Social network websites in the Internet are growing at a breathtaking speed and development organizations or projects need to keep up with these networks and use them in their work. How can this happen and what are the different technical options? This post provides you with a quick overview explaining the main options and different ways to go about social networking for campaigning, fundraising, stakeholder dialogue, knowledge sharing and collaboration.
Two years ago, Dan McQuillan wrote about social networking and social change: "There's some uncertainty about how non-profits should approach social networks, and especially how to get an effective return for the time that has to be invested in these relationship-spaces."Tool choice: Own or known networks
An important question before engaging with social networks is whether you want to custom-build your own platform or work with an existing solution. Here are the different options:
A) Develop a complete social network website. There are incredible solutions available such as Drupal, Joomla or Elgg, which allow all kinds of customization.
Pros: You can fully tailor the platform to meet your own needs
Cons: This can be an expensive option. Adequqate time is needed for development, customization, maintenance, patching and updating, and this can eat into your resources.
B) Use external solutions, which are readily available and offer a wide range of features.
Pros: Very quick to start and is not as costly as 'development from scratch'. Have all essential features such as forums, blogs and email alerts. Such a solution is Ning, which is easy to administer even by non-technical persons.
Cons: Although platforms like ning.com offer many features, some essential features may be missing. Your data are “fixed” on an external server. Equally to option (A), this approach needs mobilization for members.
C) Establish your organization in one or more social networks. Create organizational profiles, groups or fan-pages and interact with millions of potential members. These social network websites include Myspace (www.myspace.com ), Facebook (www.facebook.com ), Orkut (http://www.orkut.com ), Hi5 (http://hi5.com ), Linkedin (http://www.linkedin.com ) or Twitter (http://www.twitter.com ).
Pros: Very quick to start and good for mobilization and awareness. The implementation normally involves no costs.
Cons: All data and your members are bound to the website application. The profile or group pages only offer a limited number of features. Possible further collaboration might not be possible in such a “walled garden”.
Known communities on LinkedIn include the following:
- Web2forDev Web 2.0 for Development
- Video4Dev - Video for development
- PPGIS - Public Participation GIS / Participatory GIS
- Africa ICT Network
- E-development Network
What do you want to achieve?
Before starting a platform, it is important to consider what you intend to achieve and tackle with an online social network. If, for example, you want to exchange information in a given group and want to trigger discussions, a simple mailing list (e.g. www.dgroups.org) may be the best choice. But what if you want to do more than that?
A possible approach would be to look at what your organization would like to achieve through such a network. Here are some categories, which are not comprehensive, but will help you find a viable choice of network application:
1) Campaign /Fundraising
For awareness raising, a single website rarely creates enough impact. Instead, it is helpful to use different channels to reach your target audience. You could have an own website, which keeps all the channels together, but a Facebook fan page or Twitter profile could be extras that could attract more people and save you time. Mobilization needs to work over many channels and particularly through email. For campaigning and fundraising you may want to reach a great audience and therefore you would need to send your message across networks. Global voices advocacy has a helpful guide. So option C is the most helpful. Check these nonprofits on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/nonprofitorgs
2) Stakeholder dialogue
One other purpose for establishing a social network could be to interact, on a regular basis, with certain stakeholders or the broader public. Like above, you can set up different profiles on social network sites and engage with many stakeholders, but your interlocutors might not be the ones you want to reach. So you either build your own platform or use a readily available one such as Ning. Here you can invite your stakeholders and exchange about projects. Such dialogues can enhance the “listening skills” of an organization, as discussed here.
3) Information sharing
Depending on how open you want your information sharing initiative to be, say to potentially flourish across networks, you should choose your approach. In recent years many topic-orientated platforms have been established, the majority however are struggling to achieve widespread proactive participation. But these platforms offer a valuable space for exchange and invite a broader public to join the discussions.
Also, on Twitter you can exchange interesting information and engage with your followers, but you do not have a space for collaboration. So it can be integrated as part of an existing website to bond more closely with people. It really depends who you want to reach, and what kind of space and exchange you want to offer.
4) Collaboration
A place to share resources is one way to exchange. Another form is closer collaboration on content. That could be for different groups to work around topics or to create online new content. This needs a further set of tools such as Wikis and other text collaboration features. In these cases it might be easier, if you develop this features in an own platform, if a hosted wiki solution such as pbworks or wikispaces are not enough for you. An own platform allows to combine all different elements for online collaboration. Such collaboration within a social network is, however, quite tricky to achieve and needs highly motivated members. It might be helpful to develop your own platform or mobilize people around a wiki.
Of course, these brief insights cannot supply a full social network elaboration, but hopefully illustrate the differences and provide some stepping stones . There are many ways to use social network sites and in all cases engagement and follow-up depend a lot on the type of audience. As contributions are usually voluntarily, a motivation to engage has to be there. So, at the end of the day the platform is less important.
We are sure there are many more ways to use social networks - please feel free to contribute to this reflection.
Author: Christian Kreutz
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written by Clayton R. Wright, September 18, 2009
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written by Maurizio Bricola, September 14, 2009
And if I look at options A, B and C and possible achievements 1, 2, 3 and 4 I will go for option B and C only in relation with achievements 1 and 2. Why?
If the content produced in the SN is sensible content, that means that the SN is not only for "informal" interactions, connecting persons and let them discover each others, than it is important, if choosing for options B and C, to find out who at the end owns the content published on the SN and how easy is to export it, otherwise an "easy and cheap" solution can turn out to be very costly in the long run.
Other "con" of solution C is the many places to manage, which can be easily done with a Rss or Atom feed but then you might fall into redundancy.
Having a bit of economic resources and creating the basis for developing in-house knowledge I will go for option A, taking into account that there is no need to start with the perfect SN and with deep customizations and stunning graphic implementations, true is that the SN has to be highly usable and user friendly.
Thanks Christian for this useful starting point! I hope to talk to you again soon. Cheers!
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written by Lawrence Wasserman PhD, September 13, 2009
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Yes I agree with you instruments shall come second and I wrote that many times before. Actually I tried to write it the other way around, but it looked to me that way easier. I had many discussion with colleagues, who want to start such communities and they often struggle with all the technical issues. So I wanted to highlight that the technology is not as complicated anymore, but it can make a big difference whether you start an own platform or rely on social network applications. For example your whole strategy around mobilization can be very different.
@Maurizio yes indeed data transfer is an important but tricky issue. Until now it is very difficult to transfer all user data etc. to a new platform. I know many platforms, who started therefore from scratch and send out new inivitations. Not sure if that is a good descision though. I wish we had a lot more user feedbakc available and more analysis on what works and what not. Each of the above described options need a lot of adjustment to user needs. Otherwise they will remain easily empty bottles.