FND Enterprises

Many community groups, clubs, and other member-based organizations struggle to encourage their membership base through infrequent meetings and newsletters. Surviving off member contributions of time and money, community groups often find themselves in the quandary of how to involve other members without sacrificing more time and money from their budgets. I’d like to discuss a way that can help turn more of your members in to active members. When more people are actively contributing to and supporting any organization, great things can happen.

The idea of a web site for communicating to a membership base isn’t a new idea. While most sites do contain useful information about the organization, which can attract new members, the communication is generally one-way — online newsletters, event announcements, etc. In the past, web sites generally have been aimed towards presentation but nowadays, things are much more interactive.

Imagine a web site for your members. What kinds of things would be on it? How would it help your members become more involved? An area for the officers to convey any messages or updates about their responsibilities, places for other members to interact and discuss topics, events planning and promotion, a chat room to host online meetings or just talk with other members and foster community…

While it may sound like a dream and out of reach for your group, I’m writing this article to tell you it’s not. I’d like to introduce you to a piece of software called Drupal. Drupal provides a framework to build web sites with. It’s free, very easy to use, and very flexible. New features are easily added on an a la carte basis by installing modules. In less than a day, you can have a new web site that will enable your members to interact in new ways and help strengthen your organization.

With Drupal, it’s easy to setup message forums, blogs, polls, events listings, and a host of other features. Each officer could communicate to members via a blog. Message forums could be created for members to discuss topics, plan events, brainstorm, or just interact and have a good time. Polls are easily designed to gauge opinions by allowing your members to vote on issues. Additionally, members can send private messages to each other and photo albums can be stored. These and many other features will keep your members coming back and growing closer together.

Men Who Knit is a Drupal-based web site created and managed by my company, FND Enterprises. It boasts over 300 members from various parts of the world, all united in the spirit of knitting. The site hosts many blogs in which members share their experiences, completed projects, and funny stories. The message forums are active with questions about certain techniques, book suggestions, and cultural topics. We also host an image gallery of projects created by our users, a chat room, events listings, and provide inks to outside resources that might interest our members.

This site is a great example of how Drupal encourages the interaction of people across the various communication mediums it supports. I encourage you to browse the site and reflect on it could be customized to suit your organization. Men Who Knit started with no members. If you already have a membership base, you’re well on your way to having a successful site.

People love to be part of something. Even your inactive members do, otherwise they wouldn’t have joined. Offering them a medium where they can offer input and interact with other members keeps people working together away from meetings. Even though you may only have one or two meetings a month, our lives happen on a daily basis. With a web site of this nature, your members can contribute at their convenience rather than having to choose between meeting attendance or other responsibilities.

If you have any questions or would like to discuss how a Drupal-based site could benefit your group or organization, please contact the author at darrel@fndent.com. FND can get you a domain name, setup email and create a web site customized for your group. For more information about Drupal, visit their web site at http://www.drupal.org.

1 Comment »

The majority of business-related reporting on blogs has focused on marketing efforts, using blogs as a more human way to interact with their customers. I’d like to discuss using blogs as internal communication tools and give you some practical scenarios in which this would be appropriate.

The blogs most of us are familiar with involve celebrity gossip, self-obsessed internet junkies, or alternative news sources. Let’s take a step back from what is written and focus on how blogs handle what’s written.

When a new blog post is created, it is displayed on the front page with other recent posts. Readers can then comment on that post. Those comments can be threaded to help visually clarify when comments are being commented upon rather than the original message. This is much like the interaction that happens when an e-mail is sent and others send replies. The difference is that all those emails are now in one place, replies are organized, and are easily searchable.

The front page of a blog displays recent posts. If you want to see the discussion on that post, click the title and you’ll be brought to a page containing only that entry and any replies made to it. You can also choose to view posts only from a particular category or sub-category.

Blogs are great for project-related communications because they facilitate and organize discussions in an easier-to-follow format than email does. Categories that posts are assigned to can be tailored to create a hierarchical structure that correlates with different areas of a project, teams, or anything else that suits your organizational fancy.  The transparency of communication that bloge allow make it easy for managers and team members to stay in the loop and because all content is archived in a central location and easily searchable and retrievable, it can help make project post-mortems easier to prepare for and more productive.
Blogs are an excellent way for teams to brainstorm and share ideas effectively. It’s easy to maintain discussions on multiple topics because of the way content on blogs is organized. It’s much easier to get a clear picture of what’s going on without having to wade through a sea of emails. Mind you, no one is suggesting you abandon email, but rather divide the labor where it makes sense.

My business partner and I use a blog to communicate our ideas and plans on nearly 10 projects. We live just over 1,000 miles from one another and have found our blog to be a very effective tool. It’s improved our communication and productivity and we feel like our actions are being documented in a more useful way than clogging up our inboxes.

Each category in our blog equates to a project and we have sub-categories under each to separate things like technical and marketing issues. Posts can be assigned multiple categories, of course. On our main page, we’ve also added an area that displays the most recently commented upon posts to help us see which need attention. Since it’s all web based, you can easily cross-reference another discussion by linking to it. If that sounds scary, there are WYSIWYG blog editors (Wordpress includes one) available that make creating complexly formatted posts effortless. You can also attach or link to files easily.

Most blogging software support multiple authors and roles. Roles allow you to grant or deny users access to particular functions of the software. Using roles, you could make sure people can’t alter the site configuration or add new users by limiting their . You can also control whether a particular user must have his post reviewed prior to publishing and being viewed on the site.

While all the hype surrounding blogs might be hard to break through, it’s definitely worth a shot. They are flexible, easy to implement tools that can easily be customized to suit a myriad of applications. They are advantageous for certain types of communications, but overkill for others. The trick is finding the best implemetation to realize the benefits.

If you’d like to discuss how blogs might help your organization, please contact Darrel Farris at darrel@fndent.com.

1 Comment »