And another draft section! This is basically the introduction, explaining why this is all important. It is not the executive summary. Again, comments welcome. I’m getting a bit ‘word blind’ on this report now, so there’s bound to be not just typos but also various conceptual repetitions. Hopefully I can smooth out the rough edges once I start editing the report as a single piece, instead of lots of sections.

Building Civil Society 2.0
In their report, Public Media 2.0: Dynamic, Engaged Publics[1], Jessica Clark and Patricia Aufderheide describe how “Multiplatform, participatory, and digital, public media 2.0 will be an essential feature of truly democratic public life from here on in.”

Replace “public media 2.0” with “civil society 2.0” and the sentence holds just as true. Social technology, (see box) are transforming many aspects of modern society, from the media to government, from education to business. The third sector is no different. Change is happening and the challenge is to understand not just the nature of the change, but how civil society can embrace and benefit from it.

Clark and Aufderheide describe the landscape we now inhabit:

“Commercial media still dominate the scene, but the people formerly known as the audience are spending less time with older media formats. Many [people] now inhabit a multimedia-saturated environment that spans highly interactive mobile and gaming devices, social networks, chat—and only sometimes television or newspapers. People are dumping land lines for [mobile] phones and watching movies and TV shows on their computers. While broadcast still reaches more people, the Internet (whether accessed through phones, laptops, or multimedia entertainment devices) has become a mass medium.”’

At the same time, trust in — government, business and the media, and in traditional information sources — is low and often declining, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer Survey 2009 [2]. Trust in the media has suffered the most, but trust in other sources, such as business analysts, press releases and company CEOs is also low/declining, with respondents needing to see information three to five times before it is deemed credible. Whilst NGOs are trusted slightly than other types of organisation, they are not bucking the trend towards mistrust.

In order to combat mistrust, Edelman recommend — and this applies as much to the third sector as to business — that, “Organizations must be forthright and honest in their actions and communications.” And when problems occur “stakeholders need to see senior executives take a visible lead in acknowledging errors, correcting mistakes, and working with employees to avoid similar problems going forward.”

The combination of a fragmented media and a decrease in trust suggest that the future may not be so rosy for civil society. Organisations will find it harder to:

* Move from broadcast model to a conversational model to form and maintain relationships with the audience.
* Become transparent about the way that the organisation works.
* Put participation at the centre of their web strategy.

For some civil society associations, this implies a profound shift in organisational culture. But the price of such a shift is a small one to pay compared to the risks of failing to engage with social technology. In a world where everyone else is talking, keeping quiet is the first step on the way to irrelevance. Publisher Tim O’Reilly once observed that, “Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy” [3]. For civil society associations, obscurity is a far greater threat than letting go of control.

Yet Outsell’s report, CEO Topics — Social Communities & Expert Networks [4] , as quoted in Michael Collins’ Memcom 09 presentation [5], warns that despite associations being “the poster child of communities”, bringing together as they do people with common interests, “their absence form the community phenomenon and their seeming inability to move their offline communities online into vibrant digital communities is stark. Associations… stand to lose… their very reason for being if they cannot move their professionals into digital environments.”

The role of social technology in civil society
People have been congregating in online social spaces, such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr for years. But these tools are not just being used for day-to-day socialising and content sharing, they are also being used as news filters, platforms for collaboration, and places to organise activism. Information and requests for action can ripple quickly through such networks as people forward on interesting or important messages to their peers.

Civil society associations, by using social tools, can extend the reach of their web presence and the strength of their network, and form direct relationships with the individuals in their constituency. Social tools can also provide website visitors with something immediate to do, even if it is a small action. Establishing these one-to-one relationships and facilitating immediate action both increase engagement, which in turn increases the likelihood that the member/supporter will become a more active and valuable participant in the community.

The Association Social Technologies report [6] draws on the report The Decision to Join by ASEA & The Center for Association Leadership [7] which showed that “the extent to which a member is engaged in their membership association is tightly correlated to their likelihood to renew their membership and to talk to friends and colleagues about their association. [And] the number one way members ?rst learn about their membership association is from another member.”

They go on to say that even a “small improvement in member engagement should reliably produce an increase in membership retention rates”, which will in turn improve revenue. Because “research shows that engaged members are more likely to talk to prospective members about their association” it also follows that increased engagement will not just improve income from those members, but increase income from new members too.

Further more, if member engagement alone isn’t enough to encourage organisations to engage with social media, then the more direct effects of increasing merchandise sales, conference registration and other such transactions should help organisations realise the benefits of an investment in social technology.

