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Goodness 2.0

This month's Beers and Innovation concerned the topic of charitable organisations and the ways in which new web technologies - Web 2.0 as they're generally referred to - might offer new and better ways for them to engage with supporters and operate internally. Ian Delaney reports.

This month's Beers and Innovation concerned the topic of charitable organisations and the ways in which new web technologies - Web 2.0 as they're generally referred to - might offer new and better ways for them to engage with supporters and operate internally. Ian Delaney reports.

The Panel:

Kathryn Corrick (chair): journalist and new media consultant.

Tim Malbon: Creative Director, Interesource, has worked with the Dogs Trust, Terence Higgins and the RNID, among other clients.

Steven Buckley: Head of Information and Internal Communication, Christian Aid, teaches podcasting for social enterprise Sound Delivery and describes himself as a Web 2.0 evangelist.

Rob Purdie: founder, Important Projects, has worked with Greenpeace and Amnesty to implement new CMS systems.

Imaginary Buffaloes

Steven Buckley began the formal part of the evening with an anecdote about fake water buffaloes, an episode which had showed him the importance of Web 2.0 and the ways in which charitable organisations are no longer in charge of the narratives people hear about their subject matter.

The story began on Philip Greenspun's blog, with a posting about charitable gifts, where people allegedly buy goats, vaccinations or, in this case, a water buffalo, for people in need and then give the certificate recognising this purchase to their family and friends as a gift. Looking into the fine print in this particular example, it emerged that this gift didn't actually exist - you didn't really buy a water buffalo, you just give money to the charity.

The blog post was read by jazz violinist Robert Thompson, who was inspired by the piece to help Greenspun buy a real water buffalo, deliver it to a poor family in China, blog about it, take photos of the journey and the family and create a short film, which was then put on to YouTube, generating thousands of views.

This was a story, said Buckley, that existed entirely within Web 2.0 tools and showed how ordinary people were making their own stories, and in some cases, subverting the stories told them by charities. In order to get back into the conversation, charities need to adopt these tools, he felt. This has led Christian Aid to move to a blog format for its fact-finding trip reports, sites which have swiftly become the most-viewed within the organisation.

Shaggy Dogs

Tim Malbon's most recent project has been the development of the Doggysnaps site. Doggysnaps is 'flickr for dogs'. People join the site and upload photos of their dogs, sharing them with the community through groups and tagging. He developed the site for the Dogs Trust, which has historically run major mass media campaigns including the omnipresent 'A dog is not just for Christmas' campaigns.

The point of Doggysnaps was not simply to do something 'Web 2.0-ish' in an attempt to be more modern or trendy. It came from a recognition of what supporters were doing and what they were interested in. The Trust's supporters loved dogs, and probably had digital cameras and broadband. Putting those three things together allowed the Trust to create a community that was passionate about dogs and to channel some of that passion into raising funds. Members of the site give up the rights to their photos to the Trust, which can then resell the images to others, and create print-on-demand gifts such as T-Shirts, mugs and calendars. The site now has 16,000 dogs on it, despite no money spent on publicity whatsoever.

Open Source

Rob Purdie is a project manager and his main work with social change organisations recently has been in helping them to move to more modern, maintainable tools. At Greenpeace, his main task was to help them move from an ageing, unwieldy content management system to the open source Drupal system. Rob made the point that introducing a new system can quite easily become a catastrophic failure unless users are drawn into the decision-making and deployment process. Although he is a champion of Open Source, he didn't dictate the system that was used, but rather made a lengthy analysis of users' needs, inputting these into a 'magic spreadsheet' to eliminate questions of taste and emotion from the decision-making process. He's now undertaking similar consultancy work with the International Secretariat of Amnesty, which faces similar challenges.

