Author: mattshepherd

I love storytelling, and helping organizations share their truth with the world. From non-profit media outlets to for-profit boutique agencies to one of Canada's great universities, I've been connecting institutions and stakeholders for a while, and enjoying both the journey and seeing great ideas find great audiences.

Categories
Life in general Private

Mourning, and happiness (and more mourning)

Best cat ever

Yesterday at around 5:30 in the evening, a great light went out in the universe and a great part of my heart died.

After a terrifying incident and bounce-back two years ago, Pooper started fading again five or six days ago, and… there was a long paragraph here about the circumstances of her passing, but I cut it out. It’s not important. It’s how the story ends, but it’s far from the important or best part of that story. It’s enough to say that she gave me kisses and snuggled in hard as she passed, and let out a familiar little sigh and was gone. I spent some time with her after, and Marisa and I went home on a cold night with the threat of snow in the air.

I could write a book about Poopercat.

Not like a children’s book; a 900-page epic. Full bore Tolstoy. It’s hard to describe her to people who didn’t know her; she was a boundlessly positive presence, open and trusting and loving and curious.

The beginning of the story is when Marisa and I went to the Societé de Protection des Animaux in Sherbrooke over a decade ago. Marisa wanted to find a dim boy cat because her beloved Ozzy had died several months before. We looked at all the cats in cages but none of them vibed. Then we went to the play room, and out of all the cats in the back of the room, a tiny calico with bright eyes bounded over to us. When I reached down to pet her she hopped up on my shoulder and nuzzled my ear, and when Marisa bent down to pat her she gave Marisa kisses as well. We hadn’t thought of a girl cat, but as we left we realized she was the one. When we returned two days later, she was gone, and we were terribly sad — until from the back of the play room a pair of ears and eyes emerged from a hammock, and then she bounded down and ran over to us like she’d been waiting anxiously to come take her home.

We took her home.

She was so scared when we let her out of her cage that she hid under the steps to the basement; I got a blanket and a book and sat there and read Don Quixote for over two hours until she eventually came out.

And then she was My Cat. We signed some sort of contract in that moment where we would be best friends forever. And we will be best friends forever. 
I’ve had other cats, and my family had dogs as a kid, but Moxie Parker was my first experience with pure unconditional love. She’d follow me around the house, squeak to be picked up and patted, and spend every moment she could with me. She thought I hung the moon and the stars, and I tried to meet that with my dumb imperfect human love as well as I could.

She made me a better person. Being the recipient of such pure and unconditional affection made me a warmer, more affectionate person. Her simple focus on simple joys — a good nap, a good meal, a sunbeam, and loving and being loved in return — helped ground me in what’s important and appreciate the joys of daily life and deal with some of its frustrations. She changed me, forever, for the better, and Marisa, too.

It’s hard to describe her personality, really. “Affectionate” is covered above, but also this undefinable combination of intelligence, curiosity, and enthusiasm for things.

She had a quality where you just wanted to make up and tell stories with her.

And we did. Over the course of over a decade, Marisa and I made up countless personae for Moxie Parker. The very first, I’d venture, was Moxie Parker, Girl Detective, when she’d bumble around the house and poke at nooks and crannies and explore. But the list grew, and grew, and grew, and her sweet silliness gave rise to our sweet silliness, and we were all sweet and silly together. Here’s the list, which we compiled several months ago. Much of it is incomprehensible to the casual viewer, because these were in-jokes that only three people in the world knew about and understood; two humans and one cat (or several dozen cats):

  • Moxie Parker, Girl Detective
  • Nurse Pooper (“I’m gonna nurse you STRAIGHT TO HELL!”)
  • Spooky Bumpire
  • GD Butters, buttery pat tycoon
  • Edgar Allen Poops
  • Shakespoops
  • Bumbee
  • Dark Pooper
  • Other Pooper and Other Other Pooper (“Burn it all down!”)
  • Cosmic Clown Pooper
  • Goat Ghost
  • Lawybler Pooper
  • Entrepreneur Pooper (Pöop)
  • Skritch the Almond Genius Pooper
  • Scanner Pooper
  • Broadway Pooper:
    • [End of Act 1] I’ve got Grouchity Face / I want my snacks and I want my space / I want to be swaddled in a special place / because I’ve got / Grouchity Face
    • It’s Me! It’s Me, Everybody! (musical)
    • Listen, Listen! (one cat show)
    • Don’t Stop Pooplievin’ (showstopper)
    • Get Right In There Clean The Butt (disco hit)
  • Flapper Pooper
  • Friend of Stan Tan, winning at chebs — a prolonged take on the old Devil and Daniel Johnson thing, including a mispronunciation of “chess” and a riff on an Ingmar Bergman movie, and more
  • Belly Newsletters! Rolling over on her back and sharing her belly; when you started to turn away, kicking the leg out a little for _even more belly_
  • 100% not a twap!//TOTALLY A TWAP — the state of enticing you to touch the belly before turning into a murder machine
  • Enemy of Morris B., lover of Tallsworths
  • “Good thing I brought my dancing shoes!”
  • Flee, flop or fart: the survival tactics in order
  • Grooming for the Queen
  • The “chubby hustle” when she was booting around the house in a hurry; “chubby rage” when Digby or another cat would provoke her to the point that she’d rassle.
  • Unto every generation, a Poopercat is born!
  • Pooper is accused of crimes by the Vatican and protests her innocence (Innocente! Innocente!) and is cleared and elected the new Pope (Bededicte! Benedicte!)
  • Defender of the Treasure (“Death to the twessul seekuls!”)
  • Pooperbucks: given/taken for snuggles/taking liberties. Kisses may cost Pooperbucks. Balances change radically and without notice (“It’s a volatile currency!”)
  • Doctor Poops, travelling time and space in the DARBAS (Dinner and Relative Breakfasts and Snacks)
  • J.P., her Quebec boyfriend, and his motorcycle sidecar
  • Face merge technology – the nightly habit of mushing my face and her face together, in the hopes they would eventually become One Face
  • Eye biggening exercises: the daily maximum cuteness routine
  • Kuddle Kween, her superhero identity — tiara, cape and a diaper (it gets busy out there)
  • Cuddle Cop, forcing herself in between Marisa and I in bed and pushing us apart when we try to spoon
  • Tapping for attention… since she was a kitten, she’d sit beside you and politely tap you with a paw for pats.
  • Chubby Bear: sitting on her haunches/back legs, paws up, and then leaning forward and licking her belly while still balanced on her rear end, front paws just kind of dangling in the air

Every one of those comes with stories. Every one of those could take an hour to explain. And there’s so much more.

I gave her “pony rides” when she was a kitten through a cat; I’m sure it happened in Kingston, but the clearest memories are Sherbrooke: I’d get on my hands and knees and she’d hop on my back, settle into a comfortable position (often facing backwards, for some reason) and I’d crawl around the house with her riding on my back like a princess, usually dropping her off at the bed in the bedroom, where she’d gracefully alight and then lie down for a nap. This sounds really stupid when I write it down, but I got a huge kick out of it, and so did she.

Her absolute passion for the Big Room, which is what we called the side deck and yard. One click of the door lock and she’d launch herself from her saucer bed in the kitchen and hustle to the door, practically knocking you out of the way to get out, where she would walk on the garden stones to avoid touching grass (lava!) and would loll in the sun, so happy that she’d just roll slightly back and forth on her back and squeak in the warm sunlight. When winter hit, the first time you’d open that door and the cold would hit her nose and she’d recoil, shaking her head quickly, looking at you like you broke it. But every spring, the sheer joy of going back out again.

Her excessive caution coming down stairs, leading with front paws and then both back legs with a deliberate hop, and — if you somehow got downstairs before she did for breakfast — listening to that unique hop, but faster than you thought possible.

Her tremendous fondness for boys, especially big guys with beards — she could walk into a room full of people and would beeline for the burliest man with facial hair.

Sleeping with us — me — almost every night, starting out standing on my chest and getting pats, then settling in between or behind my knees for the night. Always coming upstairs for naps, usually lying beside me, where she’d snuggle in between my torso and my arm, rest her head on my arm, and give a little sigh before falling asleep. As she was getting older, I made a box to help her hop up on the high bed in the bedroom; it had a little wobble to it, so every night I would lie there, waiting to hear her soft tread, then the wobble of the box, then her ears and eyes peeping over the side of the mattress, before she hopped up for a cuddle and some sleep.

COVID couch cuddle time: once I transitioned to working from home, it became a lunchtime ritual that I’d lie down on the living room couch; she’d clamber up, climb on my chest, practice some face-merging, then snuggle in so that she was nestled on me and against the back of the couch, wiggling into position and then letting out a sigh — that little sigh! — of contentment before falling asleep. Sometimes I’d doze too, sometimes just lie there for a while. If she didn’t get her couch time at lunch, she’d get angry, and barge into my office in the early afternoon and squeak until she got pats.

