Last year I wrote a report for the Carnegie UK Trust’s Inquiry into the Future of Civil Society in the UK and Ireland. That report, Making the Connection: The use of social technologies in civil society, has finally been published and you can get it from the Inquiry website (direct link to the PDF). The contents are:

Executive summary
What is social technology?
What are the main types of social technology?
What is civil society?
Key characteristics of social media

Part one: Introduction
Background to the report
Building civil society 2.0
A changed world
Challenges and risks posed by social technologies

Part two: Social media in civil society
The state of play: How are civil society associations using social technologies?
Why are civil society associations using social media and how successful are they?
A failure of leadership?
Myths of age and technology
Case study 1: Joseph Rowntree Foundation (full version)
Case study 2: YouthNet (full version)

Part three: Alternative scenarios for the future
What might the year 2025 hold for social technology and civil society associations?
How might the social web develop over the next 15 years?
Key drivers of change
Future scenarios
Questions raised by the future scenarios

Part four: Recommendations
Recommendations for governments and policy-makers
Recommendations for funding organisations
Recommendations for civil society associations
Looking forwards

Plus there are four lovely appendices – including the full results of the survey and assessment of civil society websites – a glossary and a resources section. Lots to keep you occupied during a long commute! If the report is a touch too long for you then I’d recommend the Futures and the Recommendations sections.

Although the report is about the third sector, it could frankly have been written about the public sector or business: a lot of the problems and recommendations are the same. So please do take a look, even if you’re not in the charitable sector, and let me know what you think in the comments.

As part of my work on the report Making the Connection: The use of social technologies in civil society, written for the Carnegie UK Trust’s Inquiry into the Future of Civil Society in the UK and Ireland, I put together a couple of case studies. The final report carries shorter versions, so I though it would be useful for me to post the full versions to provide extra detail and context. Here is the second, focused on YouthNet.

• YouthNet focuses on understanding which social technologies their target audience use and then adopts those tools.
• Their use of social media is part of a broader strategy which embraces offline as well as online activities.
• Understanding and keeping up-to-date with social technology is the responsibility of everyone at YouthNet and everyone has the opportunity to engage with the tools if they wish.

YouthNet is a charity that provides online services and information to young people in the 16-25 demographic. Originally conceived as a book, YouthNet moved its service directory to the net in 1997 two years after it was founded.

YouthNet currently runs two websites: TheSite.org, a community of 30,000 members which provides advice on life issues and receives 500,000 unique users each month; and do-it.org.uk which helps people find opportunities to volunteer, and receives 80,000 – 100,000 unique users each month.

The organisation uses social media tools to both connect with their community and to communicate and collaborate internally. Externally, they maintain a presence in a variety of third party tools such as Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Twitter, Flickr, Ning, YouTube and Delicious. They also run a number of blogs — written by both YouthNet staff and volunteers — and provide RSS feeds of content.

Natasha Judd, YouthNet’s Marketing Manager, says that social media allows YouthNet to “have individual conversations with individual users in the spaces which are relevant to them”.

Their social media usage is, however, part of a broader strategy which also embraces traditional communications such as e-newsletters and print materials as well as offline events and outreach. The difference between online and offline is blurring, explains Judd:

“It’s quite difficult to say, ‘This is the online part of my identity,’ now. So it’s about having online and offline services which work together as a coherent whole for the young people who need them, or who may only ever encounter the offline or may only encounter the online.”

Internally, and with its charity partners, YouthNet uses Basecamp (a hosted service that combines wikis, a calendar and messaging), Yammer (a Twitter-like tool that creates a closed network based on email addresses) and Delicious to collaborate. There is a very open culture where employees are encouraged to use whichever tool they feel will work for them. They mix social tools with traditional working methods rather than trying to replace them.

Judd explains how the use of social media is ‘baked in’ to the organisation’s culture: “A lot of us use [social media] in our personal lives and know what tools are out there, what is big, what people are talking about.” Indeed, anyone within the organisation can write on the external blogs, or talk about their work on their Twitter account.