Rob's experience drew comment from a delegate from Teach First, which is making a similar move from Lotus Notes to Drupal. While the organisation has chosen Drupal, there remain some questions over open source solutions since they comes with no guarantees. Rob replied that, in fact, open source also had an ethical importance for Greenpeace, in that it wanted to show support for the open source movement and also to give back to the Drupal community through the development of its own custom modules which would be shared with other Drupal users. Steven Buckley added that his own organisation had opted to use Microsoft Sharepoint, largely because of the speed with which that solution could be deployed, but agreed that it was the needs of the organisation and its members that ought to dictate the decision-making process.

Another delegate, Amanda from Freerange Media, noted that organisations should not be over-cautious about making use of pre-existing social media resources. Not having a modern infrastructure and content management system doesn't prevent organisations from interacting with social media now. She noted that it costs nothing and takes no time to start a blog, a MySpace profile, or a flickr account, and that those infrastructures and communities are already popular and established.

Roll Your Own?

This led to some debate about the desirabililty of creating your own social networks versus joining ones that already exist. Steven Buckley talked about his organisation's PressureWorks site, which allows users to draw attention to causes that are important to them, creating videos and posts about them. Although innovative in 2004, he noted that the user generated content area of PressureWorks was underutilised and campaigners were more likely to be using wiki's and social media sites such as YouTube and MySpace. PressureWorks remains as a campaigning website but the UGC element of it is not currently being developed further. Nevertheless, Buckley acknowledged that the large sites such as MySpace are growing at such a pace (c. 1.5mn new users each week) that new social sites which are themed around specific issues are beginning to get traction. He pointed out the successful use of Linked-In by Médecins Sans Frontières as an example of how organisations might use existing networks. A delegate from NESTA reminded the audience that people won't simply come to a new site because you build it: organisations need to have their users' objectives in mind before they create anything. Delegate Paul Tanner pointed out the necessity of separating issues of communites from platforms: while inventing a new platform is probably not a great idea, new communities might well have a selling point.

Tim Malbon noted that while recreating flickr in some ways through the development of DoggySnaps might seem like wasted effort from some perspectives, it allowed the organisation to retain its relationship with its supporters, which could have been lost if they'd simply created a flickr group about dogs. Also, the fund-raising opportunities would have been lost. The costs of the site, after its development, amounted to two full-time members of staff, who have thus far been perfectly capable of looking after any moderation issues.

Keeping Check

Moderation proved a hot topic. If members are free to upload anything, how can they be prevented from uploading unsuitable material? A delegate from YouthNet pointed out that their forums often contain posts from very vulnerable and troubled youngsters. If there were no-one reading those posts, the charity would be shirking its duty and leaving those young people open to abuse from less responsible members. Yet moderation is a significant cost for many organisations, particularly where sites have high traffic and hundreds of posts a day. Kathryn Corrick recalled that the New Statesman was at one point forced to shut down its forums because the cost of moderation seemed disproportionate to their value at that time. This factor can make organisations less inclined to allow user-created content or move them to use external sites that have their own moderation procedures. Luke Smith from the Arts Council pointed out that lack of moderation can also lead to damage to your brand. Nico Macdonald talked about the immaturity of social media sites and the need to develop procedures that make civilised, intelligent discussion more likely. Delegate Steve Bridger suggested that organisations should try to make more use of its virtual supporters who might well be keen to offer support by becoming forum moderators. There might also need to be a realignment of staffing - people creating traditional top-down messaging that nobody reads might be better employed working with the community's content, for example.

Where Next?

At this point, there were a few reminders that 'Web 2.0' is still something of a minority sport. Traditional photo-sharing site Photobucket has many times more users than flickr. Most people aren't creating and uploading their own videos to YouTube. Is Web 2.0 a displacement activity, asked Martin Perks from cScape, distracting organisations from what their real users need and value? David Wilcox suggested that there was a significant disconnect between the potential of these tools and what organisations are actually doing, though there were a large number of excellent success stories as well.

Concluding, it strikes me that we were only able to scratch the surface of some of the issues that most concerned delegates. Separate, more in-depth, events on moderation and working with social networks, in particular, seem to be a good way to build on the excellent discussions at this event.