Charity web managers sceptical about walking the web talk

Here's an interesting example of how, in my mind,  an online discussion about which online tools to use reveals some deeper issues about our not-very-online civil institutions.
The discussion has been taking place on an e-mail and web forum for the managers of UK charity websites, and others interested in nonprofit technology. Technically it is a Yahoo group and you can ask to join here.
Like many similar e-mail lists, messages from group members sent to the central address starburst out to everyone else. Messages can also be viewed and posted through the web, and there are other facilities for a calendar, file storage, polls, photos and a database. If you are not-very-tech that probably seems more than enough - but it is a long way back from the sort of things you can do these Web 2.0 days with blogs, wikis and other social media (about which, more here).
Some charities are very sophisticated in their use of social media, as Steve Bridger chronicles so well at nfp 2.0, and have New Media Departments. The head of one of these dropped an e-mail into the charity web forum suggesting that perhaps it was time to move from the "web 0.1" Yahoo group to an online community website that would show others in the charity field what was possible as well as continuing discussion and providing losts of useful tools and resources. Sort of walk-the-web-talk.
In addition he said that a number of other New Media types in the field were keen, and had started organising a group.
This produced a flurry of responses, which think I can summarise as follows:

• If it ain't broke, don't fix it. We get good discussion here, and if we move we could lose a lot of less sophisticated users.
• A mailing list/web forum is OK but we should move to Google groups because they have more facilities these days.
• We should leave Yahoo and Google because they are both subject to various calls for boycott because of their behaviour in other countries.
• I can set up something using Open Source software - but I don't want to supersede existing owners/moderators
• Don't set up another group, because we are already doing that. I know you haven't heard anything about it, but we haven't put anything online yet.
• New media in charities is a very small interest group. Most people are in IT or communication sections.
• Many small charities have only one person working on this, if that.
• Techies serve fundraisers, communications and other interests in charities - shouldn't we align with them.
• Maybe it is time to set up a professional body.
• And eventually - let's join everything up - isn't that what the web is about. (Good conclusion).

The nature of e-mail group discussions is that they can get a bit messy, with people dragging out their hobby horses for a good gallop, but in this case there were a lot of useful exchanges. I have a lot of sympathy with the original proposal as a way of both learning and showcasing. At the same time I know how difficult it is to move your online space. The discussion group for online community managers, emint, is still a Yahoo group, despite great efforts to move to something else ... and these are people who often run sites with millions of online users. The list for UK Circuit Riders (nonprofit tech-support people) has even less features, yet works perfectly well for its purpose. There are calls to put stuff on a wiki, but that never quite takes off.
In the US there are far more nonprofit tech bloggers, who bring their discussions together in public at a multi-blog blog called Netsquared. That seems to me to be a good solution, but only works if people are bloggers and understand the social media world ... which rather gets us back to the starting point.
The discussion fascinated me for a couple of reasons that go beyond the use of particular online tools.
First, it reminds me that just because people find benefit in talking to others in the same space online, it doesn't mean they want to organise behind some joint endeavour. They may, but it takes a lot of focussed discussion to achieve that. UK Circuit Riders and emint both have organisations as well as forums, but it took a lot of volunteer effort.
Secondly - and obversely - discussions around tools may yield some insights into attitudes to ourselves, how we organise, and the wider world. Here's my thoughts on that second point ... taking and rather extending the charity web forum discussion.
Charities are not (or should not be) primarily for the benefit of those working for them. They are for the beneficiaries of the charity, and should be looking for ways to campaign, promote, fundraise, provide services, in pursuit of their cause. If social media offers new ways to achieve that end, it is well worth the investment. (And if you doubt the power of social media, here's how one blogger, Beth Kanter, used it to raise $100,000). So - a New Media Department can help charities look outwards, as they should.
On the other hand, tying online tools into "the ways we have always done things" runs the risk of stifling the innovation any organisation needs in today's competitive world. That's why I'm not too taken with arguments about sitting with IT or communications departments ... isn't that a bit like saying "we are the meetings specialists, and we have to sit with the conference organisers"? These days we recognise we all have to be good - well, better - at face-to-face engagement. So with online. It shouldn't be with one traditional department.
The suggestions for creating a professional body ring warning bells too. In my head I hear "nobody really respects us as much as they do academics/lawyers/accountants, so we should have qualifications and an Institute". Errr, isn't the point of the newer, participative, cross-boundary world that we want to escape those labels?
I'm really not suggesting the web forum members were taking these positions ... but they are fairly common among nonprofits, in my experience. I'm using my analysis to provoke some thinking and, ideally, further conversation. So why not just post it back into the e-mail/web discussion? Answer: for reasons that these days I spend quite a lot of time blogging, but very little in e-mail/web groups.