Her love/hate relationship with Digby, who she called the Goblin — sometimes playing with him, sometimes chasing him around the house in a state. He’s a skittish cat, which would trigger her to get at him, and if there was a loud noise anywhere in the house, she’d get up from her saucer or bed and go looking for him, looking all the world like she was rolling up her sleeves, to see if he was vulnerable and ripe for a chasing.

Her distinctive, swaybacked, “skatey-legged” walk, gliding rather than stepping, a kind of side-to-side motion with her low center of gravity and determined gait.

Her morning routine of having Marisa pick her up on a kitchen stool, holding her like a baby, with Marisa trying to steal kisses and Pooper putting up the “no paw” to keep Marisa’s face away from her face.

The way she could make me happy just by walking into the room. The way she _lit up_ a room.

She permeates every room of this big old house. There isn’t a couch or a chair or a vent where I don’t expect to see her snuggled up in having a nap, or a stairway or a hallway she shouldn’t be hopping down or skating along. Last night was largely sleepless; I can’t lie in our bed without the absence of her weight and warmth next to me turning into a terrible abyss. Every room I enter I catch my breath because I’m hoping to see her.  

Somewhere up in that list of things is “Unto every generation, a Poopercat is born!”, which started as some sort of dumb Buffyesque riff on the idea that a cat of her spirit is gifted to every generation, and — like the Buddha — if one Poopercat passes, another great spirit rises somewhere else. And, in between fits of doing things I thought only happened in books and movies (crying so hard you pull a muscle behind your eyes; literally collapsing in tears; making sounds you’ve only ever heard in horror movies featuring mutant woodland animals), this is an idea that gives me profound comfort.

Two years ago, when she was very very sick, I made a cot and slept next to her in her saucer bed on the kitchen floor, by the warm vent, for three nights. She was too ill to move. I laid there and gave her pats and wept and asked her, and the universe, for please, just a bit more time. Just a bit more time basking in the warmth of her. And I got it; she recovered, miraculously, and there was two more years of kisses and fun.

So I can’t complain. Not really. I got a full complement of Poopercat, and then I got two extra years. That’s a triumph.

And now, unto a new generation, somewhere on this big dumb planet, somebody who really needs a Poopercat will find one.

Somewhere on earth, somebody is meeting a cat for the first time, and the cat is saying “I’ll be your best friend forever if you’ll be my best friend forever.” Maybe it’s in India, or Spain, or Iraq, or the Russian Steppes. Somewhere, a cat and her person are meeting for the first time, and making a deal: it can’t last forever, but for as long as it does, there will be a bond of unconditional love and trust and friendship. Somebody will know what unconditional love feels like, and will grow and become better and stronger for it.

That’s the one thing that makes it okay right now: the idea that somebody is finding their Poopercat today, and making the deal that I made. It ends with heartbreak, but the joy on the journey far outweighs the pain at the end.

There will be cuddles and silliness and lolling in sunbeams and time on the couch and snacks and careful hops down the stairs and stories and laughter.

And love, and love, and love.

Categories
Just for fun Theory

The hedgehog, the fox, and the honeybee

Hedgehog, Fox and Honeybee

Something short this week. This has rattled around in my head for about five years, and I’m finally writing it down.

Prior to starting at the law faculty, I had very limited exposure to academia. I was in for-profit marketing / advertising, where there were a lot of terrifically brainy people, but we all tended to be the same kind of brainy: fast-thinking, creative, aggressively innovative, think-around-the-problem types. Succeeding in advertising requires a lot of different things, but optimally rapacious curiosity and the ability to take vast amounts of information on board in a hurry. If you don’t understand the client and the client’s business to a fair degree of acumen pretty fast, you’re not going to be able to help them.

Academia was definitely not the first time I’d met another kind of brainy: dogged, deep, and intense thinkers in one very finite area, but not necessarily interested in or curious about others. I started thinking more about types of brainy, and landed here. It turns out there are lots of ways to think about this, and probably some folks have got this down to a different and better degree than I do, but on a cursory Internet search, it doesn’t look like there’s a definitive take on this. So here’s mine:

Intelligent is deep, but not wide. “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing,” as Isaiah Berlin said, then later regretted saying because people kind of ran away with it. I’m one of those people, because he was originally writing about lenses for political philosophy and here I am further bastardizing it with this small bit of nonsense. Intelligence is the hedgehog trait. An intelligent person who is very interested in the history of woodworking can tell you when the first lathe was created or the average width in microns of a sharpened chisel… or not, if they’re interested in going really deep in a woodworking subset, in which case they might be absolute geniuses at wood grain but know nothing about how a table saw works.

Smart is wide, but not necessarily deep. Smart is the fox trait. Smart people know a lot of stuff, and have a crazy huge sampler tray of knowledge to draw from. A smart person could know that the reason your microwave isn’t turning on is that the turntable is broken, but also the evolutionary path of the platypus and where we’re at as a species on the path to colonizing Mars. Smart people do well at trivia night.

Clever is wiggly, and belongs to neither foxes or hedgehogs, but aligns itself more with foxes. Let’s call it the honeybee trait: honeybees, like many foraging species, use chaotic patterns to optimize food searches. They’re seemingly all over the place, but in a way that ultimately serves a goal. A clever persion might look at your broken microwave and use their knowledge of a systems planning process for a Mars mission to devise a way to figure out what is wrong with the microwave, and apply their understanding of the history of the lathe to tinker with the broken turntable inside it.

Nobody is only ever one thing. Intelligence, smarts and cleverness exist in everyone, in unique mixes. In my experience, they also wax and wane with time. I would say I am more clever than smart or intelligent, at the end of the day, but can find myself sliding into long periods of intense interest in a single subject, and crowd out most of my brain with a single point of focus. Similarly, I can get sick of something and spend weeks dabbling in various ideas, and dip into a dozen different areas of knowledge.

Clever seems to be the most baked-in trait: you’re either curious and prone to lateral thinking, or focused and not given to crossing mental wires. There’s no good or bad to it; lateral thinking can lead to disasters as well as successes (“I bet I can fix this fusebox with that piece of chewing gum” is lateral thinking, but also dumb as hell).

That’s it. No grand thesis of life, just some categorization that’s been rattling around in my head for half a decade, waiting to get written out. Intelligent, smart, clever: the hedgehog, the fox, and the honeybee.

Categories
Higher Ed Marketing & Communications Sponsorship Theory

Sponsorship should not be a function of marketing

Sponsorship value graph

When I started my Best Job Ever in July, I took over a marcomms shop run by somebody who had done it for 11+ years, and the circumstances of their leaving were less than ideal. There wasn’t a lot of leftover explanation of processes and systems; given that vacuum, there was also some reshuffling to move things into the marketing and communications shop that didn’t reside there before I started.

One of those things has been sponsorship. It’s going to be part of my budget; I’ve got a medium priority (i.e., back half of 2021) to come up with a comprehensive strategy around sponsorships.

There’s a natural fit there: one of the outputs of sponsorship is recognition. So why not put the people most in charge of our public-facing presence in charge of sponsorship?

My office is best positioned to analyze the optics and media value of a sponsorship. I know how much an ad costs in a national newspaper; I know how much it costs to produce a video; I know the rates for advertorial space in specialty magazines. Sponsorship, with “your logo goes here” and “we’ll mention you in our press releases thusly,” fits right into that matrix.

The difference between the former things and the latter things, though, is that media impact is the sole point of conventional paid media placement.

Even that’s not precisely true. There’s an optics and support component as well, in terms of what you chose to affiliate with in a media buy. I wouldn’t counsel us buying ads on a white-nationalist website, for instance; in fact, we have specific exclusion protocols set up ourselves and with media companies for this reason, so that when Google (for instance) is automatically placing ads, they don’t wind up anywhere nefarious. Social media channels are also on their way to their own kinds of polarization, where presence in one channel sends a message about the nature of your organization as well as the content in the message itself (Marshall McLuhan, I can’t quit you). A video on TikTok sends an inherently different message about who you’re speaking to and why than the same video on Twitter (and I’d argue that they shouldn’t be the same video anyway).

Fuzzily diagrammed — I’m still working through this, mentally, so don’t pay too much attention to it. Back of the napkin chicken scratch as I work through this.

Graph describing relative value of paid print, paid social media, editorial and sponsorship content. Sponsorship does not fare well in most categories.

We’ve got:

  • Paid placement (print and social)
  • Editorial and organic content (web, print, social)
  • Sponsorships

And the outputs:

Optics: do we look good through our presence here? This is very high for sponsorships (the appearance is generosity), lower for editorial (we’re obviously self-motivated to be telling these stories), quite low for paid (it’s transparent that we’re spending money to say this thing).

