Different types of online communities require different approaches.  We hear a lot about consumer-driven communities with large numbers of members, or business to business communities for select professionals, but less of the needs of member organisation’s online communities. Understanding the needs of your audience, whether through intensive market research, creating personas of your typical audience types and their needs, or benchmarking what your competitors are offering, all has a part to play. What that doesn’t always give you though is a wider perspective on the specific needs of your member organisation, faced with the challenge of shifting from a relationship with members based on transactions to one based on conversations; and using this new relationship to help drive transactions.

Use it or lose it

Driven by a traditional one-to-many top-down approach with guaranteed income it’s easy to fall into the trap of disregarding your members' needs, who in the meantime may have already started organising online using Twitter and Facebook. In his post ‘Clay Shirky: nonprofits must become new-style convenors - or lose their members’ David Wilcox says that Shirky understands what any organisation relying on members or supporters for its life must do in this new social media world: "That means change for campaigning charities, trade associations, and membership bodies who may have worked in the past through a mix of newsletters, events and perhaps not very special services. If they don’t offer more value, members and supporters will stop paying their subs."

In the video Shirky reports the case of the American Civil Liberties Union which tried to stop members using the organisation’s name when setting up local meetings through the well known meetup.org online organising site.

This disruptive social impact doesn’t just affect member organisations of course, a lack of understanding of customers and their ability to use social media is changing the business world too. Most recently this was evidenced with the recent PR disaster for United Airlines after a passenger’s guitar was damaged in transit, which the customer turned into a worldwide YouTube viral video hit 'United Breaks Guitars'. Just think how a positive viral video could drive your campaigning!

Despite these challenges facing membership organisations trying to embrace the online world Wilcox has some helpful advice: “The positive aspect is that smart organisations can realise what’s happening, and revise the offer that they make to members and supporters to add more value than DIY networking can offer.”

Change is complex

Indeed this issue of how membership organisations are evolving, and particularly what this means in terms of the way in which they engage with members online, is being developed by a project at the NCVO with the RSA. Former Chief Adviser on Political Strategy to the Prime Minister Matthew Taylor, now the RSA’s chief executive, spoke on this subject at a NCVO seminar earlier this year. He highlighted some key points on his blog which are worth considering in this context:

“Organisations find it very hard to be honest about the task of managing and engaging with their membership. It was only after I was very open about how challenging this is at the RSA that other delegates started to open up. It turns out that the issues are very similar in many different types of organisations.

"Change involves simultaneously confronting barriers (such as activist capture, cumbersome governance and stuffy inward looking cultures), building capacity (finding new ways – particularly on-line - of engaging people) and developing new content propositions (what are we asking members to do and how can we make this an attractive and rewarding proposition).”

For example it may be that the online community is part and parcel of your organisation’s ambitious strategic goals, that it’s charged with helping change the culture of your organisation. Certainly when I worked at the ICAEW as the online community manager in 2008 the ion communities had a high profile in this respect. These issues are discussed in detail in this excellent video interview with head of digital communications John Pearce. To put it another way helping your organisation set out its stall and persuade members and sponsors to engage a little strategic perspective based on understanding first the generic needs of member organisations online can go a long way.

How social media can help

By way of neat coincidence there’s also research being done by the Carnegie UK Trust report on the use of social media in civil society which is attempting to find a way through from the traditional ways of linking with members, using the new social tools. Thanks to social media in the shape of Suw Charman-Anderson's blog the preliminary list of social media outcomes are already published. To summarise the role of social media:

• Helps to engage with segments of the population that traditional marketing may find it difficult to reach.
• Enables conversations to take place, which facilitates the co-creation of knowledge.
• Improves the relationship between an association and individual supporters, as well as between supporters.
• Allows information to rapidly ripple through a community, thus enabling quick and effective mobilisation online and offline.
• Provides platforms for dissent by allowing people to express discontent or highlight abuses of power.
• Strengthens offline communities, and offline events strengthen online relationships.
•  Improves the transparency, governance and accountability of organisations, which increases trust in those organisations.
• Brings about financial benefits by helping organise direct and indirect fundraising.
• Used internally, helps improve the effectiveness and efficiency of organisations and enables flexible staffing and volunteering.
• Helps create highly responsive and less hierarchically governed civil society associations.

Helpfully she adds in an online draft introduction, a reiteration of some of the problematic issues that need to be considered: “It would be foolish not to recognise and address the challenges posed by social technologies. The main challenge is cultural. Social spaces online each have their own culture and unwritten code of conduct. Often, behaviours that are acceptable in a PR or marketing context are not acceptable in a social media context, so care must be taken to understand the culture before engaging with the tools." In addition the issues of resourcing and sustainability are also recognised as a potential problem. One way this manifests itself which may not be immediately apparent is the concern staff may have that a new community may actually increase their workload, with more requirements to answer member queries online.

What's best for your community?

Sometimes the easiest way to approach this is to consider practially what member communities are or are not. They are clearly not your typical large B2C communities. But what if anything does a B2C community include that does overlap? Vanessa DiMauro from Boston-based Leader Networks has a useful slideshare which goes into the differences between B2C and B2B. But where may member organisation communities fit in with that? Clearly there's an argument that coming from a more traditional culture they risk lacking the kind of flexibility that either your typical B2C or B2B community ideally has. So perhaps its worth thinking what are the best elements applicable to your community? Another level to consider is that there are different types of member communities, with different audiences.

At SiftGroups we recognise that overlapping factors, typically cultural, resourcing and social media expertise, are all important to a successful online community for a member organisation. Our approach is to identify the issues upfront in client-engaged workshops, and to help ensure there is shared understanding of how the needs of an online community based on attracting people because they want to contribute means change to how a traditional member organisation regards its members. In short we call this approach 'plan, build, sustain & harvest'. At a practical level this means for example in capturing qualitative (as well as the quantitative) measures of community participation, and in turn ensuring that the best contributions from your community will be those that publicly impact on your content, processes or products. The bottom line is that you need to be seen to be part of the conversation and seen to be responsive if your community is to succeed.