Blogs
Our bloggers are here to share their experiences, challenges and ideas gained from their work with online communities and helping organisations engage with their audiences.
Thursday 10 May 2012
Open access publishing puts the searchlight on finding ways of sustainable collaboration
When the government embraces a grass-roots revolution, ignoring the complaints of a vocal and profitable industry, then it’s clear that revolution has entered the mainstream. This is what is happening with the open-source and open-access revolutions. The implications for the commercial models of non-profits are profound.
Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, will advise the British government on how to...
Tuesday 8 May 2012
SiftGroups' Village SOS digital engagement project for the Big Lottery Fund has been nominated for best digital campaign at the Marketing Week Awards 2012.
Village SOS was a Big Lottery Fund project where six enterprising UK rural villages shared up to £3 million to revive their communities through new business ventures, supported by a prime-time BBC documentary. SiftGroups scoped and built Village SOS for people to share their experiences and support one another in their rural...
Wednesday 2 May 2012
"Sass makes CSS fun again. Sass is an extension of CSS3, adding nested rules, variables, mixins, selector inheritance, and more. It’s translated to well-formatted, standard CSS using the command line tool or a web-framework plugin."
- Via Sass-lang.com
We've recently been using Sass in Drupal 7 via the base theme Sasson.
Sasson deserves a blog post of it's own - it's got many useful, non Sass features to speak of. Most importantly though, it does just enough, without getting in your way...
Monday 30 April 2012
Continuing our series on questions most commonly asked by senior management when considering investing in online engagement, if control is not so much of an issue, then making money certainly is.
Question #6: Is it possible to generate new revenue streams such as sponsorship from an onsite community?
Generating revenue from an onsite community is one aspect of creating a dynamic environment that supports professional development and value-forming conversations. All practitioners look to...
Friday 27 April 2012
Continuing our series on questions most commonly asked by senior management when considering investing in online engagement, the concern over control is always uppermost.
Question #4: Policing conversations will be an overhead for us – what will be the cost?
‘Policing’ is a word associated with control. Approaching an onsite community in this way will stifle any worthwhile debate and could reinforce a brand perception that all organisations would prefer not to be associated with – a...
Monday 16 April 2012
Continuing our series on questions most commonly asked by senior management when considering investing in online engagement, the level of responsiveness to members’ demands is a universal concern.
Question #2: Members are asking for the opportunity to discuss online – what’s in it for us (the organisation)?
In a decade where every individual can create his or her personal network of peers, any organisation representing professionals has to decide whether it wants to be part of their...
Thursday 5 April 2012
In the first of a series of four articles, Lawrence Clarke explores concerns over small groups of vociferous community members causing havoc for organisations.
Governance covers consistent management, cohesive policies, guidance, processes and decision-rights – the activities of an organisation that are designed to mitigate disruption. Traditionally this works best when those being ‘governed’ – in the case of a member organisation, its staff and members – are compliant. The problem with...
Wednesday 4 April 2012
Over the years, working for scores of membership associations and organisations, we have heard some perennial concerns about the business case for establishing an online community on an organisation’s website. Take a look at our reports on community management in the membership and charity sectors that detail the challenges.
So when we collated the feedback it became clear that there are six recurring questions that reflect the concern that any senior management team has with 'letting the...