We had the pleasure of talking about participatory budgeting with Hannah Bink, Senior Director Digital Marketing and Operations at Scaled Agile.
Participatory budgeting is a democratic process that allows community members, team members or stakeholders to directly participate in decision-making regarding how funds get allocated. It’s best known in the public sector as a means of distributing public funds, but has become a very popular tool in enterprises trying to figure
out how to allocate their spending as well. Participatory budgeting involves involving citizens in the budgeting
process, allowing them to have a say in how public funds are allocated. It is an inclusive approach that aims to promote transparency.
Transcript
Melissa
Welcome to the Marketing Agility podcast, where we discuss all things related to the growing field of agile marketing. This podcast is co-produced by Frank Days and the Agile Marketing Alliance, so that we can learn, share, and grow together. I’m Melissa Reeve, and I’ll be your host for today’s episode. And we have the pleasure of speaking with Hannah Bink, who is the senior director of digital marketing and operations at Scaled Agile.
Hannah has over 15 years of B2B marketing experience in the telecommunications and healthcare sectors prior to her current role at Scaled Agile. We’ll talk with Hannah today about participatory budgeting and creating lean business cases in marketing because this show is all about scaling agile marketing. Welcome to the show, Hannah.
Hannah Bink
Happy to be here, Melissa. Nice to see you.
Melissa
Great to see you too. So Hannah, how did you become an agile marketer? Tell us a little bit about your journey.
Hannah Bink
It was very complicated. I applied to a job. Uh, I was looking for a new, new opportunity and scaled agile was looking for a partner marketing director. Um, I had never heard of agile. I’d heard of lean, but never worked in it. Fortunately, the, the leadership there took a chance on someone and figured it was easier to teach me agile than marketing.
Melissa
Absolutely, and that’s tip number one for our listeners, that oftentimes it is easier to take somebody who has a background in marketing and bring them into the Agile world. They’re just able to speak the language of marketing and connect with other people. So I’m glad that it was a fit, and I do remember reviewing your resume when I was at Scaled Agile. So today, let’s talk a little bit about participatory budgeting. I know it’s probably a new term for a lot of folks who are in the space, even folks who are agilists. So how would you describe it to somebody who’s just hearing that term for the first time?
Hannah Bink
What I like about that term is it’s kind of self-explanatory, but I’ll give a little detail. Participatory budgeting is by definition, a democratic process, lots of voices coming to bear. And this allows community members, team members, stakeholders to all directly participate in decision-making related to how funds actually get allocated. It’s best known in the public sector. This has been used there for many, many years as a means of distributing public funds. And it’s become very popular in enterprises when they’re also trying to figure out how do we allocate our spending in a fair representative way. Participatory budgeting involves citizens in the budgeting process, and it allows them to say or allows them to have a say in how public funds are actually allocated. So it’s important that it’s very inclusive and that it aims to promote transparency, accountability, citizen empowerment, really bringing those voices to bear.
Melissa
Yeah, what I love about everything you’ve said so far is it really emphasizes, like you said, that participatory nature of budgeting. And when I think of budgeting in a large organization, it’s often more political than it is participatory. We’re not thinking of each other. We’re mainly thinking of our fiefdom. So how does this play out when people are doing it, whether it’s in the corporate environment or in that public sector that you mentioned?
Hannah Bink
I think it’s ironic that you described it as political, given its roots in the public sector. But you’re absolutely right. So the process is honestly pretty simple at a surface level. The work to be done is planning the event. Then you reach out to the community, and there’s an emphasis on getting those diverse voices, whether this is in the public sector or in the private sector, you want to bring a lot of different viewpoints to bear.
The members, either the community members or your stakeholders or your team members, they propose ideas that they’d like to see funds used for. And these could cover anything. I mean, in a public sector, they might be infrastructure, they might be education or health. Inside of an organization, it could be something like hiring or technology investment or long-term strategic plays. After those ideas are proposed, somebody’s got to do a refinement step. You’re looking at feasibility studies. You’re looking at cost estimates. What are we actually talking about in terms of the effort and spend to deliver these ideas into reality? After that step, you bring all those members to a seat. You either virtually or
in person, put them at a table together. I really have seen this work well when people have physical monopoly money that represents a part of a budget. So in front of them, they may have a list of all those ideas and next to those ideas are the actual money that it’s gonna cost to fund them. That monopoly money is not enough to fund everything on that list. They’re going to have to sit as a table and work together to negotiate what projects, what ideas get the funding. And they’re literally putting money down. I was at a conference in 2019 when Luke Holman gave a keynote. He had run one of these for the city of San Jose. And he told this story about a minor who joined. So they had community members of all ages, all parts of the city, all financial backgrounds. And one of the things on the list was crime prevention. And four out of the five people at the table said, we don’t really have a crime problem, especially not a gang crime problem. We need to focus on the pollution issue in our city. And this one little girl spoke up that Gang violence is actually a really big problem in her neighborhood, and she walks home from school and she feels unsafe going from school to home. I’m choking up just thinking about it. The whole table completely changed the way they thought about the urgency around this gang crime prevention issue. Having those diverse voices at the table is what participatory budgeting is all about.
