Carnegie UK Trust

For my Carnegie UK Trust report on the use of social media in civil society, we want to include a list of “outcomes”, i.e. possible results of using social media (provided that you do it right, of course!). We’d also like to pull together some very short examples – from charities, NGOs, unions, mutuals, co-ops, etc. – that illustrate these outcomes, where we can. Of course, there aren’t necessarily enough examples out there, but it’d be good to try and find some.

Here’s our preliminary list of outcomes:

1. Social media helps to engage with segments of the population that traditional marketing may find it difficult to reach.
2. Social media enables conversations to take place, which facilitates the co-creation of knowledge.
3. Social media improves the relationship between an association and individual supporters, as well as between supporters.
4. Social media allows information to rapidly ripple through a community, thus enabling quick and effective mobilisation online and offline.
5. Social media provides platforms for dissent by allowing people to express discontent or highlight abuses of power.
6. Social media strengthens offline communities, and offline events strengthen online relationships.
7. Social media improves the transparency, governance and accountability of organisations, which increases trust in those organisations.
8. Social media brings about financial benefits by helping organise direct and indirect fundraising.
9. Social media, used internally, helps improve the effectiveness and efficiency of organisations and enables flexible staffing and volunteering.
10. Social media helps create highly responsive and less hierarchically governed civil society associations.

Do you have any more key outcomes that you think we’re missing? Any of these that you disagree with? And, most importantly, do you have any examples that would illustrate these?

{ 0 comments }

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

{ 0 comments }

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

{ 0 comments }

In my previous post I published the recommendations for government, funders and civil society regarding how to spread the use of social tools and how to engage with them more deeply. I’ve now re-written them, having taken on board some of the excellent advice and comments that people kindly left on the last post.

I’m now going to post the re-written version for further comment. If there’s one thing in the report that has to be right, it’s this bit, so I encourage you to leave comments even about the smallest thing. Am I missing anything important? Am I communicating these points clearly? Am I going into too much detail? Or not enough? Please let me know!

Skills and training
It is widely recognised amongst social media experts that social media is experiential in nature: It is difficult to fully understand social tools until one has participated and experienced them for oneself. Non-users can therefore find it difficult to understand the benefits of a given tool until they have spent time using it and have genuinely engaged with the community.

Unlike basic computing skills, such as word processing or spreadsheet manipulation, the core understanding required to make good use of social technologies is cultural, not procedural. Social tools are generally very simple to use. It is a trivial task to set up a Twitter, Flickr or Facebook account, or to create a blog on a free service such as Typepad or Wordpress. Using those tools to engage with the public in a meaningful way requires more than just understanding how to publish an update or upload a picture; rather it requires gaining an insight into the motivations, behavioural norms and expectations that make up each tool’s sub-culture.

Government must, therefore, carefully consider its digital media literacy programmes: To create an effective programme requires expertise in the cultural analysis of social media, not just a technical understanding. By focusing specifically on social media and its culture as part of a wider digital media literacy programme, the Government could both improve digital inclusion, and empower individuals to take part in activities online that would improve their social inclusion.

But if social media is sidelined or treated as equivalent to non-interactive digital behaviours, such as sending and receiving email, there is a significant risk of creating a false sense of action and understanding. The consequences of a scenario in which organisations have been inadequately trained in the use of social media could be very serious.

The PR space is littered with examples of companies who failed to understand the social media culture into which they moving, and who thus made faux pas that damaged their brand and, in some cases, had detrimental effects on their profits. One recent example was when the home furnishings store Habitat started spamming Twitter with inappropriate messages promoting its spring catalogue [1]. Because Habitat had not taken the time to understand what behaviours were acceptable on Twitter, it alienated potential customers by inserting marketing messages into conversations that Twitter users were having about issues such as the Iranian elections.

Any social technology skills programmes needs to be organised in partnership with existing social media communities, such as the Tuttle Club [2] and experienced practitioners, who may exist outside of the Government’s and the third sector’s usual constituencies. This work also needs to be done “out in the open”, in public view, so that anyone with relevant knowledge and interest can help shape the training materials. Tapping into the wider community like this will help ensure that training programmes do not just include essential cultural information, but are also flexible and adaptable in the face of what is a rapidly changing set of technologies.

Recommendations for social technology skills development
For Government
* Experienced social media practitioners should be an integral part of any digital media literacy or digital inclusion programme, and should be included in consultations and in steering groups.
* All governmental and allied groups working on digital media literacy and digital inclusion projects should adopt social media for internal collaboration and external consultation and conversation, so that all those involved have first hand experience of the tools and their culture(s).
* Centres of excellence in social media, whether community-organised, in business or in academia, should be identified, recognised and supported.

