Monthly Archives: November 2014

0 Can You Sell Spirituality?

The question “Can you sell spirituality?” came up in conversation recently.  The person who asked it plans to provide an online spiritual direction service and worried that asking for money in exchange for her services would in some way be immoral.

I’ve given this some thought and my answer is no you cannot sell spirituality because it is not yours to sell.  It is the same reason “Money can’t buy you love” as the Beatles put in many years ago.  Spirituality and love (are their others?) are of the heart.  They are my responsibility and no-one can sell me a solution to my existentialist angst.

The Wrong Question

Moreover, “Can you sell spirituality?” is the wrong question.  Lots of people have spiritual directors and most of them charge for their service.  I’m not sure how many make a living out of it but it is legitimate to make the charge.  Why?  Because you are selling your time and experience as a service.  It is your time and service that is for sale, not spirituality.

The important thing is integrity.  You need to be clear about what you are selling.  Services such as spiritual direction are obviously open to abuse.  Most spiritual directors are accountable to some sort of support network.  It may be someone selling a course online might not have any accountability and that could lead to exploitation.

But it’s like everything else, if you have put in time and effort to produce something worthwhile, there is no harm in charging for your time and service.  Whether you charge to make a living or to make-a-million is a matter for your conscience.

1 Writing Blog Posts

Last Thursday, I completed an overview of using WordPress to write blog posts by comparing the visual and text areas. There are a lot of details I haven’t covered over this sequence and so if you have questions, leave a comment. Today’s post is about blog content.

At the beginning of this sequence I suggested there are at least three approaches to blogging; the diary, library and noticeboard.  You can combine these approaches. Using categories, you can set up pages in your navigation that each focus on one of these approaches. So you might have a noticeboard for events and take down posts when events expire and an information page where you can archive permanent information. I shall go into more detail about archiving information next time.

I found this post recently which identifies four steps to writing a blog post. Below, I shall explore the implications of these four steps for my three approaches to writing blogs. This will illustrate something of diverse approaches to blog writing.

A Plan

Individual blog posts should always be planned but the article does not consider planning sequences of posts. Perhaps a diary needs least planning as it is a response to what is happening. This is not to say though that there is no framework for a diary blog. The most successful diaries have a theme and not an aimless series of events. Some people start a blog because they know the story they want to tell. Others may find a theme emerges.

The library approach demands a clear plan for linked sequences of posts. This presents its own difficulties. Whilst it may help the writer to develop ideas and themes, it can be difficult for the reader to follow, if only because posts are usually presented in reverse order of publishing. I shall look at ways of presenting posts next time.

External events shape both noticeboards an diaries. Their posts are likely to be temporary and aim to inform their readers of events. Events might be meetings but could be a range of things readers need to know. Whilst a blog for an organisation might inform its members of its events, other noticeboards might feature events around a particular theme. So, people sign up because they are interested and find information about their interest.

Permanent or Temporary?

Blog posts are designed to be temporary. When you delete a blog post, it normally has little impact on your website, unless you have links to it.

The big advantage for a diary is you can archive it and use various methods to foreground the best material. Diaries allow you to experiment and find your voice. Once you have found it there are ways to organise your posts that you can bring your best writing to your site visitors’ attention .

Libraries are designed to be long-lasting. There is no reason blog posts cannot be long-term, substantial resources on your website.

Noticeboards need to be kept up-to-date, old posts removed or archived and new posts added in good time so readers can act upon them.

Your Audience

This is an enormous topic and I have addressed your audience elsewhere. All three types of blog are likely to attract an audience if they have a clear theme. A diary called “Living with Diabetes” might be an entertaining account of how the writer struggles with giving up sugar and losing weight. It would not necessarily provide serious information. A library about diabetes might be a series about advice for people who are newly diagnosed. A noticeboard might be for a local group of diabetes sufferers and give them information about local events they might find helpful.

All three approaches might appeal to the same audience. A site might therefore feature all three approaches or specialise on one perhaps because other sites handle the other approaches.

Search Engines

The main things to remember about search engines is (1)they aim to find the best answers to questions asked by searchers, (2) the rules change regularly.

Whatever approach you use the best advice is write about one topic per post and be clear, especially in the title about what the post is about.

You may have landing pages on your site for visitors who are searching for sites about your topic. The “long-tail” referred to in the four-steps blog post refers to the answers to a specific question a specific post might contain. If one in five of your posts attracts a visitor once during its lifetime and your blog has a lot of posts, it could attract similar traffic to your landing pages.

