Experimenting with Chic Geek: how to improve blog engagement
One of the best things about volunteering for a community like Chic Geek, is the freedom to experiment. We are encouraged to take risks, learn from our failures, and share our experiences. We become resilient and innovative by constantly prototyping ideas, testing with others, and making improvements. Not only has it helped with our internal processes, but it’s strengthened our partnerships with leading-edge companies.
One company to highlight is ATB Financial (atbfinancial), a proud supporter of Geeky Summit and innovator who reimagines banking to make it work for people.
ATB transformation also created ATB alphaBeta to “share insights, explorations and experiences. From alpha, an idea, to beta, the test, and back again…until the idea is viable enough to be implemented throughout the business.”
We love the idea of moving from alpha to beta and wanted to share how Chic Geek maximized impact from a ‘minimum viable’ roll-out with a blog. It’s been over a year since we transitioned from a website blog to a Medium publication, and we’ve focused on value (not perfection), continual momentum to move the blog forward, and building a culture of adoption. This type of roll-out is an ongoing mission to encourage women to be builders and creators leveraging technology to shape the world we live in.
The Chic Geek blog’s goals were to feature leaders, share knowledge of different technologies, and expand our community reach past Calgary. With this in mind, we wanted to share how we’ve been experimenting with and improving the blog.
Change blog post content
We’re always trying something new at Chic Geek and leveraging data to understand what resonates with our community. Our popular MeetnTech events gave us the ideal groundwork to create new content for our Medium publication. We shifted content from event highlights and varied interest pieces to monthly themes based on different technical fields.
After a few months, we noticed viewers preferred reading interviews, although they were still interested in technical blogs. So we pivoted again from knowledge-driven content to personal and value-driven content.
Current results: higher engagement on Medium, social media, and our newsletter.
Future plans: expect more Chic Geek highlights, interviews, and tips about different technologies and fields.
Share older blog content
What’s the point of creating high-quality content if it’s only noticed for a day or two? We wanted to focus on high impact blogs instead of creating redundant content. We’ve also shared existing blog posts when highlighting our programs so we can focus on content that interests you.
We organized the Chic Geek publication to include older blog posts that focus on our values: be brave, stay curious, and support others. The corresponding publication pages are: inspiration, discover, and connect.
Our monthly newsletters contain a ton of great #yyc resources and Chic Geek updates! We had so much information, we needed a separate blog newsletter.
Current results: more publication followers and views on relevant blog posts
Future plans: #TBT social media posts, re-publishing relevant blog posts from our website, and modifying existing blogs to help new readers get acquainted with Chic Geek
Increase team engagement
One of the challenges when sharing content isn’t just getting online viewers interested in your stuff, but also your own team members. We improve a lot of internal processes to get more team members reading and writing blog content.
Chic Geek team members are encouraged to get Medium accounts so they can write, edit, and engage with a blog post. It’s super easy to maintain writers and we constantly share why you should use Medium and write for Chic Geek. The Chic Geek Medium account can also be used to post on behalf of others who want to minimize their online accounts.
Templates, resources, and a Trello board help to organize writers, editors, and publishers. This has made our blog post process 10x easier so we can focus on content instead of processes. We also share blog posts on Slack and make sure our writers get credit on social media!
Current results: more reads, shares, and blogs from team members, and publicity for writers and editors
Future plans: find ways to get writers outside the Chic Geek volunteer team, and community members to engage with interviewees and team members
At Chic Geek, we strive to be braver, to be more curious, and to be supportive. Ideas and situations don’t always have to be perfect, as long as we learn from it. The Chic Geek blog will continue to roll out different ideas to better engage our community members. Let us know what you think in the comments, or in person at our two-day conference, Geeky Summit.
