A Social Publishing Strategy by John Gautam, Pratham Books

 
Source: Pratham Books

Note from Beth:   During my trip to India in February,  I was introduced to a nonprofit children's book publisher in India, Pratham Books.   “It was set up to fill a gap in the market for good quality, reasonably priced children’s books in a variety of Indian languages. [Its] mission is to make books affordable for every child in India.”  I was impressed with how Pratham Books has used social media to reach out to children in rural areas who are the "Bottom of the Pyramid."

In ongoing conversations with John Gautam on Twitter, I've learned more about how their overall social publishing strategy which balances their curated content or "branded" content with community conversations to co-create social content.   He offered to write a guest post sharing more about how their social publishing strategy.

India has a reading problem and the problem is two fold. The first part of the problem is that India still has low literacy rates - the 2009 Annual Status of Education Report shows that between classes 1 to 8 only around 40% of children can read a class 2 level text in their own language and an even lower 23% of children can ready easy sentences in English - sentences  of the kind "What is your name?" That said, there are wonderful organizations working with State Governments to improve literacy and reading levels across the country such as Pratham and the Akshara Foundation and much progress has been made.  However, once children learn how to read it is crucial to sustain their interest by cultivating a reading habit and while the aim was to provide a book in every child’s hand and a library in every neighbourhood we found that there was a dire shortage of high-quality, low-cost children’s books. To fill this gap that existed in the market, the Pratham Books Trust was registered in January 2004. 

Since then, we have published and shipped over 8.5 million books, 10 million storycards and have reached over 8 million children. While that in itself probably qualifies us as one of India's largest children's book publishers, when compared to the scale of the problem - over 300 million children in India -  it is still a minuscule effort. We began our journey two years ago while trying to figure out a possible catalytic approach to the children's book publishing space. First, we have our goal which is a book in every child's hand. And logical corollary to that, that the books should be in a language the children read. Second, we looked at the problems that the market currently faces, lack of scale, lack of languages, lack of content, lack of reach and expensive distribution channels. Hence, our three primary, social media or social publishing, aims are to increase the nett content available, reduce the cost of each book and to go beyond the traditional distribution networks in a large way. This is crucial if we all believe in "A Book in Every Child's Hand" and consequently, it implies the need to create alternate channels of creating and reaching books to children.

An important ingredient to our strategy was building a community around our mission. As an adjunct to this, we realised that what we had was content, lot of it and very valuable content,  that we could use to form a community around. We have since used our mission and our content to establish conversation based around a larger "reading" mission and over time and with sustained engagement, hope to build some sort of loyalty and trust within the community we curate. 

Some of the social media properties we manage and curate established are:

Conversation and Community

• Blog: A resource which talks about publishing, reading, literacy, kidlit, learning, non-profits, events and more.

• Twitter: A space where we can engage with the community, share ideas, ask for help, get feedback, listen to complaints, participate and mobilize people to help us with our vision of ‘a book in every child’s hand’.

• Facebook: Updating information from the blog and infromation about the events we do and communicating with the community

Curated Content

• Scribd: Uploading our books frequently so that they can be read by more people. Also, for our Creative Commons licensed books to be remixed/repurposed by the community in whatever way they wish to.

• Flickr: Documentation of the work we do and also to upload our Creative Commons licensed illustrations so that they can be remixed/reused.  (See this blog post from Creative Commons)

• YouTube: Documentation of our work and to inform people about some of the initiatives we are participating in. Also to inform people about our books through book trailers.

Our strategy has relied upon being part of a larger mission, providing meaningful and valuable content, curating information and content for the community, using a legal framework that allows for a participatory culture  and lastly, in time, providing a space for the community to assist in the mission by creating content themselves. The last part, a community publishing platform, is something we are working on with the Connexions Project and a brief video about it is here. 

Example of Partham Books on mobile phones.

It's still a journey we are on and we've had many success till date  - Skype reading sessions across countries, helping us get books to children across the country, audio books created for the blind, iPad apps being made of our content and so much more.  Here's some details about some of social tactics:

Skype reading sessions: This project started after a few tweets were exchanged between a librarian from Central Manor, Pennsylvania. We started off by people from our organization having Skype reading sessions with a few children and then moved onto having sessions with entire classes. On 20th March, 2009, we managed to hold a Skype storytelling session between kids from Akshara Foundation’s community library and a class from Central Manor.The purpose is to go beyond being just a publisher. Through these activities we are encouraging reading, learning and connecting children from different communities and backgrounds. Channels used: Twitter, Skype, Blog

Inviting people to remix/repurpose our content: As a publisher, we have a lot of content available which we want people to access as easily as possible. In our attempt to do so, we have managed to license some of our books under Creative Commons licenses. Now, if we can’t publish a book in Assamese, but a teacher in Assam wants to do so, she doesn’t have to worry about copyright infringement. We have also put up some of the illustrations of our books so that people can remix or repurpose them. Channels used : Scribd, Blog, Flickr

Facilitators/connecting organisations and people: @Anorakmagazine found us on Twitter and asked if they could send us some back issues of their magazines to share with kids in India. Once the books arrived, they were sent to the community libraries run by Akshara Foundation. We also helped coordinate a drawing project that Anorak Magazine wanted to involve the children with. Now, some of the kids have their work published in an international children’s magazine.Channels used: Twitter

