Location: Washington DC

Topic: Build and Nurture Global Online Communities

Description: Is creating a global online community important to reaching and engaging with your association’s constituents or members? Are you interested in using an online tool, but have yet to try it yourself? This session will explore why several associations have chosen to use virtual options for building their international communities and what they have learned. Learn how virtual options will help your organization engage internationally, and discover some of the available tools and partnerships for building communities. You’ll also take part in an open discussion to learn what fellow attendees have experienced.

Related Links:

• ASAE International
• Presentation slides

As a community organizer and network weaver myself, I am incredibly excited by the #OccupyWallStreet movement that started in New York just over three months ago now (on September 17th) in response to a failing federal economy and political process that impact local, national, and international markets. In less than a month, over 1,700 other cities started Occupy events – both in solidarity to the thousands protesting around the clock in New York’s financial district, and with a loud voice that these issues are not unique to the US. The “leaderless” organizing of the Occupy Wall Street movement has helped avoid strategic arrests or censorship but has also prompted a powerful use of social technologies.

Online Homebase

Over the past few years, the use of social technologies during disaster response has become a central component to news and information delivery. One key element is the use of an online homebase. We are now seeing this put to great use with #OWS. There are many free online website and content creation tools available. Creating a space where you can collect and aggregate the news, content, and updates of your movement is important for people to better understand, follow, and join you. It doesn’t have to be fancy (remember: less is more) – it just needs to pull all the pieces together for your community.

Brought to you Live

The power of “now” is what makes something go from news, to breaking news. Thankfully for members of #OWS, there are various tools to livestream events, just from your mobile phone. The livestream – whether it’s video, audio, or just text – can be embedded in your online homebase and shared across social networks. The updates and first-hand accounts bring attention to a movement and generate more participation.

Personalize It

The most successful fundraising campaigns, advocacy efforts, and even personal experiences center on one person, one animal, one story, especially when trying to support a huge, faceless issue. #OWS has made the economy and political process a personal issue, inviting people around the US and the world to put their story on paper and share a photo of themselves with the story online. This level of personal connection inspires sharing and participation by those on the ground, and those following remotely.

How To: Use Tech to Organize Today

1. Build your online homebase with a wiki, a website (like WordPress.com or Google Sites), or a blog (like Tumblr or Posterous).

2. Keep people connected to live video (like Livestream or Vimeo), regular audio updates (like CinchCast or Audioboo), or live feeds of text from a Twitter hashtag or an open chat like CoverItLive.

3. Invite everyone to join the movement by sharing pictures, stories, and signs to spread your message (try Flickr or Tumblr).

Principles of Community Organizing

There are many proven practices and strategies for engaging with communities and building up participation, whether around an event, a campaign, or a cause. Here are the five core principles as we see them from our work:

1. Focus on Shared Goals and Shared Ownership

First, identify what your community wants to do – what it is coming together around, whether it’s an event, an action, or a movement.  Next, identify what you want to do, what your organizational goals are.  Those two “wants to do” will overlap and that gray area is the sweet spot. It’s important to remember that not everything your organization wants to do or achieve, matches up with with your community wants to do, and vice versa. The key is that that’s okay!  Maybe you provide services, and your community doesn’t want to be providing those services, but they are happy you are doing so. And maybe the community wants to endorse a specific candidate, and your organization doesn’t. But both the community and your organization want to see certain laws passed, things improved, programs created or groups supported.  That’s the sweet spot where you can focusing your calls to action and community engagement.

2. Transparency

Be transparent with everything: in goals, activities, membership, successes, challenges, issues within the community, and so on.

This also means don’t build it in secret and then “launch” it  – regardless of whether it’s an online space, a program or a campaign. If it is really something that is coming from the community, you can’t just take the idea and run; you’ll want to co-create it from idea to implementation.

Be sure you lead by example:  interact with the community the way you want other organizations and the community members to do.  It’s like the golden rule for community engagement.  I like this picture for this point because often mother ducks will bring up the rear, supporting the ducklings and swimming along side them, instead of shooting ahead and expecting them to keep up.

3. Go Where the People Are

Different platforms have different users – be sure to do your homework by reviewing statistics and reports from various social media tools to know who’s really using them, and ask your community where they want to engage with you.

Being active in the community leads to organizational engagement, creates community, builds followers. If you know your followers are into LBS, then be in that community and reward their activity in unique ways, such as check in 3 times and get an unique BK Art Star Badge.