However search engines are only part of a strategy to drive traffic to your blog. So, a noticeboard for example may be primarily for members or subscribers to your email lists. Library and diary blogs may be intended for visitors found online and you can use social media and other networking tools as well as search engines to point people to your blog.

1 Third Sector Organisations: Legalistic Practices

Last Wednesday I started to explore the differences between small businesses and third sector organisations. The main difference is small businesses can be more responsive to their customers because they do not need the bureaucracy to manage accountability for grants or contracts.  Perhaps the most common drag on third sector organisations is legalistic practices.

The bureaucratic nature of third sector organisations is partly down to their need to be accountable to funding bodies. But the problem goes deeper than that. The organisations that advise third sector organisations pass on the bureaucratic model. This means they saddle small organisations with structures they may not need.

A self-employed person can work for many years at their own risk. If their business fails they risk bankruptcy but many of them carry on successfully for many years without incorporation.

Third sector organisations do not normally belong to one person and so they need some sort of agreement about how a group of neighbours or people with a common interest will work together. So, they draw up a constitution and for many such organisations an unincorporated association is all they need.

Incorporation and Charitable Status

But under certain circumstances, such as employing staff, they must apply for registration as a charity. Then they must opt for incorporation to protect their Trustees. Soon, they find they must send in annual returns or else they will be liable for fines. I’ve seen several social enterprises, which would have worked as self-employed businesses, bogged down in these structures.

Incorporation and charitable status may be essential to receive substantial funding and then accountability to their funding bodies is added to the bureaucratic burden. Many self-employed people avoid the bureaucracy that ties small community organisations, just to get on with what they thought would be a simple piece of work.

The result is many organisations become over legalistic. Some of this can accounted for simply because they have registered as a charity and as a company.  It becomes a part of the mindset.  Someone told me the other day, a tiny voluntary organisation should have had a whistle-blowing policy.  The Trustees knew what they needed to do; a policy would not decide whether they do it.  This legalism is fueled by fear of what the authorities might do if certain activities are not carried forward in a prescribed way.  But the authorities are not interested in the minor issues most organisations encounter.  It is the Trustees’ responsibility if something goes wrong and most issues are easily resolved.

Trustees and Directors

Most small businesses get on with the job and do not have to pass every decision through Trustees or directors. Larger companies need them.  So why do we think community groups need them?  Many groups struggle to find people to sit on committees and then find they comprise people who mostly have a limited understanding of either the legal constraints or of the work of the organisation.

Once you get into the legalistic mindset, there are always excellent reasons for not doing things. Ask a solicitor whether you can do something and they’ll tell you why it isn’t a good idea. This is the wrong question. The right question is how do I do the new thing? I’ve made the decision and I don’t want to know it’s too risky, I want to know how to do it without unnecessary risk.

4 What’s the Problem with Capitalism?

What’s the problem with capitalism?  Anti-capitalism is the first in my exploration of third sector worldviews.

Where Marx Was Wrong

Marx is perhaps the origin of anti-capitalism. His is certainly the most prominent name. Whilst there was always criticism of capitalist thinking, see Isaac Watts, “When I survey the wondrous cross” for example, opposition to capitalism coalesced around Marx. Other socialist movements were more positive about the capitalist economy, eg the co-operative movement.

Marx identified capitalism’s internal contradictions.  Much of what he wrote proved to be correct but he was wrong on two counts.

Totalitarianism

First, the experiments to build economies based on socialism became totalitarian. There are a number of reasons why this happened. When a country prevents people from trading, they must centralise the entirety of the economy. Instead of allowing government to regulate the economy, to keep businesses small and local, the state attempted to run everything. Getting the balance right between what the state runs and what the people run is not easy.  The Soviet Union did not abolish capitalism but developed something called state capitalism.

Concentrations of wealth and power is bad news when it belongs to the state just as much as when it belongs to individuals.  Tendencies in western capitalism to concentrate wealth in the hands of the 1% are just as likely to lead to totalitarianism as state capitalism.  The issue is democratic accountability and it is absent from totalitarian economic models.

Capitalism Survived!

Marx was also wrong that capitalism could not survive. He believed it would succumb to its internal contradictions.  It has survived in a mutated form. Power concentrates in the hands of huge corporations. Governments have sold off state assets to corporations and as a result government is no longer able to govern. The people understand this to some degree but few political parties offer an alternative.