“It’s not an official YouthNet voice,” she says, “it’s our voice. Anybody at YouthNet can blog about anything that is relevant to our work. All of us can use social media. A lot of us are on Twitter. We will talk about who we’re meeting, what we’re working on, when we need case studies for TheSite.org, or when we’ve got new surveys up or want people to sign a pledge. It’s about sharing what we are and what we’re doing, and having the trust that everyone is a fantastic representative for YouthNet.”

YouthNet is a very flat organisation, open to ideas from any employee, so keeping an eye on tech is a part of everyone’s job. The Communities Team especially tracks popular tools and when they spot something that’s creating a bit of a buzz they will test it out and update the rest of the staff if they find it interesting.

Equally, if any member of staff stumbles across a tool they feel might be useful, or has an idea for how to use social tools, then there is a lightweight decision process which allows them to test and roll out small projects. Larger projects receive more attention and are planned accordingly but this agility allows YouthNet to quickly test and adopt or drop tools and services as they come along without a large technical or administrative overhead.

The nature of social tools makes it easy to be nimble — many tools, such as YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, WordPress, and Delicious are free, with the cost of any paid tools very low, in the region of tens of pounds rather than hundreds. When budget is required it comes from individual team or project budgets, whether that’s the communities team, marketing, or another team. Each team or project group invests in what they need, but the main cost remains the time it takes to investigate and experiment.

“When the communities team was starting up the Lifetracks consultation on Ning it required a lot of investment of time to get something working,” says Judd, “but they’d experimented with it previously and they knew it was the tool they needed for a consultation. We could always do more. We could always have more conversations. We could always use the tools better. But it is a trade-off.”

YouthNet do look outside of the third sector for knowledge as many businesses and independent consultants have relevant expertise to share about their use of the social media.

“That’s something that we need to do more of in the future,” says Judd. “Going along to MeasurementCamp, for example, was not just about the third sector, it was about what agencies are doing in terms of measuring social media.”

When it comes to measuring success, YouthNet look beyond the obvious statistics and try to consider their reasons for using a particular tool for a particular project to shape their aims and expectations. For example, they’re not just looking at how many visitors they get to a particular site or page but also at how engaged people become and what the quality of interaction is.

“It’s not just about numbers,” says Judd. “It’s about creating loyalties with youth and about having conversations with young people, or having a certain number of people involved in a focus group.”

Social media also provides valuable information about their user base:

“It has given us a huge insight into who our user base is, how they talk to us, how they talk to each other. On Facebook, for example, I can get demographic [information on] the fans of do-it.org.uk.”

Watching how their community uses social tools provides YouthNet with an insight into they type of tools YouthNet could use and how their audience might react. This insight which can then feed into project planning. Judd believes that it is important to understand which services their audience already use and then to adopt those so that YouthNet can have a conversation with their users where they, the users, feel comfortable. This allows them to raise awareness of their services amongst a variety of different groups.

“For example, our members had created a Facebook group themselves,” she says, “which was fantastic, so we looked at doing Facebook groups for other brands.”

YouthNet are aware that social networks such as Facebook act as ‘walled gardens’ so ensure that all of the information provided in such networks is also available on their website. Judd describes their presence in sites like Facebook as “a way of providing personalised help, for example, on how to browse for volunteer opportunities in a particular area”.

Organisations do need to be aware that their community and, indeed, their staff also have an online life of their own. They can take the conversations off onto other tools where the organisation has no presence. That’s not necessarily a bad thing because it extends reach. It is, however, something to monitor because if the conversation shifts to another tool then that might be an indication that the new platform is worth investigation.

The issue of privacy is an important one to YouthNet’s users. Jim Valentine, Communities Manager, explains that because the discussion on TheSite.org sometimes addresses “taboo, secret and distressing issues, users are more likely to join using pseudonyms and tend to avoiding inviting friends”.
“This creates unique issues around privacy and confidentiality,” Valentine says. “One of the biggest issues we address is concern about friends of users finding out about their activity on TheSite.org. After discussions with users this can lead to the deletion of their account in order to protect their privacy and confidence in the service.”

