After a handful of successful iterations, I am wrapping up my “Power of NO” pilot. After iterating through a serious of delivery mechanisms (SMS, Twitter, Twitter&SMS), I came full circle and ended up back where I started, using SMS. What I realized is my delivery medium wasn’t holding me back. What was holding me back was my message. People didn’t engage well with a long message.
After trying a series of different messages, I decided that I needed a short message that accomplished my two goals; to get people to become aware of their power to say no, and to respond to me with one thing they would say no to, in order to create a level of commitment and consistency.
Eventually I settled on a short statement were I shared what I said no to and inquired what my user might say no to. Example: “Bob, I said no to beer yesterday. What might you say no to today?”. My results were respectable, I had a 20-50% engagement rate with 15 participants in the final version of my intervention. Over 6 cycles, I received 30 replies.
The presentation below outlines some of the things that _Doc_NO helped people say no to. Look carefully, you may find your own “No” there. Enjoy…
cc: Frank Chen
Smiling creates Calm. We created an intimate, fun conversation through smiling in a group SMS
I was surprised to see the many different definitions of "smiling." I particularly found the commentary related to each smile to be very funny and made me feel closer to the rest of the group members. I really appreciated how easy it was to send texts to multiple people simultaneously. It made it very easy to do the smile project.
I was surprised at how I enjoyed seeing smiles in the morning, it helped me be more positive.
Receiving random smiles at random times from friends made me surprisingly happy. I found myself naturally wanting to smile whenever I even just saw a notification (didn't even have to see the picture). Further, I had a lot of fun showing the "smiles" off to others.
I liked the group consistency and participation. I think this was related to both the group aspect, because it alerted me for each message, and because texts aren't totally overloaded for me like emails.
My husband and I ended up taking photos together, and thus made the experience our own in a unique way.
