Nonprofit internet strategies phần 4

94 BUILDING SUCCESSFUL ONLINE COMMUNITIES with updates on how money was spent and results of the relief effort, kept donors in-volved and engaged. The results of the Hurricane Charley relief effort dwarfed the several thousand dollars raised the previous year in response to Hurricane Isabel. It is believed that ongoing efforts to develop personalized communications with donors will continue to improve results in the future. Community Mobilization: What Now? Calls to Action and Increased Participation Converting an engaged constituency into a mobilized constituency is perhaps the most challenging aspect of the community building process. At this stage of development, an organization Has convinced unaffiliated individuals to join (indicating an initial interest in the community value proposition) Has established a trusted connection with a constituent through personalized two-way communications Now the challenge is to stimulate participation in a sequence of supportive actions along an involvement path. E-mail communications should direct supporters back to Web site tools that allow for participation in actions relevant to an individual’s pro-file, with specific actions varying for different organizations. Politically active groups often use Web-based petitions and advocacy campaigns to enable their supporters to easily participate in the public policy process. Shared-value groups often use listservs or blogs to enable members to contribute their opinions to an ongoing community conversation. Charitable organizations typically focus on facilitating donations. Among your membership base exist ardent supporters willing to commit multiple hours per week (or per day) to your cause. There are others who may scan personal e-mail only on the weekends, but may provide intelligent feedback in a regular manner. Large numbers may open e-mails, but may never actively participate in your calls to action. Tracking these different segments of your membership and tailoring your in-teractions accordingly is essential to effective community building. Once an action (or a series of actions) has been initiated, make certain to solicit ideas and respond to feedback. The best way to find out what is interesting to con-stituents is to ask. Solicit preference information from individuals as they opt-in to your newsletters, give money, complete a survey, or network using your tools. In ad-dition to information supplied by members, pay close attention to behavioral activity as measured by page views, click-through rates, participation rates, and other easily measured characteristics. Combine these statistics with demographics and preferences to build a complete profile of each member and your constituent segments. Constantly look for opportunities to better understand your membership and their motivations for action. Structure your action offers so that they proceed along an involvement path, al-lowing for initial, low-barrier to participation actions that lead to the next step up in engagement. As an example, CARE USA, one of the largest international relief organizations, uses a sophisticated subscription management page (see Exhibit 7.8) allowing commu-nity members to supply updated profile information, view activity records and edit newsletter preferences. Strategies for Building Community 95 EXHIBIT 7.8 Community Profile: CARE USA Activity Optimization: Finding the Right Jobs for the Right Supporters These people who link us up with the world . . . who introduce us to our social circles—these people on whom we rely more heavily than we realize— are Connectors, people with a special gift for bringing the world together. —Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point Malcolm Gladwell’s frequently cited work on social networking and community build-ing, The Tipping Point, refers to distinct types of individuals involved in creating social trends. He uses terms like connectors, mavens, and salesmen to describe the in-dividuals who take on unique roles in marketing an idea and encouraging the adop-tion of new behaviors that become social trends. Individuals with these skills exist within the community surrounding your organization. The key to optimizing the value of your membership is to ensure that these people have access to tools that help them be effective in their roles. Ideally, you want the activities that are most supportive of your organizational mission to become the next social trend. The challenge is to mobilize supporters to use their social networks for the benefit of your organization. In essence, an organization needs to convert a portion of its 96 BUILDING SUCCESSFUL ONLINE COMMUNITIES engaged base into active recruiters and organizers, thereby significantly expanding the reach and impact of its own personnel. Many organizations have already experienced the importance of social networking online as a result of their use of “tell-a-friend” tools. These networking tools have demonstrated that if you provide supporters with an easy way to help spread the word about your organization’s activities, many will reach out to their social network and encourage participation. More sophisticated social networking tools allow supporters to build personal Web pages to communicate their involvement with an organization to their friends and colleagues, and recruit new members or solicit other supportive actions on be-half of an organization. For example, within hours of President Bush’s February 24, 2004, announcement of his intent to seek a constitutional amendment prohibiting same-sex marriage, The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) had mobilized an online community nearly 350,000 strong (see Exhibit 7.9). Having built this community through tireless effort, count- “With this endorsement, President Bush struck a cruel blow against equality and liberty in our country; he escalated the fight for marriage equality to a dangerous and divisive new level. Now it’s your turn to make history.” —Cheryl Jacques, President, Human Rights Campaign (from e-mail appeal—02/24/04) EXHIBIT 7.9 Community Profile: Human Rights Campaign Strategies for Building Community 97 less e-mail campaigns, advocacy efforts, petition drives, and correspondence, the HRC staff had an engaged and mobilized constituency ready to act. In a series of e-mail appeals, HRC offered members a variety of ways to support the organizations and its mission. Fundraising was a key element of the campaign, and an ambitious goal of $500,000 within the week was set and surpassed. Advocacy campaigns allowed mem-bers to send letters to Congress and the president voicing their opposition. HRC gave activists the ability to build their own pages on behalf of the organization, to tell their stories, post pictures, and to engage their friends and families. By having a commu-nity ready to act and by giving them the mechanisms to reach out in their own, indi-vidual way, HRC produced a stunningly successful campaign. The downside of optimizing member activity is that content may need to be care-fully monitored. The same tools that give activists an unprecedented ability to voice their opinion and contribute to your cause can often be accessed by those with oppos-ing viewpoints or those simply seeking to post inappropriate content. Organizations must strike a careful balance between giving members the autonomy to develop con-tent, with the desire (and often the legal necessity) of ensuring that content is both appropriate and contributing to the mission of the organization. Community Integration: Connecting Communities across Your Organization Online communities can complement the networks that your organization already pos-sesses as a result of your offline constituency development activities. Depending on your organizational mission, you may have cultivated networks of donors, event at-tendees, volunteers, coalition partners, and so on. Internet-based relationship man-agement and communication tools provide a cost-effective means for managing your offline communities, as well as new opportunities for connecting and optimizing these existing networks. As organizations begin to successfully mobilize online communi-ties, the opportunity to leverage these relationships to support offline activities will quickly become apparent (see Exhibit 7.10). Successful organizations will assimilate the ideas of community building into everything they do, connecting various con-stituencies into an integrated community network. Establishing connections between the different communities that support your or-ganization presents both challenges and opportunities. While many charities possess engaged constituencies, they may not have a management culture that welcomes ex-tensive community participation in the decision-making process. Traditional forms of broadcast publication are now being challenged by a variety of Web-based, interactive communication strategies (e.g., blogs or discussion forums) that allow constituents to weigh in on virtually any aspect of organizational policy. Unless an organization develops an openness to these new forms of participation, it risks discouraging the development of supportive communities. The opportunities available from integrating community-building considerations into an organization’s operations are compelling. Offline constituents can be more ef-fectively managed online, increasing the support they can provide. Online supporters constitute an already-engaged audience of potential participants in real-world activ-ities that are important to a nonprofit, whether the request involves financial support, physical participation in activities, and so on. When an organization pursues consis-tent messaging both offline and online, based on an integrated view of constituent 98 EXHIBIT 7.10 BUILDING SUCCESSFUL ONLINE COMMUNITIES Community Profile: Environmental Defense and Planned Parenthood ... - tailieumienphi.vn