Melissa
Yeah, and I know we’re going to dive into how this looks for marketing. What a powerful example. And I just want to tease out a few things that you talked about. One was obviously that diversity of voices. You know, if it had all been adults in the room, it wouldn’t have been as compelling as having somebody who feels that fear of the crime on a daily basis. I think the other thing is just shifting the conversation from what I’m going to call it sage on a stage, but it’s usually somebody presenting their point of view behind a podium. They’re in sell mode. You’re trying to sell this idea that you have of where the budget should go into, we’re all sitting around a table, we’re all in this together, and we need to work through the pros and the cons together. That’s a really big cultural shift when you’re talking about something like budgeting.
And while our topic today is about scaling agile marketing, I think this technique could apply to small groups as well as large groups.
Hannah Bink
Absolutely. And you may be thinking, oh, well, I’ve got 20, 40, 80 stakeholders. I can’t just put them at a table together. You put them at small tables, and then you look at the results overall. Do we see patterns emerge? Are there schools of thought that might be shared across tables? And does the composition of a table change the ideas or the projects or the features that they’re investing in. It’s really, really powerful.
Melissa
For sure. So then how are we seeing marketing organizations adapt this to their world?
Hannah Bink
So we’re seeing some really interesting patterns. I’m gonna speak as a career B2B marketer, that’s my world, but I’m sure it’s emerging in B2C as well. And there’s three things I’ve seen it really use well in. One is engaging customers. I’ve seen it work really well in channel marketing and in account-based marketing. When we’re talking about engaging customers, is sort of the new way companies are thinking about engaging customer advisory boards when they’re talking about product development or product roadmaps or informing where those investments should really go long term. It’s also a great way to create channels for customers to provide feedback or vote on marketing initiatives.
I’ll talk a little bit more about that related to ABM organizations. In a B2B world, you’re often working closely with a company to engage more buyers, more of the departments to meet whatever their strategic business problem is. If they have a seat at the table, they can genuinely inform you about the right way to do messaging, the right way to do positioning, who better inform how you’re developing personas.
You can also start to think about it in channel marketing when you’re collaborating with partners on joint marketing efforts. Let’s say you’re doing co-marketing events or co-marketing campaigns. You can adopt participatory budgeting principles by involving partners in that budget discussion and in the decision-making. Where do we spend those funds?
You can also decide on resource allocation or project priorities. Marketers and partners can ensure that there’s fair and a collaborative approach that aligns to your shared goals. It’s a really fascinating way to bring partners or bring customers to the table and closer to the decisions marketers are making.
Melissa
Well, and it’s so powerful because you not only are bringing them into the room, and you and I have certainly seen examples where you’re asking somebody and asking a partner, asking a customer what they might prioritize. But I think it is different. Like you’re saying, if you’re thinking about it in monetary terms and saying, if you were in sitting in our shoes, what would you fund? And having them actually put, literally put money on the table around that because I feel like that forces a mental shift as well.
Hannah Bink
I really, really love the monopoly money concept, to your point, because there’s something interesting about having a physical bill in your hand that you’re now putting on a table and giving to a collective pile to fund something. It’s very different than just looking at a sheet and saying, I support XYZ. But when you’re giving away money, even if it’s fake money, there’s something psychological about that experience.
Melissa
Mm-hmm. All right, so we talked about engaging partners in channel marketing. Talk to us a little bit about how you could use this with ABM.