Story: how much fidelity is there to an overall narrative? Do we control it? Pretty much a three-way tie at the top here, but sponsorship fares worse: we’re telling our story through the sponsor’s lens, and that carries more inherent risk.

Value: if you came in and plunked a stack of cash on my desk, how would I spend it? This is something we could spend a lot of time on, but my approach to structuring and building a shop that creates and sustains narrative is (obviously) that capacity to create and disseminate editorial/organic content is far and away the best bang for your buck. Then social’s better than print for specific targeting reasons, then print, and sponsorship justifiably at the bottom — you’re not paying for marketing, you’re paying for the organization to do what they do. A key part of this in the sponsor relationship is that getting value out of the sponsorship often requires the same capacity load as just running editorial and organic content.

Placement: how precisely do you control where your message ultimately appears? Print offers total control, social offers targeting but more fuzziness in exchange for spread, editorial/organic is at the mercy of those who share it, and sponsorship is largely ultimately out of your hands.

Message: Do you control the precise message you’re sending? Again, a three-way tie for paid / editorial / organic, and sponsorship fares worse.

Persistence: what endures over time? Only editorial, through SEO and ongoing web presence, really endures. Print advertising, paid social, sponsorships — all pretty ephemeral, social the fastest to vanish.

Caveat: I literally came up with this in 15 minutes on a Sunday morning, so don’t lose too much sleep over it. I can poke a bunch of holes in this myself on quick review, but I think it holds together in broad strokes.

So what’s the point?

“I believe in what you’re doing and want to give you money to support it” is the heart of a sponsor relationship. The more you drive sponsorship decisions into the marketing sphere, the more transactional the relationship will become, and — I’d argue — the higher the risk that the organization you’re sponsoring will become worse at what they do because their efforts turn more and more toward generating ROI opportunities for sponsors than pursuing their core mandate.

There’s no shortage of voices trying to encourage — or force — the relationship. Articles like this one present sponsorship as a marketing activity.

When you put that decision in my hands, however, you’re asking me for a professional evaluation based broadly on three things:

  1. Optics — how does it look for us to be supporting this?
    • FOMO — who else is in? How does it look for us not to be present?
  2. Storytelling — what value can we generate by talking about this ourselves?
    • Does that story mesh with a strategic, overaching goal of ours?
  3. Value adds — what will the organization do to promote our brand and story?
    • Will this be a resource the organization can generate, or will it take capacity and collateral on my end for them to fulfil that part of their mandate?

This is all well and good — it’s a reasonable matrix for evaluation of a spend — but you’ll notice that nowhere in there do we see “are they doing work that is good and of value, and that we want to support”. It’s kinda in the “optics” category, but optics is just as much about the organization’s media presence and recognizability, how readily understandable their work is, and so on.

It’s sponsorship as fast carbs: an approach that prioritizes looking at short-term or immediate gain and not at ideals or long-term prospects.

As much as it removes things from my control, I am, on balance, a bigger fan of the other approach: the Dean or other senior admin make values-based judgments on what we want to sponsor and support, and there’s a hand-off that says “make the most of this from an optics and marketing perspective.”

I’m pro-sponsorship. Avidly so. I just think it’s best supported for reasons that start with mission and values, and not originating through the marketing lens.

This tail-wags-dog approach doesn’t align well with my ideals and ideas around what sponsorship could and should be. It can work, and I’ll make it work, because that’s what I do, but the aforementioned report on sponsorship planning will be a solid matrix of what we get from sponsorships, in terms of optics, marketing, communications and partnerships… and a full-throated defense of doing things that other way, where the institution supports and aligns with organizations that meet its mission and goals first, and marketing becomes a byproduct of sponsorship, instead of the primary driver.

In the interim, if you’re doing great things in the engineering space and want sponsorship, hit me up! I can’t promise much — the budget is small! — but the more data points I can get into the “mercantile” matrix, the better it’ll be when I make the case for sponsorship to be a function of ideology, not direct benefit.

Categories
Higher Ed Marketing & Communications Theory Workplace

You can’t flip every turtle when the turtle farm’s on fire

Turtle Farm Fire

Helpful’s in my genes.

I can’t, er, help it — it’s a combination of positive attributes, like being somebody who cares about people and wants them to be happy, and negative attributes, like being an inveterate people-pleaser. It’s also in the professional DNA; marketing is a combination of being creative and being productive, where the desire to do and make interesting things intertwines with the desire to get stuff done and move projects forward.

It’s generally all good. Broadly speaking, wanting to get things done, and to help people, is a good way to be. Being a self-starter whose first instinct when I see a problem is to solve a problem has gotten me to pretty good places careerwise. It’s also won me a lot of friends.

So no problem, right?

Wrong.

The problem with being helpful is that it’s driven by an emotional state. Somebody’s in distress — external emotional state — or something isn’t right and it bugs me — internal emotional state.

Emotional states don’t necessarily lend themselves to super great decision making. I can get pulled down into a micro-focused area of detail while neglecting a broader, bigger priority. It’s the whole urgent vs. important issue, writ small, and writ constantly.

Being a manager — and managing good people who similarly want to help — has really helped me come to grips with this, and develop better strategies to make sure I’ve got my eyes on the big issues while still moving things forward on the micro level.

The analogy I’ve been using lately, which I’ve gotten quite fond of, is flipping turtles.

I watched Blade Runner a few times in university, I guess. For those who haven’t seen it, this is essentially the Blade Runner Turing test for replicants — androids passing as people.

“The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t. Not without your help. But you’re not helping.” Why aren’t you helping? Are you a human, or a replicant?

The whole tortoise analogy sticks with me: it’s a great illustration for helping, especially the kind of minor-effort, costs-nothing help that people in creative roles can exercise a dozen times a day. It’s just another 15 minutes to make the web page look a bit better; it’s just five minutes to proofread something for somebody; it’ll only take an hour or so to fix this, or do that. Going the extra mile, bailing somebody out of a jam, taking care of something nobody’s even noticed is wrong (yet). Walking down the road, flipping turtles over. It feels great! Happy turtles all over the place.

And while I switch it to turtles (I like turtles! Plus, flipping a tortoise seems like it’d be a recipe for back strain.), it also conveys that pervasive guilt I feel for not helping. Every email unanswered in my inbox is a pang. Letting copy go out the door without making sure it’s absolutely deathless prose feels like shirking. Saying “no” to people is unsettling. I feel like I’m letting turtles bake in the hot sun. What’s wrong with me? Am I a replicant? Why am I not helping?

Because, as I’m now very fond of saying:

You can’t flip every turtle when the turtle farm’s on fire.

Me, July 2020 and constantly thereafter

And in roles like mine, the turtle farm is quite frequently on fire. COVID hasn’t made things easier, of course. Even outside of a COVID context, however, higher ed marketing and communications is in a continual state of expansion: the expectation is best-in-class websites running seamlessly on constantly varying and upgrading platforms; seamless adoption on new and evolving social media platforms with ever-changing algorithms; mastery of storytelling among wildly diverse audiences ranging from high-school students (and parents) to 75-year-old alumni to Nobel-prize-winning academics to industry leaders and government wonks; quality analytics and reporting on all channels to show value; broad strategic branding and positioning work; institutions are reckoning with their colonial pasts, and under constant scrutiny for past and current misdeeds on the diversity and inclusion front… and the beat goes on.

Which is the job. It’s a thrilling, evolving, breakneck process of continual evolution and refinement and I’m there for it.

But it does mean that various parts of the turtle farm are continuously and spontaneously bursting into flame. Plunging in and reprogramming how a page template renders images on a phone screen represents an hour you’re not spending on a plan to change CMSes and move your antiquated site to a whole new web platform. Re-reviewing a set of social posts for an upcoming speaker event is time you’re not spending on the annual budget. Helping proofread the annual report is time you’re not spending reviewing recruitment trends and making sure your tools and messages are on point for the latest iteration of messaging.

There are a lot of turtles to flip, and not flipping them can make you feel like a negligent monster.

But the turtle farm’s on fire. If the ten turtles flip today keep you from saving a hundred tomorrow, you’ve made a bad choice.

This isn’t a solve-the-problem post. It’s an articulate-the-problem post. Managing the work — figuring out what constitutes a turtle to flip, and what constitutes a turtle-farm-fire (and sometimes a flipped turtle is an indicator of a fire — maybe they’re flipping over in their hurry to flee the flaming turtle farm, and maybe I am investing too much thought in working this metaphor to death) is going to be something I unpack and look at a lot.

For now, though, the analogy stands. I like it. You have to stop flipping turtles when the turtle farm is on fire.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some turtles to save.

