Innovation in conservative organizations - NYPD

Yael Bar Tur served as the Director of Social Media and Digital Strategy for NYPD (New York Police Department) between 2016 and 2020 so she had a chance to get a front-row view of what it’s like introducing new methods to conservative organizations. Such methods naturally make many people in organizations like these feel uncomfortable especially considering the inherent lack of control they represent to those unfamiliar with them. Yael was in charge of rolling out a new social media strategy that sought to expand and decentralize NYPD’s social media presence. Yael is currently a digital consultant. https://www.yaelbartur.com/ @yaelbt

From top-down to bottom-up communications:

Instead of official communications coming from headquarters only in a top-down manner, every police station started managing its own Facebook page and Twitter account. Naturally, clear instructions were put in place as to how these new tools should be used and the idea was to allow the residents of an area to get information on what was taking place in their neighborhoods. This empowered individual members of the force to represent NYPD on social media and raised morale due to their ability to have this ongoing conversation with the local population they were serving.

Generating brand credibility:

When information comes from lower-level members of the organization that have a reasonable boundary within which they can work that generates a strong sense of empowerment on one hand and a very genuine and authentic face on the other. The consumers of this information are inhabitants that care about local matters very much and appreciate putting a face to the identity of policing in their area that makes the relationship between police and communities much more positive.

Yael’s main recommendations for dealing with internal resistance:

Get the sponsorship of top management

In this case, the chief of police was on board and not only supported this in words but also in action i.e. published to social media himself and had his direct commands do so as well.

Create positive feedback loops

Regular emails were sent from the central social media team to the various stations. At the end of each such message, there was a positive mention of a station that did something remarkable the week before. This weekly mention of a station’s social media activity on a broadly visible email is a sort of reward via internal positive exposure.

Make it simple

Whatever you ask from the workforce should be made as simple as possible. In this case, part of the weekly email contained instructions, ideas, and content that could be used by the stations as part of their social media activity.

Start small and later scale

Initially there was a Twitter account only and later a Facebook page was added. In addition, this was an informal added role for someone from the station initially whereas later it became an official dedicated role.

Make room for failure

When applying new things it is only natural to expect failure from time to time. It’s important to stay the course even when such mistakes happen. In this case, photos were uploaded by local residents that were not well received by the community. It would have been easy to just shut everything down at that point due to the perceived public embarrassment but since leadership was committed - that did not occur. It also communicated to the various stakeholders that this was important enough to continue the activities despite what had happened and that management had their backs.