, a veteran of commercializing mobile technologies. We welcome your feedback.

how to stand out 300x220 Small Business Philosophy 101: Making waves in a sea of competitorsBy John Craig

One thing that has guided Purple Forge more than anything else since our inception is our product philosophy. We develop mobile applications around a high-level concept called mobile community engagement. Sound catchy? Well, as it turns out, it is and has become both a point of market differentiation and a guiding mantra for those customers we choose to work with and the business verticals we target.

In 2010 the mobile application market was filled with companies offering custom mobile application development and do-it-yourself development services. It was a “Is there an app for that?” culture and everybody had a hot app idea they needed you to build. The problem was that when you dug a little deeper into the idea, there was no guiding philosophy. Over and over again, customers would tell me they wanted the same thing – a flashy, five-star app that would make them millions of dollars. These customers all had what I call “Angry Birds envy,” which is a condition where you think you have an app idea that is simple and addictive like the massively popular game Angry Birds.

Now we all want to make money, but as Richard St. John points out in his book The 8 Traits Successful People Have in Common, you don’t make money without serving people something they want. This is where having a product philosophy comes in. Embracing mobile community engagement has allowed us to guide our customers into a mode of connecting with their target audience and serving it with something it wants so they can make money.

Mobile community engagement is a philosophy that organizations need to broadcast their news, events and videos to their target audience, who in turn will share this with their friends using email and social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. But the most important objective of mobile engagement is to get people to perform a real-world task that is in line with the real-world goals of the organization: charities want donations; politicians want votes; tourism boards want more heads in beds.

Building modules that would help these customers achieve these real-world goals kept us focused on building things that organizations would pay for because the value could be expressed and tracked with real-world returns.

This in turn kept us focused on serving customers who aligned with our philosophy. If a customer came to us asking for a pure video game, we would take a pass. If the customer came to us looking for a back-end database integration to mobilize their company for an intangible productivity gain, we would also pass. Our philosophy was to engage organizations looking to engage a target audience to perform real-world activities with measurable results.

Green engagement

A great example of this was the work we did for the Green Party of Canada in the 2011 Canadian federal election. The party approached us about building a mobile application to engage with Canadians and accomplish three goals: attract volunteers, collect donations and get people to vote for the Green Party and its leader, Elizabeth May.

The application had modules to collect volunteer information and also to challenge people who downloaded it to sign their friends up to support the party. In return, the volunteers were given points shown on a national scoreboard, creating a healthy competition between them. Donations could also be collected online through the application’s mobile optimized donation page. All of this effort helped Elizabeth May become the first Green member of Parliament elected in Canada. This was a tangible example of mobile community engagement.

As we developed our customer base, other organizations then recognized the value of our philosophy and how they could apply it to their own marketing campaigns. These visionary customers then helped us to jump from serving politicians to serving event organizers and then municipal and federal governments.

Tying Purple Forge closely to the philosophy of mobile community engagement has made us recognizable in a sea of mobile app development firms who will build any app they are asked to build. Our philosophy has focused us to build features that excite real-world activity. Instead of suffering from Angry Birds envy, our customers experience Purple Forge bliss.

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John Craig is the co-founder and VP of Sales and Marketing for Purple Forge.

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John Craig

Posted by: John Craig on September 14, 2011

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New companies need to export or die

As part of our ongoing series examining the ecosystem necessary to bring technology to market, we asked John Craig, a veteran of commercializing mobile technologies, to share his thoughts on how startups can achieve market validation to drive revenues. This is the first of his commentaries and we welcome your feedback.

FM Series banner headART 1 300x145 New companies need to export or die By John Craig

The importance to emerging Canadian companies of being focused on winning deals outside of Canada.

As the co-founders of Purple Forge, Brian Hurley and I placed a significant amount of emphasis on exporting to the U.S. and around the world to get our business started. For those of you who don’t know Purple Forge, we develop and sell mobile applications as a service for politicians, event organizers, governments and interactive marketing firms. We are headquartered in Ottawa, Canada with offices in the U.S. and resellers around the world.

In 2009, we had a very simple idea — developing mobile applications for community engagement. The idea was to allow organizations to reach out to their key constituents to broadcast their news, events, social networking feeds and other information. These constituents would then share this information using their own Facebook and Twitter accounts, and then the organizations would ask these people to perform activities to the benefit of those organizations.

Cool, right? We thought so – and we wanted to prove it. So where to start? Well there was always the Government of Canada, which was in our own backyard. We knew the sales cycles are 18 months or more, and it was very conservative about adopting new technologies that hadn’t been proven elsewhere. We needed to find a customer who was willing to take a risk. Better yet, was willing to take a risk and would pay us to do it. That way, we could prove the value of the idea.

Staking a claim in California

I had a connection with the Republican Party of California. I begged and pleaded and was offered an opportunity to sit on a panel session to discuss mobile technology as it was to be applied to political organizations. The rest of the show was an opportunity to network with some of the campaign teams and sales teams. Fall 2009 was a very ripe time in the California political scene. It was the lead up to the 2010 governor’s race and senate race. The entire state house and senate was up for re-election.

I ended up meeting another panelist who was running Chuck DeVore’s campaign for U.S. Senate. Chuck was the dark horse in the Republican primary (he was up against Carly Fiorina) but he fit our profile; he was a risk taker, and was interested in the application of new technologies to his campaign.

Three months later we issued the first mobile application ever used in a senatorial primary race in the U.S. Four months after that we were awarded the American Association of Political Consultants Pollie award for the development of the most innovative mobile application applied to a campaign in 2009/2010. I was also named the top Republican mobile campaigner in the U.S. This U.S.-based start gave us the confidence and the experience needed to continue to sell in the U.S., as well as to return to Canada and start selling here.

My anecdote may not apply to every type of company out there, but if you are a Canadian company building something new with broad market appeal, you had better get a handle on selling to the U.S. California’s population is the same size as Canada, and the U.S. as a whole has 10 times the market size. It’s critical to establish a beachhead in that marketplace if you have plans for thriving. Canada is just too small and conservative a market to prove many new ideas.

Levering that ‘lighthouse’ customer

We did two things really well in entering into the U.S. market. The first was finding a lighthouse customer in Chuck DeVore. Chuck agreed to provide us with quotes and let people know he was dealing with Purple Forge. This paved the way for us to sign on Nathan Fletcher, who was a California assemblyman, and later Meg Whitman, who was running for governor of California.

The second thing we did was to establish resellers catalyzed around our customers. Chuck introduced us to RaiseDigital, a leading social media marketing firm he was using in the Washington, D.C. area, which subsequently signed on as a reseller and helped us land a congressional candidate. RaiseDigital also introduced us into the event space where we developed the mobile application for CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, held each year in D.C.

Resellers often have a wider scope of market understanding and influence and can introduce you into some very interesting business if the relationship between your product and their clients is well understood and lucrative for all parties involved.

The end result of this U.S.-first market approach was that we were able to take a leadership role in the application of mobile technology to U.S. political campaigns, which opened some doors into the event market as well. It also allowed us to come back and enter the Canadian marketplace with a U.S. pedigree. We are now able to directly connect our U.S. experience as the reason why we ended up winning business with the Green Party of Canada, the Calgary Stampede and, most recently, our work with the Canadian government on the royal visit by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.

John Craig is the co-founder and VP of Sales and Marketing for Purple Forge (www.purpleforge.com).

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John Craig

Posted by: John Craig on July 27, 2011

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