Anti-Capitalism in the Third Sector

In the third sector there is sometimes an anti-capitalist worldview that sees the market as something to be resisted. This is not always expressed as revolutionary communism; more often it is a quiet moral superiority to the grubby realities of the marketplace. Their critics tar all business owners with the same corporatist brush.   This suits the corporations of course. This all-encompassing anti-capitalism doesn’t touch them but incapacitates small businesses.

Worse it means third sector organisations do not think about small businesses to rebuild the local economy. Indeed they don’t think about the local economy. So, throughout my working life community organisations have either ignored the local economy, focusing upon the needs of disadvantaged sections of the community, or else they have set up alternatives to the local economy, such as social enterprises.

Do Social Enterprises Undermine Local Business?

I suppose the idea is the people who run social enterprises do not subscribe to capitalism. Too often as a result they are not a permanent part of the economy and become dependent on grant aid.

Meanwhile, this marginalises the people who might affect lasting change in their neighbourhoods, the local business people. Their skills and values are not accepted and so they are side-lined. The organisational failures that plague so much community work are familiar to business people. They know they don’t work and so keep their distance. They’ve seen it all before and know how destructive it can be.

The frustrating thing is the most creative period in recent UK history for development of local economies was the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century.  The retail co-operative movement, is part of the capitalist economy, even though it owns capital collectively. This demonstrates the creative potential of capital when democratically owned.

I’ll explore some of these issues in more detail in future posts.  Find them by following this link and scrolling down to Third Sector Worldviews.

3 A Case Against Altruism

Some people find they are able to practice altruism, at least on occasion. I suppose soldiers on the battlefield are altruistic. The problem is you cannot build a society on altruism.

You may have gathered I am a theologian and apologies to those who are not religious but I want to show how the roots of my views about self-interest and altruism are in the deep past. It’s what people have believed for thousands of years. Some people will remember words from the Christian New Testament: “We ought to lay down our lives for one another” (1 John 3:16, NRSV). This is something religious people aspire to but it is not the main thrust of Jesus’ teaching or indeed of other religious traditions.

In various places Jesus teaches the second commandment, “You shall love your Neighbour as yourself” (eg Mark 12:31, NRSV). I remember Mrs Hayes, my teacher at Junior School, who told us that with the first commandment this means we must love God first, other people second and ourselves third. We are permitted to love ourselves it seems but third.

This is of course nonsense. The second commandment is about mutuality. Remember mutuality is understanding that when I work for the benefit of others I benefit myself. The point Jesus makes in this second commandment is not that I come third but I am one of the neighbours I love. From God’s perspective we’re all the same. There’s no third tier of love occupied solely by me!

The word used to describe this love is self-interest. It is the basic value underlying mutuality. Maybe sometimes altruism, giving of my entire self for the benefit of others is important. It makes for inspiring stories but in the regular day-to-day world it is self-interest that benefits all. It is not the same thing as greed.

Greed is where the powerful act solely in their own interests without accountability. Listen for it in the mouths of politicians and directors of industry. They genuinely believe taxation is evil, that supporting the weak through the state is a waste of money, that deregulation benefits the economy …

But pure altruism has its down-side. You can’t build a society on it, unless you need soldiers to fight wars. Here are some of the issues:

The local economy is where we act out our commitment to the values of self-interest. In a disadvantaged local economy, our opportunities to act out of self-interest are limited. When it thrives we are able to collaborate and increase general wealth.

Those who tell us that the economy is essentially competitive are not participating in the economy. They are predators in sheep’s clothing who do not care for the benefit of all.

So, self-interest is a core value but there is another one, about which I shall write next Monday.

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1 The Immortal Leader

Two weeks ago I wrote about mortality and how it is essential to good community leadership.  We all know we’re going to die.  We may believe it will be in the distant future but it is a future that will perhaps arrive sooner than we think.  We all know this.  So what do I mean by the immortal leader?

The immortal leader lives as if they are never going to die.  Ask them and they will readily concede they will one die one day.  But in practice they are there forever.  Here  are some signs of immortality?