Increasingly, people want direct involvement in civil society, rather than action by proxy, and social tools can help them experience that direct involvement. That may mean that they want to be a part of an active community, rather than a passive individual isolated from their fellow supporters. Civil society associations can use social tools to provide an environment for conversation, whether that’s on a blog or a social network or on Twitter, which will then allow a vibrant community to grow.

Social media allows individuals to easily come together to discuss and solve shared problems. Associations can either tap into that, facilitating self-organisation that benefits the association, or can ignore it. But if they do ignore the opportunity provided by the internet to engender collective action, they risk sidelining themselves as individuals bypass existing organisations and structures to achieve their goals.

Challenges to using social technologies
It would be foolish not to recognise and address the challenges posed by social technologies. The main challenge is cultural. Social spaces online each have their own culture and unwritten code of conduct. Often, behaviours that are acceptable in a PR or marketing context are not acceptable in a social media context, so care must be taken to understand the culture before engaging with the tools.

Resourcing is also a potential problem. Social media can be time consuming, and has to be worked into employee’s work schedules in a way that guarantees the time and freedom to engage fully.

Social technology changes constantly, so engaging with it has to be an ongoing process of discovery and learning. It’s not a one-off project, but a permanent change to the way the organisation communicates, collaborates and thinks.

These challenges can, however, be overcome and should not pose significant problems for associations that wish to engage with social technologies.

[1] http://futureofpublicmedia.net
[2] http://www.edelman.co.uk/files/trust-barometer-2009.pdf
[3] http://www.openp2p.com/lpt/a/3015
[4] http://www.outsellinc.com/store/products/734
[5] get citation
[6] http://www.principledinnovation.com/bigideas/socialtechsurveysummary/
[7] http://www.asaecenter.org/Marketplace/BookstoreDetail.cfm?ItemNumber=26918

Another draft section done and ready for comment!

What stops civil society associations using social media? It is easy to point the finger at a lack of technical understanding, or a paucity of time and budget. But whilst these are all genuine concerns, they are all relatively simple to address if organisations decide to do so.

Resistance to new technology by upper management is a pernicious problem. Talking to civil society associations and reading comments left on the survey shows that for many organisations, conservative attitudes amongst management and trustees stifles the use of social technologies. A web developer for one large organisation, when discussing possible uses of social media, responded, “The trustees would never go for that.”

Michael Collins, in his presentation Social Networking — Threat or opportunity for membership organisations? given to Memcom 09 [1] , identified these “internal threats” when examining the reasons why associations aren’t engaging with social media:

* “Complacency, apathy, indecision, fear of change and losing control”
* “Myopia re ROI”
* “Inadequate consultation with community members”

From the comments left on the survey, lack of knowledge and understanding, is a key problem:

“Lack of knowledge in the upper levels of the organisation tends to hold us back sometimes.”
“We have an ‘older’ age range of staff, who are focused on service provision. Many don’t understand, or have time to learn about the net.”
“[There’s] not much understanding that social media is not the same as mass publicity that the ‘comms’ team can just do by themselves.”
“We are just beginning to expand on usage, and I am doing my best to educate my management team.”

And out-dated attitudes seemed to be behind another comment from the survey:

“Current policies seem to have been made years ago.”

A further problem identified by the manager of one medium-sized association’s website was resistance to change:

“The culture of [our organisation] leads its communications efforts in many ways and it’s not based on evidence, or knowledge of the marketplace or the audience. It’s ‘This is the way we’ve always done things’. When push comes to shove we tend to revert back to instinct, revert back to assumptions.”

But although getting managers and trustees to recognise the value of social media might be hard, it doesn’t necessarily mean that using social media is impossible in those environments, just difficult:

“I have struggled to get buy-in from management, but have had success with what I have been able to do.”

The importance of an internal culture which is open to new ways of doing things must not, however, be underestimated. In their report Discover, Argument and Action: How civil society responds to changing needs, Julie Caulier-Rice, Geoff Mulgan and Dan Vale discuss how civil society associations “can sometimes become frozen around past needs rather than current ones.” [2] Although Caulier-Rice et al were not directly discussing civil society association’s attitudes towards technology, their words are just as applicable in this context.

Those who oversee civil society associations must ensure that the culture they create within their organisation is one that is open to new ideas, new technologies and experimentation. Failure to do so will not only hobble staff in their efforts to communicate, collaborate and engage their community, it will also hold the organisation as a whole back. Organisations unable to use the internet to its fullest capability risk being sidelined by others who understand how to use social technologies to spread their message, and unite and organise their supporters.

[1] get citation
[2] http://www.youngfoundation.org.uk/publications/reports/discovery-argument-action-how-civil-society-responds-changing-needs-march-2008