• Groups aren't good for substantial pieces - people want to skip through e-mail and respond quickly.
• If you do write something of substance it will be seen by a limited number of people, and can't be linked for wider discussion, unlike a blog.
• It can be difficult to follow threads of discussion, because other topics crop up.
• You can't "be yourself" in quite the same way.
• You can't put what you are saying in the context of other things you have written.
• You can't add images, audio, video.
• You can't tag.
• ... in short, it is just so frustrating when you have been in the other Web 2.0 place, and so doesn't feel worth the effort.

As I write this, I spot that knowledge management guru Dave Snowden muses on his blog Should I give up on listserves?... so feel in good company. I'll drop a link to this post into the charity web forum as a matter of courtesy. I'll be surprised and delighted if anyone responds here <gentle provocation>.

Technorati Tags: nptech, nptechuk, socialtech

Comments

[Beth]

THis probably will seem odd .. but the discussion re: listservs is hitting me ... I'm thinking about Nancy's session recently about the new rules for online communities.
I'm also thinking about tagging communities and some social interaction stuff that is in my mind, but not necessarily the community leaders. Would love your two cents.
http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/2007/03/youre_doing_tha.html

[Kevin Harris]

David - I wouldn't want to lose sight of the first of your two points, (the one which you don't unpack): "just because people find benefit in talking to others in the same space online, it doesn't mean they want to organise behind some joint endeavour."

This is a crucial point that is well-put. As you yourself have argued often enough I think, we need a mix that accommodates different temperaments as well as different purposes.

For a real-world parallel, I've recently been interviewing people about the sociability of dog-walking: one woman said to me, 'it gives me an opening into the community. I don't have to join a club, I don't have to turn up at a certain time, I don't have to have a commitment...'

k

[Bertie]

Hi David,

I’m the one who originally suggested a web based community in the forum you mention.

I would like to explain the thinking behind my idea. But before, I need to point out that the messages posted on the board are different from the positive and encouraging messages sent to me directly by e-marketing managers, consultants, web agencies etc. Clearly, people know the first rule of the internet: never argue on a public forum…

Over the past 10 months, I have been invited to speak at several PR and Marketing conferences (I bet it's my French accent!) and attended a few as a delegate. Being able to speak alongside high profile brands made me realise that the charity sector can be at the forefront of New Media and that commercial organisations can learn from our experience just as much as we can learn from theirs.
On a few occasions, I was approached by charities who told me they were facing the following issues:
• e-fundraising, e-campaigning etc. implemented without the web team being involved
• or reversely web team not willing to innovate and contribute to the work of other teams
• lack of (recognition of) in-house expertise
• lack of vision from senior management teams
• lack of resources
All of the above leading to frustrations and misunderstanding of what defines, what we can still call, New Media. For many charities, New Media is still not recognised as discipline of its own.

I am lucky. I work for a charity who believes in New Media (Senior Management Team and Trustees included). I have 14 posts in my team. I didn’t have to fight for them. And we are not a big charity with big budgets. We are about 250, which means that just over 5.5% of all staff work in New Media. I have what I need so why should I bother trying to convince other people this is the way forward?
The reason I work in this sector is not just because it’s a job. I am passionate about what I do and believe in sharing information and knowledge.
On several occasions, I went to speak to charities directly and showed them the model of "in-house digital agency" I have been implementing at Breast Cancer Care. There seemed to be a genuine interest to stay in touch, share case studies, templates etc. So I thought it could be a good idea to set up a community site. By that I don’t mean an Institute of New Media Practitioners of the Not for Profit Sector in the UK. I mean a well designed site reflecting an innovative sector with useful tools, promotion and information sharing that could benefit all charities (from high profile to small local charities).

This project has generated more debate and interests that I had envisaged. This is really positive and hopefully will help make it happen.

The argument “are we Comms” is interesting. I don’t know one Press Office in the charity sector in the UK who has press officers sitting in different departments. The standard model seems to be a central press office with all the press officers (celebs, fundraising, core charity activity etc.). And that makes perfect sense for Comms… So why not for New Media? Why should "e-specialisms" be managed by different teams, working in isolation?