Leverage the power of the online communities and networks, such as with Tweetsgiving. Highlight the work of the community on the home page of the campaign or website.

4. Cultivate Leaders

Leadership development is incredibly important. You don’t actually want to be the one maintaining the engagement forever – if the community can take over your role, it’s a sign it’s not just sustainable but thriving!

Striving to be replaced can be a tough one for most everyone. It isn’t exactly in our nature but it is key to the ethos of a community builder. One way to work on supporting your community to not need you managing the program, platform, or whatever else is to encourage interaction without you. This touches back on letting the community know itself. If you’re making connections and supporting conversations across the network, you’re helping the community create strong ties that will not require your time and energy to maintain.

Striving to be replaced also means rewarding and spotlighting leaders. Positive reinforcement is one of the best leadership development practices you can build into your work across the board, whether it’s online or offline, on your facebook page, newsletter, annual fundraiser or neighborhood events.

Lastly, be active in sharing your toolbox. You can model behavior all you want but if no one can tell what tools you are using to be so successful, there’s no way they can jump in and help man the ship.

5. Know Your Community

Part of doing this well is letting your community know itself. That means don’t take credit where it isn’t yours, highlight the leaders and contributors in the community, and making connections across the network. It also means letting community members connect directly with one another, without going through you.

Knowing your community also means knowing your role in the ecosystem. It’s important, as I mentioned earlier in the strategy steps, to identify what your role or roles are as the organization and stick to them. Once you start spreading out, you squeeze out room for others to grow and develop or even to explore what’s possible. Not to mention create far more for yourself!

Knowing your community also means you help it grow. Sometimes that means making mistakes. Hopefully they are tiny and harmless, and that you’re there to learn alongside the community.  But, it’s just to say that you are in it just like the community is, and not everything we try in life works smoothly. Instead, design for growth and sustainability from the start with lots of room for feedback, evaluation and iterations to continue developing and redeveloping. The best time to fail is early and openly – that way you can learn and build to move forward.

Case Studies

Check out the slides below to examine four case studies of these principles in action:

Resources & Links

• http://socialbysocial.com
• http://wearemedia.org
• http://www.communityorganizer20.com/2011/05/03/how-to-create-love-online-case-study/
• http://www.communityorganizer20.com/2011/02/24/follow-the-leader-innovative-social-media-activism/
• https://amysampleward.org/2010/05/07/guest-post-on-online-community-report-sustainable-community-building/
• https://amysampleward.org/2009/08/06/online-community-building-gardening-vs-landscaping/
• https://amysampleward.org/2011/01/20/diy-community-engagement-metrics/
• https://amysampleward.org/2011/05/18/crowdsourcing-vs-community-sourcing-whats-the-difference-and-the-opportunity/

Get the full archive here!

This month’s chat focused mainly on sharing lessons and examples from the 2011 Nonprofit Technology Conference, which took place in Washington, DC, last week. Some of the topics from the chat include:

• Engaging specific ethnic groups/communities
• Using content to fuel community engagement
• Engagement for advocacy vs non-advocacy organizations
• Hyper-local communities
• Contests to encourage content sharing
• Social media in CRMs

It was a rich conversation, so I haven’t tried to pull out specific quotes. You can read through the full archive here.

Join the next #CommBuild chat:

• Date: Thursday, April 28th
• Time: 4 pm EST (1 hour)
• Topic: Community Building, of course!
• Location: Launch the chat here (not live until the chat starts)

About the CommBuild Chat:

These monthly chats originated out of the #4Change network and are open to anyone interested in learning and sharing about building community, on and offline, with the use of social media or other technology tools. If you have a topic or question you’d like to explore in an upcoming chat, feel free to let me know anytime!

Hope to have you join us in April!

Get the chat archive!

The conversation in this month’s chat focused on these questions:

1. How to best stay motivated and motivate your community team. It’s important and not always discussed. The result is often community managers having to motivate themselves AND their community. Not a small feat. from @vrhinesmith
2. Question 2: How do we lower the barriers to entry for participation in our (our = whatever your community is) community? from Anna McDonnell
3. What are the best strategies for when your client/manager/boss doesn’t understand social media, or you have a different opinion about how to use it? from @kg

This month’s chat had so many great examples shared and here are just a few:

Laura Kimball: In regards to internal motivation – I try to recognize someone’s success — like share a screen shot of a comment they left that drove positive engagement, results, etc — to show what other people have done, their success, etc. Almost like an internal leader board to say “good job” and inspire someone else to do something similar.

kristy @kg: Saw this today/thought good way to encourage participation, while recognizing others >> Replied to comments from @calipidder @dubid0 & @mtsquirrel on my post about flow http://bit.ly/e8U9d0#climbing #sports #banfffilmfestival

Rabia @realize_ink: We’ve highlighted rockstar community members by creating a FB tab dedicated to them. Kind of like the posters we all made for child of the week in kindergarten. It was fun and done with their friends + fam, so it was a surprise for them, too. Great response from the community.

