Online communities

Do your research before you set up an online community, says Sue Fidler.

Before making the decision to build or create an online community space, it is essential to work through a checklist. This can help save time, money and trouble by ensuring you are creating the right resource for your organisation.

First, who is your audience? Whether you want to create something for clients, supporters or volunteers, you need to identify clearly who the tool is for.


Second, what do they want? There is no point building something your audience doesn't want; identify what its members are looking for, rather than what you think they want.

Third, what tool suits the audience? Do you want to provide a discussion forum or something that provides one-to-one support? Is MySpace appropriate? Do you have potential bloggers or would an image gallery be better? The tool needs to fit the purpose and the audience.

Finally, you need to consider the creation, launch, management and moderation of the community. Can you find free tools to use on sites such as MySpace or bloggers? If so, will your audience be happy using a different URL? Who is going to create or set up the tool? Think about the contrasting benefits of having a community out in the public domain, or driving traffic to your site where you can control the message.

How will you promote the space? You need to spread word by seeding messages in other communities. Do you have the resources to manage and moderate it? Can you promote volunteer moderators or use staff resources? How heavy-handed does your moderation need to be?

Once you have worked through these questions, you should be able to evaluate the need for a community space and plan its implementation. People will use only something that gives them benefit.

The web is a perfect tool for internal communication

Sue Fidler says the web is a perfect tool for internal communication.

If you have any type of regional or community base, the web is an ideal way to communicate. More than 70 per cent of people in the UK use the internet, and there are few audiences that can't be reached.

First, it can offer you cheap and easy regular mailings via email and even calls to action via text.


Second, it can allow your local groups to manage themselves. If you have a CMS - content management system - then allowing groups to have their own pages is an ideal way to give them a voice and manage their own data, events and communications. If you don't have a CMS, you can still use forms for data capture to allow them to keep you informed about their activities.

Third, it allows you to include local groups in your appeals, campaigns and actions. You can ask them to upload images and video via websites such as Flickr and YouTube, post blogs of their activities or send texts for live updates. This might apply to their own local activities or to bigger regional or national events. From a coffee morning to a major action, everyone can feel they are part of something, see their own actions online and, most valuably for you, produce live user-generated content to make events look real and the organisation look active.

Finally, you can use the web to form communities. Whether using websites such as Facebook or MySpace, or creating a presence in virtual world Second Life, you can gather a community of new and existing supporters around your organisation online or around a specific event or campaign.

Once you have a growing online community, you can ask people to contribute user-generated content for everything they and you do, making your organisation look lively and fresh simply because it is active.