Addendum: I solicited some friends for a name for a fictitious turtle sanctuary, thinking it’d play into the above somehow, but the name just didn’t seem to play out well in the context of the piece, and I wound up liking a farm more than a sanctuary because it sounds snappier (no pun intended) in a pithy phrase. Sorry, friends! Special shout out to Nathalie Noël for “Shellter,” the best turtle sanctuary name of them all.

And here is a list of more turtle sanctuary names, if anyone wants to start a turtle sanctuary. My gift to you.

  • Turtville
  • Slowpokes Ranch
  • The Turt Yurt
  • As The World Turts
  • Turt Around, Bright Eyes
  • She Shells Sanctuary
  • Sancturtary
  • Snap Judgments
  • Sanctum Sancturtum
  • Reptile Resort
  • Turtal Recall
Categories
Workplace

The Eight Types of Zoom Meetings

Eight types of zoom meeting shep.ca
  1. Somebody worked hard on this report and by criminey you are going to listen to them read every last word of it
  2. Oh, is it your birthday? It’s her birthday, guys! Let’s all sing happy birthday! What, yours is tomorrow? No way! Who else has birthdays? What? Your dog? No way! Who else has dogs? You do? A dachshund? No way!
  3. Two people argue, everyone else relives the long drive home from Thanksgiving at Grandma’s
  4. I did not call this meeting and I am not on the agenda but I am going to commandeer it by sheer force of will
  5. Glenjamin’s unfailing belief that the wifi will somehow reach his kid’s tree fort, which he has decided to work from for some reason, is strangely admirable
  6. HELLO CAN YOU HEAR ME I CAN’T HEAR YOU IS MY MIC EVEN ON THIS STUPID THING I CAN’T HEAR ANY OF YOU I SEE YOUR LIPS MOVING CAN YOU HEAR ME BECAUSE I CAN’T WAIT LET ME TRY THIS BUTTO—
  7. You thought this was a Zoom meeting, but now you’re looking at the invite and the vendors are using a video conferencing app you’ve never heard of, you have to register for an account, wait for a confirmation email, and then install a mysterious third-party app on your computer where the EULA seems to be written in Bulgarian. съжалявам, нещастници!
  8. Nobody has cameras on, and we’re all quietly catching up on email and hoping nobody notices. In other words, identical to essentially any meeting prior to February 2020.
Categories
Higher Ed Marketing & Communications Theory

Confidence, Internal Comms and the Fall 2020 Semester

Confidence Transfer in Higher Education

I think internal communications is about to have A Moment in higher ed.

Actually, I think it’s about to be the hero — or villain — of the entire 2020-21 school year.

I did a dumb drawing to illustrate why, up top.

We’re about to embark on the Most Online Semester of All Time. COVID’s made things weird; more than weird, it’s made them scary.

Scary for us in the institution — we have a duty to deliver the best education we can. That’s been called into question by this drive to (mostly) entirely online classes for at least the fall semester of the 20-21 school year; even the best of us (and the place I work is very, very good — best in Canada, if not North America) are anxious.

Students, though.

Fresh or recently outta high school, worried about the future, jobs, their actual grades, the fact that we’re melting the planet. We’re in a pandemic that if it had slightly more visually appalling symptoms would be a global horror movie. They’ve made the largest investment of their lives so far — some of them ever, if they don’t buy a house — in this whole higher education thing.

And we’re throwing a whole new playbook at them. Kids entering university for the first time, with preconceptions built on a lifetime of TV and movies and books about it, are off the map. We’re all off the map.

I actually feel pretty good about the coming semester. Where I’m at, anyway, the administration and the faculty have an appetite to improvise and excel. We’ve got a great senior admin team, dedicated faculty, and a top-notch digital teaching and learning team thanks to earlier online course development.

But how do you convey that?

Hence the sketch above. We need to instill confidence in the incoming students. So I’ve been thinking about confidence, and how it flows.

It doesn’t flow equally in all directions.

The ability to instill confidence isn’t equal. I think you can have a strong flow from the institution to faculty to students. Faculty, similarly, have the power to instill confidence in students.

But the transfer weakens on the inverse. Students can to an extent help faculty feel more confident — being attentive, participating, clearly demonstrating they’re learning. That’s got some value in confidence-building for faculty. The flow is weaker in the student -> faculty direction, though. It’s relatively easy for a confident teacher to build class confidence.  It’s harder for students to rebuild a faculty member’s confidence.

Similarly, faculty can increase institutional confidence by radiating preparedness. But it’s more of a positive feedback loop than a process of confidence that starts with the faculty and makes the whole institution confident.

So internal comms is about to have A Moment. It’s a vehicle for both building and conveying confidence, from the institutional level to both the faculty and students.

You can have the best plan in the world for the fall, but if you’re not sharing it clearly, you’re not building confidence. You can have the world’s greatest digital lesson plan and all the tools in the world, but if you’re not showing students that’s on the way, you’re not building confidence.

And confidence starts at the institutional level. Students and faculty both need to know the institution has their backs.

There are very valid conventional-marketing approaches to this — make a public-facing campaign, target it at your students (geography, age, interests) and benefit from the reputational splash-out into adjacent audiences. And that’s a great idea. Do something excellent and big.

Big is general, though, and you need to back up the big and general with the specific. I can tell you it’s going to be great, and that’s a good thing to do, but without the undernarrative of what _exactly_ is making it great, that supernarrative risks collapse.

Which takes us back to internal comms, and faculty or department-level messaging.

Internal comms is about to have A Moment.

It has to.

Because if we’re not on point with our newsletter game and our student-facing web game and our app game and our outreach game, we’re not going to have students hitting the ground confident and eager for the Most Online Semester Ever.

Having to unpack and unravel anxiety after the start of term is doubling the load. Then we’re downloading a stack of not only teaching duties and student-management duties to our faculty and staff… we’re compressing a pile of anxiety into the mix as well.

I’m actually confident right now, because I’ve got the inside-baseball view of the preparation, innovation and energy that’s gone into this semester. Now it’s incumbent on me, in my job, to make sure I’m helping the institution tell stories that radiate that confidence to our faculty and students.

It’s going to be a good semester, despite (and in some ways because of) this pandemic. I’ve got the keys to make it even better. Internal communications, the tousle-headed little brother of marketing, is about to have its day in the sun. It’s not the area of marketing and communications that usually gets the glory.

But this is its time to shine.

Categories
Nerd

Auto-deleting junkbox

CronBot Takes Out The Trash

As a lower-mid-tier nerd, I’m just nerdy enough to be running a home media server (old Dell box, on Ubuntu 20, with Plex and nothing else). I also own my own domain (hey, you’re on it!), which gives me the power to create a nigh-infinite number of email addresses.

This, in turn, lets me make a generic email for all the sign-up garbage I need to use once and never again. “Enter your email / click the link in your email to register for | download | access” stuff.

What I wanted to do was have all that stuff funnel into a box that self-deletes every night. Get the confirmation email, click the thing, and nope out, knowing that any junk mail or follow-ups will auto-clear.

Since I have the local computer running (close to) 24/7 as a media server, and Ubuntu, and my own mailbox, why not dive into the wonderful world of Python scripts and cron jobs to make it happen?

(For the record, this seems like a jovial public-facing post, but it’s really just for me so I can remember how to do this stuff if I need to do it again).

Here’s the script, courtesy of the good people at Opalstack, my web host. Nice, responsive, and ultimately patient people! 

#!usr/local/bin/python3

import imaplib
import ssl
from datetime import datetime

# your IMAP server credentials
IMAP_HOST = 'mail.us.opalstack.com'
IMAP_USER = 'user'
IMAP_PASS = 'password'

def clear_old_messages():

    today = datetime.today().strftime('%d-%b-%Y')

    ctx = ssl.create_default_context()
    server = imaplib.IMAP4_SSL(host=IMAP_HOST, ssl_context=ctx)
    server.login(IMAP_USER, IMAP_PASS)
    server.select()

    resp, items = server.search(None, f"SENTBEFORE {today}")
    #resp, items = server.search(None, "SENTBEFORE {}" .format(today)) [[python 3.5]]
    items = items[0].split()
    for i in items:
        server.store(i, '+FLAGS', '\\Deleted')

    server.expunge()
    server.logout()

if __name__ == '__main__':
    clear_old_messages()

I save the script as garbage.py in a folder called “scripts” in my home folder, and make it executable: 

chmod u+x garbage.py

On the Ubuntu server, I open up the crontab editor with

crontab -e

Then adding at the bottom of the crontab 

0 1 * * * /home/[user]/scripts/garbage.py

I made an earlier mistake setting this up with a relative file path 

0 1 * * * ~/scripts/garbage.py

but that was a no-go for some reason. Using the absolute path helped the cron job find the script and run it.