Sue_Anne: We also share “success stories” on our site and are trying to find ways to do this more — even little things community members are doing in their local area.

Debra Askanase: I know that my blogger colleague W. Ching Ya has a “member of the month” that she highlights on a custom FB tab. Here it is: http://www.facebook.com/#!/SocialBloggingTracker?sk=app_4949752878. Think it’s along @realize_ink’s idea

Claire Sale: When I worked for the Red Cross, we did a daily social media update to the comms dept, senior leadership, and anyone else who wanted to receive the info. The update included all of the social media mentions about the Red Cross (the good, the bad, and the ugly) that were relevant to our work. It really caught people’s eyes.

The Ning issue touches on a topic that’s very important to me and I’ve written about a number of times, including: Letting Technology Lead, Why we need a new way of building, How our tools define ‘community’ and Ning saying No to free networks.  As all of these posts mention, the underlying issue here isn’t whether Ning was the best tool on the Web or not, in fact it has nothing to do with that. As community organizers, campaigners, and organizations working to better the world, we know that the tactics and tools we use can dramatically impact our success, and if the tools we have aren’t accessible and aren’t in our control we put ourselves in a position to negatively impact our own success.

Earlier this Fall, I got a message from Laura on the Chain Reaction network (on Ning) that told members the group would be moving to another platform. I followed up with Laura and have her case study below.

Case study: Chain Reaction

The Chain Reaction network is the online space for those who attend or are interested in the Chain Reaction event, an annual conference in London focused on gathering changemakers and igniting more projects and impact. The group was originally set up on Ning, and with the change to a paid-service, Community Links (the organization behind Chain Reaction) helped the network transition to Grou.ps. They did so publicly with a blog post to the community as well as messages to the members of the network directly through the Ning platform.

Read the blog post about the transition here.

Interview

I asked Laura Hyde from Community Links to provide some additional information about the decision and process:

How did your community respond to the news that ning would no longer be free?
There were mixed responses. Generally I think most could understand why ning would begin charging, but for many community organisations such as ours it’s often a struggle to find the ££’s to pay for extra services.

How did your team decide on a new platform?
We tested a few different platforms such as wordpress, webs, social go etc. We also consulted with people in the Chain Reaction network. Grou.ps seemed to be the best in terms of functionality suited to our needs.

What did you like best about Ning previously?
It was easy to update / add content to. Feedback from network members was that it was pretty easy to use as well.

Is that functionality available on grou.ps?
Yes, although grou.ps can be a little clunkier. For example, I find that changes that I make don’t appear straight away which is a little frustrating. The added advantage of grou.ps is that there is a wiki and polls feature that isn’t available on ning. You also don’t have to pay to have a custom domain name as you do with ning.

What was the work load like to switch?
Very easy. In fact, I thought it might take a day or two to transfer all the files over from ning to grou.ps – in fact it only took about an hour which left me a little unprepared (I hadn’t updated the CR blog in time!)

And the catch 22!
As I was posting this today, I visited the new gou.ps network for Chain Reaction and was greeted with a message that the group was temporarily unavailable. I messaged Laura on twitter and here’s her response (read from the bottom up):

So the platform that touted itself as the free alternative to Ning is now no longer free either!

Phoenix or Fizzle

So, where does this leave us? Where are we now? Have most groups stayed on Ning and found a way to deal with the charges, or have most groups, like Laura’s, moved on? And, perhaps more importantly, have we as a sector learned anything from this?

Examples like the Diaspora project saw overwhelmingly positive responses from the community at large, with people donating more than twice what was requested – many obviously hoping to be early adopters of what they hoped would be a revolution on the Web, but others hoping that by contributing they could have a bit of say in where it all goes.

Is Ning going to be a phoenix – rising out of the backlash and outcry about changing to a paid-service to become the platform of choice and provide users with access and ownership in it’s future? Or will it fizzle into the growing ocean of tools that put all users at a loss from lack of control and transparency?