Immortality is a spiritual issue.   A theologian called Walter Wink has written a three-volume book about the Powers (the first volume is to the left).  For Wink demonic possession is where someone allows an organisation to inhabit their being.  In first century Palestinian cosmology, every organisation has an angel that can be healthy or sick.  Sick angels are demons.  We normally read these texts through the twin filters of Medieval demonology and modern horror films and so miss the sophisticated cosmology of this period.

Healthy organisations empower their members and others.  Sick organisations can embody humanity’s vilest tendencies.  Organisations are in principle immortal.  With succession in place they can continue for centuries.  The churches are a good example of this and so are governments.  They have powerful structures in place so when key personnel unexpectedly go missing, the organisation is not threatened.  They can to a degree accommodate their immortals because they are not dependent upon them.

But identification with an organisation is never healthy.  It distorts vision and undermines rational thought.  Immortals never listen because they have already made up their minds.

How might immortals appear online?  Does the Internet extend their power or threaten it?

0 Using the Text View

If you enter the WordPress post editor and look to the right just above the one or two rows of buttons you can see two tabs labelled Visual and Text.

For most purposes you will work in the Visual area. This offers an approximate version of the post or page you are working on. If you want to see it exactly as it will appear once published, press the Preview button towards the top right.  The Visual area has improved in recent upgrades and now it offers a fairly good approximation to what you will see once published. This means writing your post is a little simpler than it used to be.

What is the Text View?

The text area is where you can see the underlying html of the post or page. Some people work solely in this area but I don’t recommend this unless you are familiar with html.

The text area offers a very basic facility to control the detail of what you see on the page; your theme and plug-ins control a lot of it. the Text area enables you to control  your posts’ and pages’ appearance using CSS.

There are a few buttons that allow you to add html tags and some are similar to buttons in the visual view. You can add any html into the text area even if it is not available on the buttons.

I’m not going to go into detail. If you know html you can work out what the buttons do and if not you’ll not follow it anyway.

Here are two things to note:

1. Sometimes if your post or page does not publish how you expect it to, the reason is visible in the text view. If you know html, it’s worth taking a look.
2. You can do a lot by using div with a class attribute supported by css. I use this method to add my cross, tick and arrow bullets. Anything that requires css will need a div tag and class attribute.

2 Third Sector Organisations: Outputs and Outcomes

Last Wednesday I offered five reasons why so many websites lack purpose. Whilst these can apply to any organisation, I’ve found the third sector is particularly prone to purposeless websites. The reasons why so many sites fail lie in the nature of the organisation that puts them there.  If the organisation is not clear about its own purpose or the purpose of its website then it is inevitable the site will not have a clear purpose.

Business and Third Sector Organisations

Businesses seek profit and so they have to get their websites right; they must get to know their customers and potential customers and so offer a site they will respond to positively. Their existence may depend upon them getting their website right and keeping that way.

Third sector organisations can be businesses but many of them are not. They are often dependent upon grants and this means they need to satisfy their funding bodies and not their clients. The relationship with funding bodies is rarely a partnership. Usually funding bodies are interested solely in whether their money is spent for the reasons it was given. They are not so interested in how effective the work is, even allowing for all the talk about outputs and outcomes.

Outputs and Outcomes

Outputs are brilliant to the bureaucratic mind. They are measurable. So you offer a grant to an organisation and in return you might ask, for example, that the organisation sees 100 clients. The organisation needs to provide evidence they have seen 100 clients. Usually there are several outputs, so if the organisation helps people find work there may be further outputs detailing numbers who do training courses, find work, set up their own business, etc.

The problem with outcomes is they are far less visible. Let’s say you have a single output, which is that one person found work through the organisation that received the grant. The outcome would be the difference it makes to the client’s life and their family. Here things can get messy. How do you measure the extent to which they enjoy their new job? What if they enjoy it but are on low pay and have to travel 2 hours each way to get to work? What if they hate the job but the money really benefits their family?

I don’t want to get bogged down about how to measure outcomes; it is possible to record them. It requires qualitative methods and these are generally less well-known and more demanding than quantitative methods.

A business offering a service similar to a third sector organisation has to focus on outcomes if they are going to understand their customers and offer them a valued service. The third sector organisation has to understand their funding body and their requirements. They may be fully aware the statistics they gather for their funding body are effectively meaningless but they have no option but to collect and process them.

Their focus is on where their income is coming from and it is not coming from their clients. This means they have to become bureaucratic and not responsive to their clients’ needs. Any innovation has to be justified to the funding body at some stage. Sometimes the hassle is too great.  Why bother changing things to meet the needs of clients if the funding body is already happy with your performance.