Bertie

[Steven Clift]

Cross-posted here - with embedded links: http://www.dowire.org/notes/?p=341

...

Should I post here with a comment or should I use my own blog?

With a comment, I am essentially a second class participant, while on my own blog I a member of the “popular in-crowd.”

This is why e-mail lists still dominated. They have strong identity - your e-mail address. Conversation is two-way - no one is technically superior. This is also why despite the great nptech blogs in the U.S. you mention, most of our equivalent conversations to those UK are thriving on e-lists like NTEN Discuss and onlinefacilitation.

If everyone had a blog, then e-mail lists would have less currency. Most people do not have their own work life blogs, except for us “experts” who don’t fear the online version of public speaking. More should blog, but the laundry list of Web 2.0 tools (see David’s Wiki Carnival on social media) is boggling to most people except for us rare seekers. I think of e-mail as Internet 1.0 - when pre-web you had an identity and highly interactive exchange made public through e-mail lists - not as “web 0.1.” In fact, Web 2.0 is bringing us back to the spirit of Internet 1.0 (I still remember visiting all of the web sites in the early nineties via Telnet and thinking how much less interactive it seemed than e-mail and newsgroups.)

While E-Democracy.Org used tagging and a “mashup” with our Voter Voices experiment, push our project blog, and even use a public wiki for drafting grant applications and collaborative local election link directories, we focus on technology choice and reaching people where they are with our discussion forums.

Over two years ago we made a big leap off Mailman and YahooGroups to the open source GroupServer platform. In short, it encourages equitable e-mail and web participation in the same open space. The problem with all of these new Web 2.0 tools is the huge diffusion of audience and attention.

This diffusion is OK when you have a large audience and aggregated channels (like Beth Kanter’s curating of the nptech tag stream or my promotion of the e-democracy tag), but my sense is that most people don’t know where it is worth replying. Ultimately, most folks need a sense of audience to motivate a reply - hence the lack of comments on most blogs or contributions to smaller wiki efforts. This is probably why most blogs (even if most are personal diaries not expertise blogs) are not very interactive. Here is an interesting recent example - TheOpenTheHouse.com project blog (with lots of Web 2.0 advocates involved) has few comments yet when the blog posts are forwarded into their Google Group (similar to GroupServer) the discussion takes off. I say location, location, location.

My Advice

So strategically, my advice to advocates for Web 2.0 use in non-profits/NGOs is to figure out how to fundamentally integrate those tools into everyday e-mail usage. Do not settle for simple e-mail notices that say “come to the website for X, Y, or Z.” E-mail equity means you can make a new post, share a comment, edit a page, tag something, rate something, etc. all from your life’s universal aggregator - your e-mail in and outbox.

On that note, I’d love to have other non-profits join us investing in the most advanced GPL open source tool for equitable (and therefore effective) group communication - GroupServer. (If you are part of the Drupal hegemony take a look at Organic Groups with OG2List or if you want something free with ads Google Groups is eating YahooGroups’ lunch.)

@ E-Democracy.Org

We are thinking about how to introduce “citizen media” aspects into our local community Issues Forums. We have deep daily ties with hundreds of citizens in 8 local communities in Minnesota, England, and soon New Zealand. Hosted by OnlineGroups.Net we have access to GroupServer features in development including an innovative files feature that encourages you to not just tag files, but more importantly attach them to topics - via e-mail or uploaded via the web view. Instead of e-mailing the full file out, a simple link is included in a group e-mail and the web message view simply integrates the files in discussion topics and via a traditional file listing. I also have a proposal out there for automated thumbnail display of uploaded/e-mail attached images. Imagine this discussion on graffiti in Minneapolis with photos e-mailed in from mobile phones!

Taking this a step further, since each group has a native ATOM feed (like RSS), all GroupServer needs to add is the ability to “ping” when a new topic (or subject) is started. Technically speaking you would now have a massive multi-editor blog that Technorati and Google Blog Search will slurp up regularly (they already do some extent). So now we have an a e-list, a linear web forum (like PHPBB) and a group blog.

Down the road we hope to attract some donations or funding to add some further Web 2.0 integration:

1. Video and Audio Display - A simple idea from some WordPress plugins. See a link to YouTube, have GroupServer embed the video automatically. Upload or link to an MP3 audio file, insert an Flash-based audio player. Both right in the topic/post web view.