What do you think? What’s your experience so far? Where are you looking to build?

Review the full chat transcript!

Questions in the November chat:

1. Is it important to discern/clarify what a community expects to get from their participation in the community? Or is it OK if everyone is in it for different reasons? (From Laura Norvig)
2. What are examples of, best practices for, or learnings from engaging community members around various kinds of media, like videos and pictures instead of text? (From Mazarine Tryez)
3. What are online communities good for?

Community accountability:

Something I am really interested in is the way that we can support each other in growing and improving by being open about what we want to do and holding each other accountable as a community to be better all the time. At the end of today’s chat, I asked participants what they will share or do because of the chat and I’m sharing those highlights here:

• Laura Norvig: Storing up some ideas in my toolbox for future launch of online discussion boards. Posting more video to Facebook.
• Shalena Broadnax: Echoing Green is operating in a relatively new space for us—deepening our online community engagement. Setting expectations with our community will be key in the development of our new platform.
• Bonnie Koenig: The need to make discussions about technology to all members of the community.
• Ash Shepherd: I really liked the discussion around intentionally building flexibility into community expectations.

And as for me? I’m hoping to be more intentional and thoughtful in planning, promoting and executing the chats to build on the successful and rich conversations so far to make these community activities as positive as can be! I hope you’ll help me

Join the December Chat!

For details of the December 16th chat and for full archives of previous chats, visit the CommBuild chat page.

Recap: October

Get the October Chat archive.

Some of the examples and recommendations from this month’s chat included:

• UN Food&Ag Org (FAO) has done a great job with their Share Fairs – sharing the discussions and training on and offline. You can look at #sfaddis to see what they did recently from Addis Ababa in Ethiopia
• TechSoup Global has an upcoming Digital Story Telling contest, getting orgs to put together 60 second vid’s about what they do/who they are. We’re leading up to it providing webinars and chats, but will be hosting an awards mixed reality event in February. Second Life and IRL at TechSoup HQ in SF.
• The Community Organizers Handbook available as a public resource, you can certainly refer there for information/feedback/best practices on offline organizing: http://organizershandbook.wikispaces.com
• Video is such an inclusive medium. I personally love how it presents the opportunity to be involved in a community, sometimes in a real-time format, from a distance.
• The League of Women Voters of SF has found that making 1-3 minute (no longer than 5 min) videos gets much better pick-up online
• The Alliance for Climate Education makes presentations about climate change to high schools around the US. At the end of every presentation, they put up a slide where students can either 1) join their cause on Facebook or 2) text them to sign up. It works really well
• I recently watched Bioneers and some TEDx’s being streamed from a satellite location with local people – becoming my preferred way to participate. Smaller setting, still get the information, lower cost. Here’s a writeup on the talk Charles Baker from Meetup.com did last week @ TechSoup, might be helpful – http://blog.techsoup.org/node/1483
• I have also found that giving people specific roles is successful – empowering for them
• After meet ups online communication generally takes precedence and thats why its so important that both communities are connected
• I also think the immediacy of that communication is key, as well as presenting opportunities to get involved. I usually note the names of specific people who had interest or were good leadership candidates.
• and much more!

If you missed the chat or want to revisit it, access the full chat archive here.

Upcoming: November

The next chat will be in November. If you have a question or topic you’d like to discuss, be sure to leave a comment here so we can ensure it’s covered. The chat is just an hour long so be sure to submit your questions in advance!

Details:

• Date: Thursday, November 18th
• Time: 4 pm EST (1 hour)
• Topic: Community Building, of course!
• Location: Launch the chat here (not live until the chat starts)

About the Community Builder Chat

These monthly chats part of the #4Change network and are open to anyone interested in learning and sharing about building community, on and offline, with the use of social media or other technology tools. If you have a topic or question you’d like to explore in an upcoming chat, feel free to let me know anytime!  Hope to have you join us next time!

• Date: October 28th (I’ll be presenting at the Blackbaud Conference on the 21st so will move it to the 4th Thursday of the month)
• Time: 4 pm EST (1 hour)
• Chat: Launch the chat here (not live until the chat starts)

About the Community Builder Chat

These monthly chats part of the #4Change network and are open to anyone interested in learning and sharing about building community, on and offline, with the use of social media or other technology tools. If you have a topic or question you’d like to explore in an upcoming chat, feel free to let me know anytime!  Hope to have you join us next time

(Photo credit: ToastyKen)