The issue of abusive behaviour is dealt with “holistically”, explains Valentine. “Although individual behaviour may need to be addressed, more effort is spent on creating a supportive environment that reinforces positive behaviour. This isn’t just a role of moderators, but the community as a whole — who are the first to address abusive behaviour and encourage new users to be supportive of other members. Moderators monitor the discussion boards and respond to reported posts, which ensures problematic or abusive behaviour gets a fair and balanced response.”

Spam is unavoidable but when it is reported it is dealt with promptly and a CAPTCHA image and question on the registration page helps reduce the amount of automated spam.

The vast choice of social media tools, platforms and services can be daunting but it’s not necessary to have an active presence on every one (although it is a good idea to register your brand names in the most popular services, just in case you want to use them in the future). When deciding which tools to use, take the lead from your community, Judd advises, and don’t feel that you have to be everywhere.

Judd sums up her attitude to social media: “It’s not about the tools, it’s about communicating with people, engaging them and inspiring them to trust your services and get involved in your organisation.”

As part of my work on the report Making the Connection: The use of social technologies in civil society, written for the Carnegie UK Trust’s Inquiry into the Future of Civil Society in the UK and Ireland, I put together a couple of case studies. The final report carries shorter versions, so I though it would be useful for me to post the full versions to provide extra detail and context. So here is the first, focused on the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

• Joseph Rowntree Foundation uses its website to share information with its audience, hoping to reach senior leaders under significant time pressure. It is felt that these people are unlikely to want to, or have the time to, engage with social tools.
• Although past social media projects have not been a success, making management reluctant to invest further, small scale experimentation with free tools is still continuing.
• Social media could bring JRF’s work to a new audience, one that would not hear about JRF through traditional channels and so would not be aware of their work.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation is an independent research charity which seeks to “understand the root causes of social problems, to identify ways of overcoming them, and to show how social needs can be met in practice”. It focuses primarily on poverty, housing and empowerment, e.g. social care or disabled rights. Its sister organisation, the Joseph Rowntree Housing Trust, is a registered social landlord which provides housing, care/retirement homes and supported housing predominantly in York and the North-East.

The JRF’s website is a rich resource for anyone interested in social change. Nathon Raine, who is responsible for the web team at JRF, says that it aims to engage with the people who can bring about social change and be the first port of call for people interested in JRF’s core strategic themes.

“We try to reach the people who are in positions of influence — policy makers, practitioners, academics, journalists, etc. — and we do that through publications, events, meetings, networking, and conferences, and obviously the website is very important in reaching people.”

The site is managed by a team of two and was until recently built by hand. It was migrated to an open-source content management system called Drupal six months ago. Website design and development is now done by an external company but JRF staff can add and manage content. The decision to use Drupal, Raine explains, was lead by the web design company but their recommendation fit well with JRF’s needs.

“The web team is platform neutral, but have a preference for open source partly because it fits with our ethics and ethos.”

Drupal’s flexibility, usability and extensibility also played a part in the decision as did the fact that it is free software.

Drupal supports a number of social media activities, such as blogging, yet the only social tool used on the JRF website is RSS with feeds produced for publications, press releases and events. This may imply an organisation that is unaware of social technology, but that’s not the case. Raine understands how the internet is developing and the limitations of a static website:

“Generally speaking the site is well used and well regarded. We do quite a lot of usability activity to validate that what we’re doing is working and general levels of satisfaction with the site remain high. We think we’re doing quite a good job in terms of communicating our research, evidence and ideas across to people. However, it’s beginning to feel a little one dimensional: The web is changing. Ninety nine percent of the site is dedicated to saying, “Right, here’s a new press release”, “Here’s a new publication”, “Here’s an event”, “Here’s a summary of the work that we’re currently doing.” It doesn’t really do much more than that.”

During the redevelopment of the site, JRF did consider starting a blog — the CEO Julia Unwin already keeps an internal blog using Microsoft Sharepoint — but for a number of reasons it “never quite got off the ground”.

