Dougie Shirlaw explains why he is running for FOH election

Why are you looking to become a Foundation board member?

It's one of two things. I got involved early doors, even before the Foundation was born and Bidco and all that was happening. I just got in touch with whoever I knew, whatever network that I knew, and said, 'Look, put me in touch with these guys' and whatever. I tried to offer my help, and my colleague also tried to help in terms of, how do we get the message out? How do we start getting funding in to support the club? So 14 years later, I'm a little bit wiser. I've been in my job here now for about 16 years. So a bit more experience, I think I've got a little bit more savvy. I kind of know what's going on and what's going on in the background as well. So I don't think I'd be any mug in terms of not knowing what's happening.

When the election letter came out I thought, 'Maybe I could do that'. I spent a couple of days thinking about it. Then I spent one night actually not being able to sleep thinking, 'I could do this'. And then I was just about planning how I would do it.

Ultimately, the way I see things now, the Foundation at the beginning is a very different beast to what it is now. I think what it was, it was very much a reactive one to a particular situation. Now we need to pivot towards something that's a little bit more proactive and look at some of the threats that are maybe coming down the line that haven't been really addressed through the strategy that the Foundation has taken.

In terms of just the last thing you said there, looking at the threats coming down the line, what do you see those being?

I'm running on three basic themes. The themes are communication, technology and sustainability. And that last one is a little bit about environmental issues that could potentially get better. That's certainly not the kind of the main element there in terms of sustainability. It's about the funding and how we fund the club going forward.

Now, donors, Tony Bloom – all these things. Big numbers are being bandied around the place, that's all well and good, but some people who are already contributors to the Foundation might think, 'Oh, well, the club's got enough money, I don't need to contribute anymore'. So that's one thing.

I think they're not doing enough to actually encourage more people to pledge. It comes down to the communication part of it, which is that we need to know our audience. We need to know who's currently pledging, who's been pledging for forever, who's been pledging for the last five years, who's been pledging in between. And through that, you tailor your communication to those people. Also you need to understand the kind of demographics of that. If it's young people, you've got a core of young support there who may not be able to pledge money, but they want to be part of it. We need to be accessible to those people. We can't just turn them away. I know there used to be a 16-year-old limit on it, and when I initially started pledging, I was a tenner for me and a tenner for my son. But that came to a point that, well, actually, he can't get any of the benefits because he's under 18. So we need to start looking at that.

Communication has been poor. I mean, two examples. I've been to one plot ceremony. I've had two invitations to plot ceremonies yet, I'm on the fifth level of the rewards. Now, I know people who haven't had emails. You can get away with, 'It went in my spam folder' or whatever, but that's where the technology comes in. If you've got this new Shopify platform, you've got an account, go in and see where you are, request to attend or sign up to a mailing list for the next plot ceremony. Because the plot ceremonies seem to be just plucked out of thin air, and it's like a week before. Sometimes you only find out through the grapevine, so that's not great.

The second part is even just to do with the election. The names came out the week before the election started. Now, I would say half of those people on the list are disadvantaged because no indication of the voting period went out in the email. There's nothing on the page for you to log in. That sort of stuff's basic. The people who don't have any skin in the game within the club who are on that list, which is about half of us, we don't really have the chance to campaign properly. You set yourself up for a fall there, and they corrected it by the end of the day, but it doesn't help when I'm sitting here waiting for my voting form to come through and people are emailing me and going, 'I voted for you'. I'm like, what? I've not had mine through.

Then the realisation that the chance to campaign has practically gone when somebody says they've voted because even if they've not used all their three votes, you can't go back in and cast your spares.

That communication period should have been a week before: this is what's going to happen. Week one: nominees, it's going to be published on their website. Period is going to be November 1 until December 1 at 5pm. There'll be a chance to set it all out so people have that awareness up front. I'm going to find it hard to pick up votes because people don't know how to engage at that point.

What would you like the communication to look like? How would you like it done?

You need a structure to your weekly output. Social media doesn't work in a way that you just broadcast and then that's it. You have to engage with people, you have to start conversations. I know in some forms of social media it's very difficult to engage with people without people losing their rag. So structure. Pre-match, what would it look like? You would engage with a mascot, for example – get their story. You'd engage with the ultras – get their story. Engage with people who kind of have been coming here for years and getting those sorts of stories out through the week. At the weekend, leave it to the club to do all the match stuff because you don't want to start obscuring the kind of final goal at the end of the week.