Audio books for the National Association of Blind : This project started off because of another blog post (on the Helen Keller Talking Library project) that got automatically updated to our Twitter account. @owos then messaged us to tell us about a similar intiative Radio Mirchi had started. Then another tweep (@barkhad) told us that she had registered with Radio Mirchi but they didn’t get back to her. So, we got in touch with Radio Mirchi to talk about a blog post and while we were talking, she asked if we would be interested in having our books recorded by Radio Mirchi for the National Association of the Blind. We also requested if @barkhad could record one of our books and they agreed. So, our Twitter friend went offline and recorded a book in their Delhi studio! Channels used: Blog, Twitter

Passing it on – the book edition: We read about about a bunch of kids in Kolkata who went around with a van full of books to reach kids who didn’t have access to books and even went on to teach the kids how to read. After reading about this initiative, one of our trustees volunteered to sponsor some Bengali books if we could find these kids. We mailed the news bureau which published the article, but were unable to get a response. So, we decided to see if the Twitter community could help us. Within half an hour of sending out a tweet, we had a volunteer who said he would get us the information and by the next day we had an address and contact number. Within a few days, Bengali books were sent by us to these kids.From this story, we decided to start an initiative which would allow our online community to participate…to help these kids as well as other kids. Channels used: Twitter, Blog, Facebook

What we've found is that honestly, transparency and accountability are the three most important elements of any social media strategy.   A longer case study that we had written up is available on the IndiaSocial site. 

 

John Gautam works for Pratham Books is a non-profit trust that publishes high quality books for children at affordable prices and in multiple Indian languages.

Comments

[Krish Ashok]

In memory of my grandmother who recently passed away, I've started doing story-telling sessions at schools (for the underprivileged) using visuals and an interactive, participative style that my grandmother excelled at. I assembled the visuals to accompany the story I told (Vikram/Vetal) from the internet and I also recorded the entire session using my laptop's webcam.

Since it was very well received, I am now planning to work with the school teachers and do similar sessions, but this time, on topics like WW2, which are part of the students' syllabus but have very dry and boring textbooks. I plan to show actual videos of Hitler speaking as I tell them stories from the war.

My point is - I think story telling is a powerful way to teach, and we just don't do enough of it. It'll be interesting if some textbooks started taking this approach as well. I'd love to speak with you and discuss this in detail

[Account Deleted]

Hey Krish: Indeed story-telling is a very powerful tool indeed and we don't use it often enough. It's surprising how story telling can be re-purposed to teach things like Math and History and how boring we sadly make the entire curriculum...

Will send you my email address too...

[Morgan]

I really should be reading your blog more Beth. This is such a great case study I can use to dialog with my org with. We're currently sorting out our social content strategy and actually looking to consolidate. I get a lot of the social media stuff, but my org is still adapting to it. The good thing is that essentially, we're a storytelling organization (film, citizen journalism, digital story stations etc.) so the adoption (in theory:) ) shouldn't be that difficult - our leadership is pretty responsive.

For places with no internet, I was utterly inspired by the Biblioburro in La Gloria, Columbia: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuTswmx9TQU

For the past 10 years, Luis Soriano has delivered books to rural children on the back of a burro - si se puede (It can be done!).

P.S. The Skype reading sessions sound fantastic!

[Edison]

Happy to visit your blog, many posts that provide inspiration and motivation, hopefully we will get many benefits from this blog.

Edison Koibur

[Account Deleted]

Hi Morgan - glad that this is of help to you! And thank you for the video of the Biblioburro. Such a wonderful story! The Skype reading sessions were so much fun to organize and run - hopefully we'll get to do them again...

[Girls Pattaya]

Pratham Books are certainly making full use of all technological innovations the web has brought.

[Debra Askanase]

I don't think I've read a social media case study that has touched my heart as much as this has. Thank you John and Beth for bringing your organizational and social media story to the public.

I have two social media questions for Pratham Books: 1. Which ocial media platforms are the most successful for connecting with fellow Indians, (which segment of the population) and why are those channels the most successful? 2. Are you looking to capitalize on the social media reach with social network fundraising? What are you thoughts on how you might do that?

Thanks again!
@askdebra

[Account Deleted]

Thanks Girls Pattaya!

Debra - Your comment has made our day! Thank you so very much! And Beth, thank you for giving us the space to tell our story...

To answer your questions, it would be difficult for us to claim that any one network has been most successful. What we can say is that Youtube, given our content, has been the least successful. We've had tremendous success with Twitter and it's the virality of Twitter that has helped our cause the most - eg. Books to Calcutta. Facebook has been powerful too but in different ways - there is a far deeper engagement on Facebook and we get depth of details that we don't otherwise see on other networks. Scribd and Flickr have been incredibly powerful in spreading our content because they were built for our kind of work. If we were to make a recommendation, we'd say Twitter and Facebook for sure. And a blog/website as the mast-head.

And to answer your second question - as of now, we're not looking to fundraise via our social media reach. We're fortunate that we are sustainable as is. What we are looking to do is curate a community that is passionate about reading and given that our mission is "A Book in Every Child's Hand", what we'd like is for the community to use our content as seed content and create many many more derivative works for children across the world to read. In short, what we're trying to catalyze is more and varied content. However, we believe that in order to be successful at fundraising, we'd need to give more than we receive and create far more value than we capture...

Once again, thanks Debra for your kind words...