What's Working In Online Communities?

By Sarah Golightly and Marcia Conner
Helping nonprofits understand the potential of online communities usually involves helping managers and technologists see beyond sending one-to many email blasts and having staff maintaining Web pages. While email blasts and Web content have their place in constituent and supporter communications, the true potential of supporter engagement remains unrealized when these tools are the only communications used.

For most nonprofits this means engaging volunteers, building shared knowledge libraries, inspiring dialogue, and building member-to-member relationships.

Web 2.0 Internet tools change the way constituents engage with organizations and each other. Web 2.0 means giving your constituents tools to self-organize. Often, this plays out in online discussion groups allowing volunteers, board members, community activists and others to discuss, plan and organize. In true Web 2.0 fashion, preferable online discussion tools are a hybrid of email and the Web, permitting the reader to decide whether to use and reply to email, or sign-in to a Web site and join the conversation there.

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Another Web 2.0 innovation is self-publishing tools, such as collaboration libraries, blogs and wikis, that allow constituents to store and share documents, write about issues of interest and build resource materials. These activities change for the better the fundamental relationship between an organization and its volunteers and supporters. Many-to-many activity in online communities builds relationships among your volunteers, supporters and staff, binding everyone to each other in a very personal way.

While some organizations express skepticism regarding fostering more distributed relationships with volunteers and constituents, this change helps everyone gain more control of what personally matters to them, while giving staff more ways to accomplish their goals.

Online community tools are designed to give your constituents the means to create change and actualize your mission without you having to handhold them the whole way. It also extends your organization's scope of action beyond the 9 to 5 work day. An online community -- by its very nature -- is open all the time, even when the office is closed. Collaboration is happening worldwide around interests, passions, and key issues, regardless of traditional boundaries, such as neighborhood, time-zone, age, ethnicity, gender, or income level. This creates a more inclusive organization for all people, not only your staff.

Take the Nonprofit Technology Enterprise Network (NTEN) as an example. NTEN is a national trade association of nonprofit technologists with more than 3,500 dues-paying members spread across the United States. NTEN successfully launched an online community, www.groups.NTEN.org, earlier this year and recently welcomed member number 2,000 to the online space. Members are invited to join one of 100 online affinity groups and to create new ones. These online affinity groups are one of the main ways that members interact with NTEN. The way conversations have evolved in these affinity groups is a testament to the true power of the online medium.

NTC session questions range from technical to social: How do I decide how private or public my online community should be? How do I gage a healthy community? How to I stimulate active participation? How do I scale from 200 to 2,000 community members? How do I keep from loosing members when I switch from one online technology to another? How do I nurture self-selected community leaders? How do I find staffing to keep my community running smoothly? What is the balance between content push vs. pull? What tools are right for my members? Do I build? Do I buy? Do I integrate Open Source?

It's clear the online community movement is at the very beginning. No different from the towns and cities we call home, online communities come in varied shapes and sizes. Growth is certain and there is much to learn from one another along the way. With growth comes change, and challenge, and celebration.

So are those running communities technologists or social engineers? In the Web 2.0 Age you need to be both. The technology can do more today, affording techies the opportunity to carry on complex conversations with nonprofit organizations about their relationships with constituents. This conversation is more fun than talking about server loads and software updates. It reaches the heart of what motivated everyone to get started in this business: online community as an engine for human relationships and social change.

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Sarah Golightly is chief executive officer of GoLightly in Mill Valley, Calif. Her email is sarah@golightly.com. Marcia Conner is managing director of Ageless Learner in Staunton, Va. Her email is marcia@agelesslearner.com

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