When that didn’t work, I got advised that putting the path in the cron job as well as the shebang will bulletproof it more: 

0 1 * * * /usr/bin/python3 /home/[user]/scripts/garbage.py > /home/[user]/logs/garbage.log 2>&1

Things that have gone wrong

  1. Including the path to Python in the crontab. I was pushing the crontab just to the script and assuming the shebang to Python would be enough — apparently not (I’ve updated the post above).
  2. Permission Denied for the path to the Python script. I’m finding the Python script using whereis python and locating it at /usr/lib/python3.8, but the crontab log is giving me a “Permission Denied” in the log. The solve there was using usr/bin/python3.8 — no idea why lib is permission denied and bin is okay, but whatever works, works. I’ve updated the post above.
  3. When Python updates, the path breaks — I had crontab calling /usr/lib/python3.7 and getting a not found error, which was vexing until I realized Python had updated to 3.8 and I hadn’t noticed. This applies to both the shebang for the script and the crontab call. The fix: you can call the Python version (python3) without the subversion (python3.8) — but not just “python”, because then the system calls Python 2, which can’t run the script. Once again, the post above’s been updated.
  4. Moved everything to a Synology server, and while its built-in task scheduler has solved the cron job for me, after a ton of syntax errors I finally discovered that the above script uses an f-string that only works in Python 3.6+, and the Python 3 module in the Synology package manager only supports 3.5.1. So the script above has been amended again to reflect that.

Categories
Higher Ed Marketing & Communications

Best. Jobs. Ever.

Every Job is the Best Job

What does it mean when every job you’ve ever had is the best job you’ve ever had?

Because that’s the deal. I think I’m just an incredibly fortunate dude.

In high school I had the usual slate of jobs — gas station, washing dishes at a restaurant, busboy, hardware clerk at Canadian Tire (if a teenager working at the Tire ever tells you he knows what he’s talking about, believe me he does not).

The first ‘real’ job, though — like actual responsibility, opening and closing, managing a float, dealing with customers solo — was at a used book / comic book / trading card shop called Twice Told Tales. The owner, Ron, was a great guy and pretty much the ideal boss for a 15- or 16-year-old. He was probably in his early thirties then, but was an adult to me, in that way everyone over 25 is “generic adult”. He had another store in Markham he spent a lot of time at, so I kind of semi-managed it after a year — buying books, taking stock, putting in orders, running inventory, managing the cash and the float. I loved books and comic books and in my last year there, Magic the Gathering cards. I discovered Richard Brautigan and alternative ‘comix’ there.

It was the best job I ever had.

Graduating from Ryerson and the Radio & Television Arts program, I somehow lucked into being the editor in chief of the school paper, the Eyeopener — one of only a handful of non-journalism grads to do it. I drank a lot of coffee and smoked cigarettes and had yelling fights with the news editors and the photo editors sometimes. We ran me for office in the provincial election in the Fort York riding as a publicity stunt (positioning ourselves as the Spider-Sense Revolution, in opposition to Mike Harris’ Common Sense Revolution, with a general mandate to do all-candidates meetings and talk about how education matters) and I got 140 votes, which wasn’t great but still beat the Natural Law party and the Marxist-Leninists. Production nights — this was in the era of pasteup, where we would lay out the paper on Macs but still had to print everything and paste it up on waxed board, making edits with blue pencils and cutting out and replacing individual words and letters with Xacto knives — would go on till about two in the morning, and a few of us would crash on the office couches to get up and deliver the paper at 5 a.m. the same day. We ate bad Chinese food and terrible pizza. When the stars aligned, we’d get ads from both the local Caribbean restaurant Mr. Jerk and for a sperm donor clinic which we would dutifully place next to each other on the back page of the paper. Mike, one of our news editors, once stole three bags of shredded papers from the Principal’s trash after a closed-door budget meeting and spent a whole night trying to tape them back together. Somebody sent us a Sega Saturn for the entertainment section and we stayed up all night playing Virtua Fighter. We launched a whole new section of the paper, championed and edited by Brian Daly, called Roots & Culture because even in 1995 it was sadly obvious that everything was too white and marginalized people needed voices. I worked with brilliant people who later became luminaries in journalism and graphic design — Ed Keenan, Doug Cudmore, Stefan Woronko.

It was the best job I ever had.

As my time at the Eyeopener was drawing to a close, I got a call from my friend Mark who told me that the radio station at the 2000-student English-language university he went to in Quebec — Bishop’s — had just gotten its FM license. But the CFRC said they had to have a full-time station manager and their total budget was around $14,000 a year so they needed somebody who would work for about the equivalent of $5 an hour to run a radio station. I leapt at the chance and they hired me. I was the only full-time employee of a station that at its peak was broadcasting in four languages, with over two hundred volunteers manning shows from 6 a.m. to 2 a.m., seven days a week. The volunteers were all dedicated and a bit crazy; some of them formed a record label later, which among other things was the first to sign Canadian indie rock darlings The Dears. We hosted cheap concerts for bands who just wanted a place to crash and a share of the door on runs from the East Coast to Montreal. I made spaghetti and meatballs for The Planet Smashers and Itch crashed on my sofa once. The station went from 25 watts to 500, broke from the student union and became an independent non-profit, and did some ridiculously innovative things in radio programming that I’m proud of today.

It was the best job I ever had.

After some time kicking around cleaning apartments and helping run a B&B, I was hired to be the editor for a truly brilliant guy who was doing French-to-English translation but needed an editor to turn his translated English back into “English English.” It was a great idea and one I generally don’t see many translators use. I started with him part-time, then full-time, and after a few years it was a standalone office and four full-time staff. We did tons of work for ad agencies, government work, tourism, all kinds of things. We translated a liquor catalogue for the SAQ and that’s how I learned “cat piss” is a legit tasting note for wine. Also that deaths in pharmaceutical studies are “serious adverse events.” My love for language deepened and my boss, Scott, patiently and insistently drilled into me a rock-solid attention to detail that was not part of my DNA but now reverberates in my bones.

It was the best job I ever had.

One of our clients was an ad agency that was doing boutique work out of Sherbrooke, and needed a lot of help with English-language content because they’d started doing original creative for national brands — Bayer, Johnson & Johnson — that wanted standalone Quebec marketing, but that in turn needed to be translated into English for the Quebec English market. Also loads and loads of translation for pharma studies, because the Université de Sherbrooke was a hospital school and there were drug trials stacked a mile deep there. I was the “creative guy” and they eventually crunched the numbers and realized it was cheaper to hire me than to keep hiring the company, so they offered and I accepted. I was the twelfth hire at the agency. Eight years later it was 52 people, and doing national campaigns for international brands, instead of the Quebec versions; holding down marketing for major pharmaceutical companies and making a name in the burgeoning area of animal health. The graphic designers – Dan, Charles, Charlie, Val, Élizabeth – were (and are) stone cold brilliant, and working with them was pure alchemy. Living in an environment where we transitioned from French to English and back seamlessly according to which word felt the most right at the moment was a joy. The account directors were driven but compassionate, and the owner had a rock-solid dedication to quality of life that was the envy of every other agency we ever met. I got to sit down with clients at the outset of mandates, pitch our work, and carry it to execution with our creative team. It was fits of boundless brilliance punctuated with camaraderie and discovery. I could spend three weeks immersed in swine vaccines, come up for air, and find myself learning every intricacy of the paperboard industry to launch a company, and then leap into developing patient adherence materials for a novel chemotherapy regimen. 

It was the best job I ever had.

For a variety of reasons, Quebec stopped feeling like home, and when I looked for work, I was lucky enough to find Queen’s Law. I wasn’t going to apply but Mike — from the Eyeopener, and the shredded papers, remember? — was working there and said I totally should. So I did. I became the first director of marketing & communications at the school’s law faculty, despite not knowing a thing about law. From there, I got to grow a team that included alumni and advancement staff to turn it from a modest law school with no digital presence to arguably the most online law school in Canada. I got to expand from marketing and communications to alumni and advancement (university fundraising, for the uninitiated) work. Rare for higher ed, I got to see the full scope of our lifecycle, from the first outreach to high school students to alumni 50+ years out. We built a wildly successful national online undergraduate program in law, reinvented alumni communications, rebuilt our entire web presence, and became polyvalent storytellers on almost every channel we could get our hands on. I delved into research promotion with Canada’s finest legal scholars, and could spend a day rocketing from working on brand development for our pro bono clinics to structuring a Constitutional Law book launch, and develop a fundraising proposal for a new chair in business law over lunch. I learned that law is the secret lever that moves the world: that no matter what you do and where you go, if you live in society, law is the steady thrum that holds all of civilization together. The faculty are staggeringly brilliant, but so were the staff — and the students, who I admittedly had a lot of “law student” stereotypes about, were and are the most considerate, thoughtful, passionate and driven people I’ve ever met.