The Role of Business and the Third Sector

One final point: I am not making the political point that the private sector is more efficient than the statutory sector. These political ideologies seek to justify privatisation of public services and they have proved to be an unmitigated disaster. Most private sector organisations on government contracts are large corporations who generate their own bureaucracy and their accountability to the government generates its own bureaucracy.

The strengths of small businesses lie in their closeness to their clients and their ability to respond directly to their clients’ needs. Once consumed by bureaucracy they lose their advantages and deserve to lose their business.  It leaves open to question the best way to fund services for clients who cannot pay for them.  The least wasteful approach for mainstream services has to be through public services.  This leaves small businesses and third sector organisations to fill the gaps in provision.

1 Evaluating the Marketing Worldview: Mutuality

Last Tuesday I discussed the value of marketing to small businesses and before that evaluated underselling marketing as a means to personal wealth.

This time I want to ask how marketing can bring about transformation of society. First, a warning: there is no panacea. There is no magic bullet that will instantly change things for the better.  The neo-liberal worldview is almost universally dominant. In the UK the three main political parties have all bought into this worldview. Through privatisation they have sold off the sovereignty of Parliament and so seem unable to effect change through legislation.

The recent growth of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) is a joke. They perpetrate the same ideology, whilst recognising the helplessness of our politicians they believe it is membership of Europe that is the cause of loss of sovereignty.

We need a new politics that is pro small business, pro local economy, pro regulation and pro taxation. We need to re-democratise the economy.

Co-operation

This happened in nineteenth century UK through the co-operative movement. It was much wider than the retail co-ops and working people experimented with a range of Friendly Societies that lasted well into the twentieth century.

People understood mutuality and they understood what many people who are in business understand. To be successful in business you must collaborate. The idea that competition is somehow the means to wealth is one of the lies perpetuated by the neo-liberals. It is a lie taken for granted to the extent that almost all of society believes it.

When entrepreneurs set up in business they discover it is a lie. You can choose to compete for a small piece of the pie or you can collaborate to grow the pie. But make no mistake: pies do not grow in a neo-liberal economy. In 2008 the neo-liberal debt based economy collapsed.  We’ve paid for their mistakes ever since.

“Who ate all the pies? Who ate all the pies? The Corporations, the Corporations, they ate all the pies. (And then they ate a pie.)”

Marketing can counter this prevailing ideology.  Online marketing offers everyone an opportunity to get their message across using methods that a few years ago were available only to a small élite. If we can learn to collaborate, it may be possible to experience the mutual benefits our great-grandparents experienced.

You would think the third sector would embrace this approach and to a degree it does. However, the third sector has also embraced the neo-liberal worldview. The consequences are that much of what is happening is self-defeating and so over the next few weeks I shall look at third sector worldviews.

1 Self-Interest and Altruism

Last Monday’s post asked, is it possible to rebuild the local economy? Despite the views of some politicians the truth is many voluntary sector organisations and churches work with private businesses. These relationships do not always work because values clash but there are examples of collaboration between these sectors.

Imagine a spectrum with greedy grasping capitalists at one end and selfless or altruistic saints at the other. Both ends are unreal.

The grasping capitalist is closest to the 1%, the directors of the corporations who draw wealth from local economies. They are responsible for the collapse of the global economy (and will be again soon it seems) and environmental damage. They do this through deregulation which skews the economy in their favour.

Starry-eyed people occupy the other end of the spectrum.  They genuinely believe it is possible and desirable to act solely for the interests of others.

Self-Interest

Most of the rest of humanity is somewhere in-between and motivated by self-interest. When I work for the benefit of society I do so for my benefit. If society benefits through my work, so shall I because I am a part of society.

The corporations want us to believe everyone is essentially selfish and so wants to pay lower taxes and make fewer contributions to general well-being. Another way of  increasing tax revenue and so to benefit society is  to increase wages but big business doesn’t like this solution because it will cost them a lot more.

I don’t see why volunteers should not be paid; they can always give away their excess. We earn for the benefit of  ourselves and others; pay the state to provide some of that benefit and can choose to contribute to causes not supported by the state.  But this works where people earn enough to be able to freely exercise these choices.

I’ve made a case against the greed of the banks and corporations, supported by our political élite.  Next Monday I shall explain why altruism does not explain why people work for the local economy.