Engagement is key. So how do you get people involved? You have to have consistency as well. I mean, the Foundation man of the match, that only pops up when the team have won. Keep a structure and then people will buy into that structure. Bring that kind of real-life storytelling into it.

You can do as much as you can with your own audience and that Foundation audience, but a lot of it will rely on the club being able to give you some content too. It's just to be a wee bit more tied up and a wee bit more structured. That's what I would do.

And going back to something you mentioned earlier about the data side and using all the data sets that exist to help make better decisions. Can you expand on that and what you'd hope to introduce or improve or what it would look like?

Well, it's not introduce or improve. If the right platform is being used, I think it is now Shopify. I don't know if Shopify is doing all the communications or whether it's another tool that they're using. For example, Shopify can tell you the best time to send out an email because ultimately it knows when it sends emails out to people, what time people will open it up, when they open it up, how long they read it for. So the type of emails that you send out, it could be for the plot ceremony or it could be requests for people to provide the blog for next week's game, for example. You have to look at the amount of time people have opened it up. It's looking at how people engage with and how many times they open that.

Within the email, when you send it out, if you've got links back into the website, you can then monitor how many people are actually coming back to the website. But even then, even that communication part that's going out, there has to be that kind of call to arms, that call to action. Bring back people to the website – ultimately you want to get people to pledge. Now, pledge is one thing, but also donating is another.

I was reading the thread earlier on about people who are abroad. That's a difficult one. People want to be part of it, but they're arm's length. How do you engage with them? There'll be things that you can do which don't cost money, but will give value to people, or how people will value more. If you don't pledge for a certain period of time, it's like being elected to this board, you have to be a member of the Foundation pre-September. Similarly, you should only be able to get certain rewards if you've donated a sum or a total sum, if they are one-off donations. But equally for people abroad, their needs will be different from people who are in Edinburgh, or people who travel within Scotland. So you need to look at that and give them something else. Just off the top of my head here, HeartsTV comes on quarter to match day, so full video and audio. Give them 15 minutes or 10 minutes before where they get exclusive content. You can speak to people who are abroad and can be brought up to date with things that they might not be aware of. So it's just a little bit of extra content that they might not be part of.

Again, it relies on the club to provide that content. I think one of the criticisms I've seen from somebody who's going through the election as well saying that the marketing team have found content difficult to come by. So that needs to change.

The other thing I took from your address that found interest or looking for you to speak around was the Foundation should be looking at improving the democratic governance. What would you like to see improved?

That's a really easy one. Minutes at the meeting, you can redact comments that are... well, you agree in advance what can and can't be shared. But at the very least, you share something. If they're meeting month to month, then there should be minutes published. I work in the public sector. At the moment, you publish minutes from meetings within the month of the meeting taking place. It doesn't need to be War And Peace. These were the things that were discussed, these were the decisions that were taken, these were the analytics that we discussed. Here's the things that have been a success, here's the things that we're going to try, here's the things that didn't work out.

These will spark ideas in people who are reading it or people who are interested in it. It's all very well saying we need volunteers, but you need volunteers in a specific capacity. But those specific capacities are only identified once you start finding out what it is you actually need to do. We need to go back and revisit what it is that we now need to do as a Foundation. And what skills do we need to do that? Who can we get in? Because for a fan base the size of us, I'm pretty sure we can cover most things without having to go out and pay for it.

What's the most important thing that you see for yourself bringing to the Foundation or what you'd like to achieve?

I'd really want to be the conduit between fans and the Foundation. I think because that has been lacking, it goes back to the creative ideas, it goes back to what things could you provide that are of low cost, but also value to people who are engaged. That transparency is one thing, but being available to talk to fans – I think every club has a liaison officer who goes to away games. We could have somebody similar for the Foundation who is the point of contact not just away games, but at home games. Volunteers can pick up the slack initially and if it becomes successful then you look at whether that becomes a part-time job for somebody.

We talk about bringing fans in closer to the Foundation and the club. A wee bit behind the scenes sort of thing. Just that little bit of closeness so they can feel part of it. There's so many other clubs out there. We're not just the one fan ownership club that's out there. There's plenty of others across Europe which I'd love to start speaking to. I'd love to see what type of things they're doing. What are things that work for them? We shouldn't just operate within the bubble that we currently exist in. We can learn more from other people than we already have. But equally it would be reciprocal to being asked those similar questions by other organisations or clubs or fan-based supports. Because after all, we're doing it for the love of football. People don't like the corporate nature of big business getting involved and we need to just make sure that the roots and the communities that have formed this part of football over the ages are retained and essentially modernised for the present day.