2. Recommend Posts - We’ve always been nervous about rating tools that might be used by a political majority to drive out the minority - diversity of voices in our political forums comes first, however we’ve reached a point despite our hands on forum facilitation (not moderation) that we need to add the positive incentive of an even larger audience for participant posts to encourage higher quality contributions as well as give less frequent visitors quick access to the “must read” contributions. So we need a feature where people can “digg” it from either their e-mail, the web, or the feed with one click. Then it will be up to us to display this “best of” content in a profile way.

3. Citizen Media or “News” - Our roots are in many-to-many citizen engagement, but increasingly we see mindshare competition from citizen media efforts, many of which base interactivity on produced “news” or “content” or “commentary.” I am inspired by a number of “placeblogs” including Griff Wigley’s work with LocallyGrownNorthfield and his previous work with Northfield.Org. However, there is something about having an editor on top or content above conversation which seems too centralizing to me. I guess blogs are democratizing media and national political punditry BUT in smaller places they are encouraging new or reinforced elites (my popular crowd comment above). One to some blogging simply feels so much less democratic to me than well functioning many-to-many online spaces. Then again, if someone does citizen media right (and can subsidize it with time, energy, or advertising) who wouldn’t want more of it in their town … as long as it is complemented by many-to-many spaces. :-)

To flip this upside down, I’d like us to develop features that encourage “news” or well developed content to rise up from the forum into a “citizen media” space on the site. Tagging a post “news” might be a simple step along leading to highlighted web display. ATOM feeds based tags assigned to posts might be what we need. Then I’d add enhanced display of attached photos (e-mailed/uploaded) with captions within the story. (Wouldn’t it be nice if below the subject line in a mail program there was a line for tags - although we could tell e-mail publishers that the first line with “tag: news, event, picture, commentary, report, etc.” their post will get processed uniquely and displayed specially.)

4. Mashup Display - I’d love to have a Minneapolis Today page generated automatically along with a daily e-mail version sent to our forum members to prompt forum discussion. Our forums are meant to be at the cross-roads of local public life and not positioned as an alternative or a privatized online shopping mall (what commercial forums are in many ways). With Voter Voices, we used the basic embedding tools of Flickr and YouTube and web feeds for Del.icio.us based on the tag “mnpolitics.” Each of our local communities could adopt and promote an unique tag like “minneapolisissues” or “newhamissues” as well as monitor organic tag combos (e.g. minneapolis, politics) that seem to gather relevant content. Spreading group tagging behavior to events with Upcoming.Org and grabbing search results to feed content from Google News and for blogs both Technorati and Google Blog search and we really could display “today” for our local community. I want a feature in GroupServer (or another service we link to) that automates this by allowing our local forum volunteers to simply “just set it and forget it.”

I can go on, but rather than embrace a further diffusion in local participation and lose the “there, there” that defines us, I want to bring Web 2.0 into the heart of working online communities - into equitable two-way spaces. I resist the technological determinism I see coming from tool fanatics based on hyper-individualist models that use the terminology of national democratization that in reality make things less democratic when applied locally or in smaller groups. Yes, thought leadership and well-edited experience sharing via blogging needs to be encouraged at all levels, but turning aside “old-fashioned” e-mail will drive a wedge into effective online communities of practice designed to reach out beyond the always-on broadband crowd to average Internet users. Anything that limits or removes the ability for someone to simply press “reply-to-all” to be part of public life, to publish, is a democratic step backward.

If any of these approaches interests you or you want to see some of these tools get built contact me about how to help: clift@publicus.net

Perhaps you have better ideas than those listed above that will help implement a realist perspective that reaches people online where they are and moves them collective baby steps into effective Web 2.0 features. Expecting mass conversion to new technologies that require people (who aren’t paid to be there) to be proactive or pulled continuously is counter to the productivity generated through invasive, accessible, and naturally cluttered voluntary e-mail experiences.

Steven Clift
publicus.net

[David Wilcox]

Wow! Thanks Steven for such a terrific exposition of the power of well-managed and crafted e-mail groups. I take many of your points.
Personally I find there's nothing like a friendly e-mail group where there is a shared set of interests. On the other hand, if you want to cross over some boundaries, be a little provocative, embed some links, it may not be welcome. Maybe I'm just an outsider ...