It was the best job I ever had.

Until four hours ago.

I’ve just put a pin in Queen’s Law, and starting tomorrow I’m officially the Director of Marketing and Communications at Queen’s Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science. On paper it’s a lateral move, but as somebody who’s never made a choice based on titles or money, it’s a creative step into a thrilling unknown. It’s going to broaden my scope from law (which is itself a cosmos) to a dizzying array of sciences I can barely wrap my head around. I’m working with the people who build, and rebuild, the world. It’s the crackling excitement of students testing the frontiers of what they’re capable of, in Tony Stark labs with genius mentors urging them on. It’s reactors and robots and biomechanics and chemistry.  It’s the technology that’s going to improve our lives, and possibly save them all. It’s literally the gosh-darn future sitting there waiting for stories to be told about it.

It’s going to be the best job I ever have.

Categories
Marketing & Communications

The “Tax Ratio” fallacy

(this is an extension of the Kingston Tax Rates page)

Tax-ratio fallacies are the first and greatest refuge of the Tax Whiner.

But what’s wrong with tax-ratio arguments?

TLDR: they’re vanity metrics.

We get jiggy with the logic below.

Why tax-ratio arguments are fallacies

So you’re chatting with somebody who has a compelling statistic. The city has higher taxes per person than another place, for instance, or a higher average amount paid per income, or… well, it could be anything, really. Taxes versus square kilometre of territory. Taxes per number of dwellings. Taxes per total number of daschunds. Taxes per average height of a citizen.

Ultimately, tax ratio arguments, “our taxes are the highest or lowest per ______________”, are kind of like IQ tests. If you have a great score, you can feel really good about it, and it’s fun to brag about at parties, but for any practical purposes, it’s trivia.

Explaining why it’s trivia takes a bit of math and a bit of civics and a certain amount of “if A, then B” logical thought. Oh, and just a smidge of Greek mythology. Buckle up!

Let’s start with a question of control.

There’s one element under municipal control, as far as taxes go: what they charge. Their rate.

Where does that rate come from?

Here’s the math part; it’s a pretty simple two-part formula, but worth repeating:

Part one:

municipal servicesxcost=revenue required

Part two:

revenue required/taxable assets in your territory=tax rate

This is grossly oversimplified and doesn’t take into account a lot of things, but it’s a napkin sketch of how taxes happen.

So why is this important to know?

The key thing is to look at this using common sense.

To manage a situation and to effect change, you have to look at what is under your control.

In the municipal case, it’s “services”.

The outcome of the two-step equation is “tax rate.”

You can truncate this relationship to

services…tax rate1

What isn’t in this equation?

Everything else.

It doesn’t account for population size*, or local income, or the number of weiner dogs in the territory.

*except to determine the scope of services it needs to provide above, but you knew that.

Why can’t it?

The better question is “how could it?”

It can’t, for a number of pretty common-sense reasons, chief among them this valuable bit of context:

Large municipalities require planning.

Municipal organizations are complex networks in charge of life-sustaining services, and planning happens (or should happen) on a scale of years to decades, not days to weeks.

Major infrastructure like water, roads, and waste needs to be planned and maintained. Large numbers of service groups like police, fire, garbage, and utilities need to be hired, trained, and managed. Parks and sporting infrastructure needs to be maintained. Finances have to be meticulously kept. Public transit needs to run. Tourists need to be attracted.

These aren’t “snap decision” kinds of areas, and when cities see disaster, it’s usually because somebody with a “runs like a business”2 mentality has tried to apply what is perfectly sound thinking for running a bait shack to running a municipality. The systems aren’t compatible.

So what happens when you try to apply “taxes as a percentage of average income” or other ratio-based arguments to a discussion about municipal taxes?

You’re introducing trivia to the conversation in the form of non-actionable information.

We’ll use “average tax paid, as a percentage of income” as a f’rinstance, but this applies to any ratio model, including square km, number of people who own ducks, total count of refrigerators – any datum that can provide a number to put on the right side while taxes are on the left.

So you’re talking to somebody that says “this town’s taxes are out of control! We have one of the highest average taxes paid, compared against income! Why, 5% of a citizen’s average income goes to taxes, and the average across the province is only 4.8%!”

To be fair, that legitimately sounds outrageous if you don’t think about it very much.

But let’s invest some thinkin’ time.

First assume good faith, and that the person in question is actually trying to have a helpful conversation and not just kvetching.

The key question becomes:

What, in this scenario, is in the municipality’s power to directly change?

They can’t increase local revenue (well, not directly*). Unlike the above equation, which starts with “services,” this is the ratio argument equation:

average income/taxes paid=taxes paid per average income

In the first equation, we started with “services”, which municipalities control. “Municipal services” is the starting point in a linear path to “tax rate.”

But here, there’s no municipal-adjustable equivalent. Even with the very best wishes and a spectacular wizard hat, municipal government can’t magically increase local revenue.*

They can adjust tax rates, but as we’ve shown above, tax rates are a direct derivative of services, and as the clear-eyed have noted, “services” represent a vast range of things that are more like a cruise ship than a unicycle – they take forethought, vision, and long-range planning to manage effectively. Radical changes to services to immediately slash tax rates generally read as “panic” and don’t end well, as a rule. “Income has fallen 0.5% so let’s not have police for three months” is not a great way to run things.

In the “average income” flavour of this argument, a good question to ask is “does the municipality charge income tax?” and if the answer is “no,” the follow-up question “so what does income have to do with our tax rate, exactly?” will usually flip the light switch.

*”Municipal government can’t increase local revenue” is actually not entirely true.

Municipalities make a huge difference in local revenue by making themselves attractive to new citizens, tourism, and employers. How do they do that?

By having great communities where people and businesses want to be, which requires fun things like good water, functioning sewers, police and fire, etc. These are “services,” and they’re what drive taxes. So if you want your tax-to-revenue ratio to improve – even though it’s a vanity metric – you should actually want to pay taxes for world-class services, to attract people and businesses, and improve revenue.

But they can’t directly affect total revenue, which is kind of the whole point.

Anyway, the above applies to any argument that relies on the forumula

tax rate/[VARIABLE]=tax rate per [VARIABLE]

whether it be average income, counting women named Barbara, total km of city streets, number of babies born per year, etc.

All right, sooooo…

So when you stake your whole argument on one of these ratios, you’re not actually complaining about taxes any more. You’re complaining about [VARIABLE].

And it’s all well and good to think that there aren’t enough daschunds in the city, or homes cost too much, or homes cost too little, or people don’t make enough money, but at that point you’re essentially saying [VARIABLE] is a problem, but you still think you’re upset about taxes, because you don’t understand how taxes work.

To put it another way…

The tax ratio fan can’t argue that the taxes aren’t fair (in Kingston’s case), because they are. That’s just math n’ geography. They’re upset about [VARIABLE], but they don’t really understand that [VARIABLE] is the problem… not the taxes.

So what’s the problem with these ratio arguments? They’re silly, but harmless. It’s just trivia, right?

Meh. One problem is that they get people who don’t have a firm grasp on math or civics all ginned up about something that doesn’t ultimately mean anything, which is a huge waste of energy and helps propagate a pervasive I-read-half-an-Ayn-Rand-novel “taxation is bad” fallacy that erodes a general understanding of civics. Shutting these things down helps foster a nuanced understanding of how society functions.

More practically, the ratio arguments also passively promote a model where municipalities should, say, continually adjust rates according to chicken count or total number of Dairy Queens or average income or people’s heights; they have the gloss of facts, but when you think about the facts of civics and the math underlying taxation, it’s a bonkers worldview to put forward.

Consider the kind of government you’d need to run to index crucial long-term service decisions based on the number of people named “Dave” in your catchment, which changes weekly (Daves come and go). But then somebody complains about the daschund ratio, and then the average height, and then, and then, and then…

If you don’t pay much attention, the ratio arguments are compelling, and next thing you know you’ve got a mayor who wants to “run things like a business” and ten years later you’re wondering how everything went to hell and why you’re on a boil water advisory.

So it’s worth time and energy to shut tax ratio arguments down as meaningless. Hey, I wrote this whole thing! Clearly I think it’s worthwhile.

So ratio presentations of taxation are useless?

No! They’re fun trivia, as mentioned above. If you’ve got, say, the lowest taxes paid per total number of swans in the city’s pond, you can put that on your website and the easily gulled will think you have low tax rates, regardless of what your tax rates actually are. You may have the highest tax rates and also the highest number of swans, but a sucker is born every minute.