For Funding Organisations
* Funds should be set aside for cross-sector social media training, coaching and mentoring, and the creation of free/open source training materials, case studies, and other resources. Such projects should be led from within the social technologies community.
* Funding organisations should also adopt social media internally for collaboration and externally for communication as a matter of course, so that they become better equipped to understand social media projects.
* Additional help should be given to smaller organisations to ensure that they are not excluded from participation.
* Recognition and assistance should be given to informal, ad-hoc civil society groups and the individuals who wish to start one.

For Civil Society Associations
* Associations should earmark funds to pay for ongoing social media awareness training for as many staff as possible, especially trustees/management and those staff ‘at the coal face’.
* Additional training should be focused on those with the right aptitudes, e.g. curiosity, an ability to communicate clearly, and a desire to connect with people. These people can then become social media champions within each organisation.
* Volunteers, supporters and members should also be offered assistance in understanding new social technologies and opportunities to participate in the organisations social media projects.

[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2009/jun/22/twitter-advertising
[2] http://tuttleclub.wordpress.com/

General recommendations
Recommendations regarding training and the proliferation of skills through the third sector and public are addressed in the above section. There are many additional areas that deserve attention, however, and those are listed here.

Recommendations for government and policy makers
* Research into the use of the internet by the British population is fragmented and sporadic. Whilst both Ofcom and the Office for National Statistics produce research in this area, there needs to be one single body, a ‘British Internet Institute’, that carries out original quantitative and qualitative research and meta-analyses [1] of research produced by other bodies in this field. Such an organisation should be entirely independent of the Government and should focus not just on ‘issues of the moment’ but carry out longitudinal studies that will give us clear indications of trends and variations. This would provide data to support not just the third sector and businesses but could also feed into government policy.
* Social media should be embedded into the education system at all levels, from primary all the way through to university and continuing education. Social tools should not just be focused on students, but on empowering educators to share information and collaborate, and to help strengthen the relationship between educators and students’ families. The ICT curriculum also needs to be updated to include social media and associated topics, which may also help drive more general adoption of ICT by young people.
* Social media should become an integral part of government, from local to national levels. Using social technology in government will not just be beneficial from a practical point of view, but will also help spread the skills required to understand the medium amongst those who make policy.

Recommendations for funding organisations
* Grant giving organisations should consider how the projects they fund could be improved by the use of the web, and should encourage organisations to include social technology in their project plans. They should also be willing to specify additional budget to ensure that social media is worked into the fabric of the project, not bolted on as an afterthought.
* Adherence to web standards, particularly regarding accessibility, should be encouraged for all projects with a web component.
* Grants should be given for focused research into the use of social media and the web by civil society association to create a portfolio of case studies and best practices, including ROI, metrics, and resourcing needs.
* Funders should invest in projects that will help build technical capabilities across civil society, e.g. schemes that bring together developers and organisations to work on open source projects which could then be used or adapted by any other organisation.
* It is essential that funders be supportive of experiments and risk-taking. There is no one clear route to social media success, and some projects will not work out as well as hoped. These must not been seen as damning, but as part of a wider learning experience.
* The sharing of experience should be built into project plans, covering both success stories and lessons learned from projects that didn’t work out so well. Full and frank discussion of how social media fits into the civil society agenda is an important way to develop our understanding and future applications.

For civil society assocations
* Ensure that individuals have the resources, especially time, to engage with social technologies.
* Task a person or team within the organisation to learn about and experiment with social technologies on an ongoing basis, and to share their discoveries throughout the organisation.
* Use social tools internally for collaboration and communications. Blogs, wikis and social bookmarking tools are particularly useful in an internal context.
* Focus on a small number of tools, and choose ones that can be most easily fitted into existing work schedules. Understand the limitations of your resources and don’t try to do too much.
* Work with external consultants and mentors who can advise on strategy and implementation. Whilst the tools might be easy to use, using them well can be harder.
* Share success stories, lessons, problems and knowledge both internally across the organisation but also externally with other organisations. Sharing knowledge with others will encourage reciprocation, create goodwill and help everyone involved.
* Engage with social media communities outside of the third sector, for example, attend events focused on social media. There are many small, free, informal events, so it’s not just about expensive conferences.
* Let individuals’ personalities come through. Social media is not a form of corporate communication, but a one-to-one conversation so it’s essential to let people be themselves.
* Don’t just focus on younger members of staff. Having a talent for social media is all about one’s mindset, not age or technological history. Older members of staff can take to social tools like ducks to water just as much as their younger counterparts.
* Ensure there is space for dissent, and that it is evaluated honestly and fairly, and fed back into the process.

[1] The use of statistical techniques to review and combine the results of several different studies.

{ 0 comments }