“JRF isn’t about campaigning,” explains Raine. “It isn’t about having a particular voice or a set line. It’s about the evidence. We are politically neutral and we just want to get the evidence that we generate out there and blogs may not be quite right for us in that sense.”

This stance appears to be partly driven by a sense that blogs have a distinct demographic skew which is at odds JRF’s target audience. So, whilst they have used blogs for projects that are directly focused on issues faced by young people, it is still felt that blog are “seen as something for a younger crowd. The people we’re trying to reach are influencers and it’s generally felt that they are not going to be using blogs.”

Influencers are seen as senior people and the organisation as a whole bases its communications policies on reaching them and the view of the web team is that social tools will not achieve that. This sits at the very foundation of the organisation’s attitude towards social tools and although there have been discussions and presentations internally they have not translated into concerted action.

Raines feels that the web team has not yet seen compelling evidence that social tools will help JRF achieve their organisational goals but says, “if we were presented with solid evidence that social media tools were of use to our audience we would make the necessary changes. Our evidence, however, currently points us in the opposite direction.”

JRF has carried out market research into social media when they were preparing to redevelop the site.

“We asked people, ‘Do you want to see more social tools on the site,’” explains Raine. “The answer came back a resounding ‘No’. But this was two years ago. Things have changed and we need to ask that question again.”

Both tools and attitudes change rapidly in the social media space and Raines recognises the importance of revisiting the evidence. But because JRF’s web resources are scarce they need to focus on areas, such as user experience, which they feel will provide the best return on investment.

JRF’s current audience is also under considerable time pressure. Market research done in 2004 showed that many people were suffering information overload and they wanted JRF to help them “cut through the clutter”.

“They don’t necessarily want to come to our site and hang around in a social media sense. I don’t think they want to come for engagement. They just want to come in, get the research and get out as quickly as possible.”

Another possible source of reluctance comes from the fact that JRF has been bitten before by social media projects that failed. They set up an extranet for their strategy groups — made up of senior people who advise on a given topic — which was “not very well received”.

They chose a tool which was marketed as social networking for professionals with discussions, profiles and the ability to upload and share items. But, Raine says, there was “virtually no interest whatsoever outside the organisation. We set the tool up, made a bit of a fuss about it and external people just didn’t use it because they just don’t have time.”

Even if social tools don’t suit JRF’s current target audience, there is a world of people who might like to know more about what the organisation does but who just don’t know it exists. Might they be reachable through social media?

“Yes. We do want to increase the pool of people who know about and engage with the JRF, and who we can communicate with in a two-way fashion. For example, we’ve just set up a Twitter account that is bringing our work to a hopefully more diverse audience than normal. We only just started it a couple of weeks ago, so we’re still very much feeling our way. We’ll do it for four months and then evaluate, but I’d say that out of all the attempts we’ve made in the social media space, this has been the one that feels like it might have some traction, some momentum.”

Raine is keen to base his web strategy choices on evidence rather than following the latest fad.

“There’s a lot of snake oil out there,” he warns. “What I’d want is something that proves the usefulness of social media. We have set services up and found that social media isn’t a panacea at all. There is a set of assumptions around social media that don’t bear any relation to our audience reality.”

In terms of cost, allocation of budget is a problem. Raines explains that a lack of “obvious return on investment” in an organisation that isn’t sure about social technology means that it’s very difficult to get funds ring-fenced for such projects. Equally, budgetary pressures make it hard to bring in external consultants to provide help the organisation understand how it might benefit from and implement social tools.

As for internal use of social tools, experiments have been done but interest is low. Some people have tried using the social bookmarking tool Delicious but, again, information overload is seen as a significant problem and social tools are viewed as adding to their cognitive burden rather than lessening it.

Raine’s biggest concern with both JRF’s web presence and intranet is that the users are given what they need.

“If we were trying to reach the general public,” he concludes, “then I think things would be very, very different. But we go after this slightly rarefied audience, and social media doesn’t seem right for us in many ways.”