The results can also derive some interesting ways to look at [VARIABLE], as long as it’s clear you’re on an investigation of [VARIABLE].

If you find Greek gods named “Zeus” are taxed more than anywhere else in the country, for instance, you may want to see if the Greek goddess Hera is working in your tax office.*

*That’s the Greek mythology, folks! Don’t forget to tip your waiter.

But tax rate is still the only rational metric of whether a city’s taxation is fair?

Yes. It’s pretty straightforward. Again, it takes a bit of math, some civics, and… well, honestly, you didn’t really need the Greek mythology. But it’s fairly linear after all.

Back to the Kingston Tax Rates page!

1. A good test of “is my municipal government doing okay?” is to inverse this relationship. If the tax rate is fair, relative to comparable other places, and the services are adequate, the city’s doing a good job. If the tax rate is out of step with other municipalities, or the services are dismal, the city’s doing a bad job. In Kingston’s case, the services seem good and the tax rate is fair (see previous page), so I deem the City do be doing okay. There are always things to improve, but taking to the ramparts about taxation is a non-starter and a waste of everyone’s time.

2. One more time… If somebody’s answer to “should government be run like a business?” is anything other than “no, that is insane, a business’ ideal model is to maximize benefits for a tiny number of owners or shareholders, and a government’s ideal model is to maximize benefit for everyone, which is literally the exact opposite, so while it’s fine to say governments should pursue efficiency or not be wasteful, business is a ludicrous model, governments should be run like very good governments, and you should feel bad for even asking that question”, you can safely ignore anything they have to say about government, civics, economics and politics. Send them to this page and if they call you a “snowflake” or a “Neo-Marxist,” tell them I said they owe you a quarter.

Categories
Kingston, Ontario Taxes

Are Kingston taxes higher than those in comparable cities in Ontario?

TLDR: No.

Exhaustive research below.

Really? Somebody online insists that they’re, like, the highest tax rates anywhere ever.

S/he’s wrong. Probably also says things like “government should be run like a business”.1

Methodology

Let’s start with “what’s a comparable city?”

Population size is the clearest metric here. Nothing else really makes sense. A tiny village isn’t a fair comparison. Nor is a borough of a major city, nor is a city more than twice Kingston’s size. Size matters. Municipal taxes pay for municipal services for the population the municipality serves. Something weird seems to happen with taxes for all mid-sized cities, too (see below), which makes comparisons that don’t account for this doubly inappropriate.

In short, population size is the common-sense metric for determining “comparable” in a tax scenario. But hey, if you don’t like population size, there are two other ways to measure this below. Stay tuned!

Setting a comparative range based on population size

From the 2016 census (via Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_municipalities_in_Ontario)

Kingston’s population is 123,798.

15 municipalities is a reasonable basis for comparison, so let’s move up and down seven slots on either side of Kingston:

MunicipalityPopulation
Clarington92,013
Brantford97,496
Chatham-Kent101,647
Waterloo104,986
Thunder Bay107,909
Milton110,128
Ajax119,677
Kingston123,798
Whitby128,377
Cambridge129,920
Guelph131,794
St. Catharines133,113
Barrie141,434
Oshawa159,458
Greater Sudbury161,531

And now: LET’S TALK TAX RATES!

What’s our basis of comparison?

We’re using “Residential”. If there are varying rates by region, we’re going to use “Central” or the closest equivalent. All rates from 2018.

All amounts are per $1000 evaluated. Links to the actual tax rates are next to the city and amount. First, here are the municipalities again ordered by population size:

MunicipalityTaxes per $1KSource
Clarington$12.2https://www.clarington.net/en/town-hall/property-tax-rates.asp
Brantford$11.9https://www.brantford.ca/en/living-here/resources/Documents/2018txrates.pdf
Chatham-Kent$14.9https://www.chatham-kent.ca/Taxes/Documents/2018%20Tax%20Rates.pdf
Waterloo$11.0https://www.waterloo.ca/en/government/resources/Documents/Finance/Property-tax-rates–-2018.pdf
Thunder Bay$15.1https://www.thunderbay.ca/en/city-hall/resources/Documents/Tax-Rates-2000-2018.pdf
Milton$6.9https://www.milton.ca/en/live/resources/2018-Tax-Rates.pdf
Ajax$11.5https://www.ajax.ca/en/home-and-property/resources/Taxes/Business/2018-Tax-Rates.pdf
Kingston$13.6https://www.cityofkingston.ca/documents/10180/57933/2018+Tax+Rate+Schedule/8d71caf6-8606-4ba4-a999-509de328b1ba
Whitby$11.8https://www.whitby.ca/en/resourcesGeneral/csx-urban-rural-historical-tax-2018.pdf
Cambridge$12.0https://www.cambridge.ca/en/your-city/resources/2018-Tax-Rates-Website.pdf
Guelph$17.1https://guelph.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018-final-tax-rates.pdf
St. Catharines$14.3https://www.stcatharines.ca/en/governin/resources/Tax-Rates-2018-Final.pdf
Barrie$12.7https://www.barrie.ca/Living/Housing-and-Property/Property-Taxes/Documents/2018%20Tax%20Rate%20Chart.pdf
Oshawa$14.1https://www.oshawa.ca/city-hall/resources/Tax-Rates-2006-2018.pdf
Greater Sudbury$14.4https://www.greatersudbury.ca/city-hall/tax-services/2018-tax-rates/

Where you might expect to see a correlation there – especially since large centres like Toronto and Ottawa have rates closer to the Milton end of the spectrum – there doesn’t seem to be much of a ratio mapping population size to tax rate.

Sorted by amount:

MunicipalityTaxes per $1KSource
Milton$ 6.90https://www.milton.ca/en/live/resources/2018-Tax-Rates.pdf
Waterloo$11.00https://www.waterloo.ca/en/government/resources/Documents/Finance/Property-tax-rates–-2018.pdf
Ajax$11.50https://www.ajax.ca/en/home-and-property/resources/Taxes/Business/2018-Tax-Rates.pdf
Whitby$11.80https://www.whitby.ca/en/resourcesGeneral/csx-urban-rural-historical-tax-2018.pdf
Brantford$11.90https://www.brantford.ca/en/living-here/resources/Documents/2018txrates.pdf
Cambridge$12.00https://www.cambridge.ca/en/your-city/resources/2018-Tax-Rates-Website.pdf
Clarington$12.20https://www.clarington.net/en/town-hall/property-tax-rates.asp
Barrie$12.70https://www.barrie.ca/Living/Housing-and-Property/Property-Taxes/Documents/2018%20Tax%20Rate%20Chart.pdf
Kingston$13.60https://www.cityofkingston.ca/documents/10180/57933/2018+Tax+Rate+Schedule/8d71caf6-8606-4ba4-a999-509de328b1ba
Oshawa$14.10https://www.oshawa.ca/city-hall/resources/Tax-Rates-2006-2018.pdf
St. Catharines$14.30https://www.stcatharines.ca/en/governin/resources/Tax-Rates-2018-Final.pdf
Greater Sudbury$14.40https://www.greatersudbury.ca/city-hall/tax-services/2018-tax-rates/
Chatham-Kent$14.90https://www.chatham-kent.ca/Taxes/Documents/2018%20Tax%20Rates.pdf
Thunder Bay$15.10https://www.thunderbay.ca/en/city-hall/resources/Documents/Tax-Rates-2000-2018.pdf
Guelph$17.10https://guelph.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018-final-tax-rates.pdf

So in the end…

Kingston is #9 on the list of 15. From the dead middle of a list of 15, it moves up one place in that same list.

So Kingston doesn’t have astonishingly high taxes when compared to other Ontario municipalities of similar size?

Nope.

Kingston’s tax rate is proveably and conclusively average?

A smidge higher than average but not even in the top five in its weight class.

Why are mid-sized city tax rates higher than those of megacities and tiny towns?

It’s an interesting thing I noticed while working on this. Major centres have much lower rates, as do tiny towns. I don’t know why for a fact, but my theory is that mid-size cities have all the fiscal disadvangages of large cities – obligation to provide city water and full services, a cultural life that needs to be supported, sophisticated transit and library systems, and sports infrastructure – without the economies of scale that kick in once you’re at the million-citizen mark. Small towns don’t have to do this at nearly the same scale. There’s probably some soft population number at which these things spike, and another where they drop again.

Milton, for instance, is our outlier here. The suspicion is that as essentially a borough they can lean into Toronto as a sports/culture/transit mecca, so they can offer a dramatically lower tax rate than some of their peers in size. The other cities on the list are “standalones”, and essentially are providing Toronto-level services but to much smaller populations.*

Again, that’s just a theory. If you’ve got facts, I’d love to update this page.

A reader, connected to somebody once in Milton’s municipal services department, provides some context: “Milton has been able to get away with not providing (and paying the full freight for) what we might call a mature suite of municipal services for a number of reasons, and the current mayor (now Canada’s longest-serving, at 13 terms) takes it as an article of faith that property taxes shall not rise for any reason (more or less), and he will likely be re-elected until he’s carried from his office….the other thing to note about Milton is that it also has a municipal tier above it (the regional municipality of Halton, which, pending the provincial review of regional muncipalities, may or may not change dramatically), so certain costs are shared out between municipalities large and small within the region (e.g., Halton Regional Police Service).”

Let’s try a different comparison method! How about similar-ish cities?

Sounds great! This time, let’s map Kingston against cities that might be less similar in population (we’re still excluding places that are less than 30% as big, or over 200% larger) but share most of Kingston’s key attributes:

  • A large and dynamic downtown
  • Multiples of various ‘city’ indicators – movie theatres, sports complexes, schools
  • At least one major educational institution (a university or two or more colleges)
  • Well developed tourism infrastructure

To make this list, I reached out to a number of people – Tourism Kingston, the City of Kingston, and Kingston Economic Development. They have a firm sense of the city and who our “competitors” are. With their help, I arrived at the following list:

  • Guelph
  • St. Catharines
  • Barrie
  • Sudbury
  • Kitchener
  • Waterloo
  • Muskoka
  • Cambridge
  • Sault Ste Marie
  • Peterborough
  • North Bay

And now: LET’S TALK TAX RATES! AGAIN!

MunicipalityTaxes per $1KSource
Waterloo$11.00https://www.waterloo.ca/en/government/resources/Documents/Finance/Property-tax-rates–-2018.pdf
Kitchener$11.30https://www.kitchener.ca/en/resourcesGeneral/Documents/FIN_REV_2018_Final-_Tax_Rate.pdf
Muskoka*$11.80https://www.huntsville.ca/en/council-and-administration/resources/Forms/2018-FINAL-TAX-RATES-SUMMARIZED_1_v2zoom.pdf
Cambridge$12.00https://www.cambridge.ca/en/your-city/resources/2018-Tax-Rates-Website.pdf
Barrie$12.70https://www.barrie.ca/Living/Housing-and-Property/Property-Taxes/Documents/2018%20Tax%20Rate%20Chart.pdf
Kingston**$13.60https://www.cityofkingston.ca/documents/10180/57933/2018+Tax+Rate+Schedule/8d71caf6-8606-4ba4-a999-509de328b1ba
Sault Ste Marie**$13.60http://saultstemarie.ca/Cityweb/media/Finance/Tax%20Rates/2018TaxRates.pdf
Peterborough$14.30https://www.peterborough.ca/Assets/City+Assets/Property+Tax/Documents/Tax+Rates/Tax+Rates+-+Final+-+2018.pdf
St. Catharines$14.30https://www.stcatharines.ca/en/governin/resources/Tax-Rates-2018-Final.pdf
Greater Sudbury$14.40https://www.greatersudbury.ca/city-hall/tax-services/2018-tax-rates/
North Bay$14.60https://www.cityofnorthbay.ca/cityhall/department/financial-services/property-tax-department/tax-information/
Guelph$17.10https://guelph.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018-final-tax-rates.pdf

*Muskoka is an interesting case, where it seems there’s a regional tax rate and then a town rate that attaches to that. Huntsville, one of the towns, comes in at the middle of the tax rates and incorporates the regional rate into its own. I think. It’s a bit hard to understand. It might be as high as $17.40 if Muskoka levies an additional bill to the town bill.

**A tie!

How does Kingston do in our second test?

Here, Kingston is just under halfway down the list – 6/12 (I’m awarding it the tie with Sault Ste-Marie, because who can honestly say they’d prefer the Sault?).

So in two tests vs. comparable cities or municipalities, Kingston is… average?

Slightly over in the first, slightly under in the second.

Comparisons by average home price

This is a toughy. It involves doing a ton of clicking around on the CREA National Price Map (https://www.crea.ca/housing-market-stats/national-price-map/), and even that gives huge areas, not specific municipalities. So “Kingston” covers what I think of as Kingston, but also includes Napanee, Gananoque, probably Yarker, possibly Pontypool, etc. “Oakville-Milton” is insane because it has a bunch of boroughs in its catchment and is even more expensive than the GTA region. I can’t find a source more granular than this.

So this really is fudging something in search of a better way of doing it, but without home price averages (ideally for single-home residences, to align with our tax category) for individual municipalities instead of huge catchments, it’s hard to find a better way.

So here are average real estate prices circa February 2019:

MunicipalityAverage real estate price
Barrie & District$458,600
Brantford$427,322
Cambridge$477,754
Durham Region$576,702
Greater Toronto$767,800
Guelph$527,300
Hamilton-Burlington$587,300
Kingston$366,334
Kitchener-Waterloo$490,484
London & St. Thomas$394,121
Niagara Region$393,500
Oakville-Milton$961,000
Ottawa$400,800
Peterborough/Kawarthas$435,964
Quinte$334,420
Sudbury$250,495
Thunder Bay$219,458
Windsor/Essex$313,146

They’re big regions, so let’s just grab three on either side for a field of seven:

Seven regions with comparable average real estate prices to Kingston

MunicipalityAverage real estate price
Sudbury$250,495
Windsor/Essex$313,146
Quinte$334,420
Kingston$366,334
Niagara Region$393,500
London & St. Thomas$394,121
Ottawa$400,800

And, I don’t know, the most comparable city in each region for…

LET’S TALK TAX RATES! YET AGAIN!

MunicipalityTaxes per $1KSource
Ottawa*,**$10.70https://globalnews.ca/news/4311558/property-land-transfer-taxes-cities-canada/
Kingston***$13.60https://www.cityofkingston.ca/documents/10180/57933/2018+Tax+Rate+Schedule/8d71caf6-8606-4ba4-a999-509de328b1ba
Trenton***$13.60***https://www.quintewest.ca/en/your-city-hall/resources/2018-Tax-Rates.pdf
St. Catharines$14.30https://www.stcatharines.ca/en/governin/resources/Tax-Rates-2018-Final.pdf
Greater Sudbury$14.40https://www.greatersudbury.ca/city-hall/tax-services/2018-tax-rates/
St. Thomas$15.30https://www.stthomas.ca/UserFiles/Servers/Server_12189721/File/City%20Hall/Treasury%20Department/Taxes/2018%20Tax%20Rates.pdf
Windsor$18.10https://www.citywindsor.ca/cityhall/Taxes–and-Assessment-/Documents/Tax-Documents/Residential%20Tax%20Rates.pdf

*I’m not thrilled about it either – it’s too big a city to be a valid comparator – but since Mike Harris jammed mega-mergers down everyone’s throat a while back, we don’t have the sensible comparator, Nepean, to stack against.

**Ottawa doesn’t post its tax rates! It’s the only city that doesn’t seem to do that.

***Another tie! Again, I’m going to give it to Kingston, because, I mean, Trenton.

Where does Kingston land this time?

When you stack the most comparable cities in the regions with the closest average real estate prices, Kingston is second lowest in a field of seven for tax rates.

Huh.

Yup.

That’s three different ways to compare Kingston fairly to other places and see how the tax rates stack up.

It is indeed.

And just one last time: Kingston doesn’t have amazingly high tax rates compared to similar municialities?

One last time: nope. Squarely in the mid-range. Low, by some measures.

So will these Actual Facts stop all the complaining?

Oh, my sweet summer child, no. Tax Whiners tend to wind up in a Venn diagram that strongly overlaps with people that say things like “the facts don’t care about your feelings,” so one might expect that exhaustively researched facts will keep them from repeatedly venting their feelings, but I’m… not optimistic. I’m probably going to get called a “Neo-Marxist” by people who don’t know what Marxism is. Yes, that’s a whole thing now.

Hey, that Internet Person is now going on about tax rates per capita / tax rates per income / tax rates per building / whatever.

Ugh. The ratio fallacy. It’s a kind of a combination of a lack of math and a not-great grasp on civics. That takes quite a bit of unpacking so I’ve put it on its own page.

1. If somebody’s answer to “should government be run like a business?” is anything other than “no, that is insane, a business’ ideal model is to maximize benefits for a tiny number of owners or shareholders, and a government’s ideal model is to maximize benefit for everyone, which is literally the exact opposite, so while it’s fine to say governments should pursue efficiency or not be wasteful, business is a ludicrous model, governments should be run like very good governments, and you should feel bad for even asking that question”, you can safely ignore anything they have to say about government, civics, economics and politics. Send them to this page and if they call you a “snowflake” or a “Neo-Marxist,” tell them I said they owe you a quarter.