Hannah Bink
So with ABM, I really like bringing the customer in if you have that really close collaborative strategy. Marketers can adopt this approach to involving that client’s team into that budgeting process. It’s really fantastic at allowing clients to sort of see behind the curtain, especially when your ABM strategy aligns with that client’s goals. I’ll give you an example. Maybe they’re trying to sell internally or they’re trying to affect some sort of internal change. Bringing them into the fold as part of that account expansion strategy could be really powerful for everyone. Not to mention, you’re going to create a long lasting relationship which should lead to higher retention rates, maybe even account growth just inside the one business segment that you’re working with. Similarly, if you’ve got a SaaS product or if there’s like a physical thing that they can buy, I’ve never met an account that doesn’t want a say in how they’re sold to. Often they’re genuinely appreciative to have a chance to have some sort of say in it or shocked that they’re invited into the conversation. Again, this could be an incredible tool for long-term or customer retention.
Melissa
Yeah, I mean, we’re really shifting the paradigm, not only in participatory budgeting, but also in or with agile techniques. And in my mind, it’s the paradigm is shifting from a tennis match where we’re lobbing a ball over to another person, another group, another outside entity and waiting for the return, to really a team sport and inviting those people that we used to lob the ball to onto the team and saying, no, let’s think this through together. And that’s the shift that we’re trying to create.
Hannah Bink
I’ve always said that the wildest thing about marketing is that we’re asked to sell a product we’ve never used to people we’ve never met working in context we’ve never worked in. And people ask questions like, well, why doesn’t the marketing work? Bringing the customer closer is a great way to bridge that gap.
Melissa
Yeah, there’s a lot of assumptions that are made in marketing for sure. So talk to us about a time that you used participatory budgeting. You know, I’d love our listeners love real world examples. So what did you notice that surprised you? Did it change your mindset or your behavior?
Hannah Bink
So I’ve actually used it successfully in staffing strategy. Every department, marketing, sales, anyone is gonna have their own wish list of the skills they think they need, the roles they think they need. And when there’s budget at play, it can get pretty contentious or just frustrating because you’re not quite sure how decisions are being made.
We took a participatory budgeting approach to the staffing strategy where we sat and came up with our ideas ahead of time, did the research of just how much it costs to acquire or develop those skills. And then in traditional company, each department has their own budget. But especially when things get tight, or if you have a centralized budget where staffing is held in one place, you really need to bring all the voices to bear to understand the impact of these skill-oriented decisions. I’ll give you an example. I can tell you for a fact that my sales department right now wants nothing more than a field marketing department. They want that built. It is a major wish list item.
But they don’t necessarily understand the full business impact of what field marketing means. If I put a field marketer in every region, that means I also need to empower them with potentially an agency in that region because no one person can do everything in marketing. I probably also need to staff up headquarter support to support all of these regional marketers suddenly.
And then I probably also need to expand my system investment so that they have some sort of malleable support system that works 24 hours a day and has some sort of approval process, built-in automation. This is a significant investment. It’s not just hiring six people. So by using the sort of feasibility study or cost analysis step that other people are doing, we’re talking about staffing strategy using real dollars. What is the actual impact of field marketing investment versus more data analysts or more electrical engineers? How do you compare these skill sets? We’ve used participatory budgeting at Scaled Agile to get each department to the table and to have a really holistic view of the hiring strategy. And the conversations are hard. I’m not going to lie, they’re really difficult. But that’s kind of the point, is to have the hard conversation because this is real dollars. There are real impacts to the decisions we’re making. I was taken aback by just how willing people were to have those conversations and make those trade-off discussions in real time.
Melissa
Well, you’ve got the smartest people in the room, right? And you’ve got the people with the most information about how it impacts them and the cost. And what’s different is, again, we’re shifting away from this hierarchical notion that the person at the top knows the most. And they don’t often know the most. And you need real conversations happening in order to make the best decisions and get the most information out on the table. And I think that’s another great benefit of participatory budgeting and this type of approach.
Hannah Bink
I remember our HR leader was very skeptical, thinking through the example I’m mentioning, very skeptical of all the fighting she thought was going to emerge. And she was genuinely shocked by how collaborative people were. I think there’s power in just having more information that’s digestible. Having the details in front of you. O ranges in many cases, as opposed to apples to helicopters. You don’t know what you’re looking at, but this forces you to bring that information together, bring the right people in the room, and most people just want to do what’s best for the company at the end of the day.
Melissa
So thank you, Hannah. This is the end of part one of two. Appreciate your sharing your stories with you, so rich, so full of color. And listeners, stay tuned with us for part two of participatory budgeting and lean business cases.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS