Monthly Archives: December 2014

0 Community Development Online, Future Developments

Now is the time for the Christmas break.  It is an exciting time because I am at the point where I am planning major developments for this site.  This blog will return in the New Year in a new context.

I am planning to offer support to people and organisations active in the local economy, particularly those who are collaborating in real life and want to promote their joint venture online.  This will allow me to bring together 30 years experience in community development with knowledge of online approaches to collaboration.  There are many ideas out there that deserve wider promotion.  I hope this site will become a hub where ideas and good practice in the local economy can be shared.

It’s an enormous challenge to plan do something on this scale as a one person, low-budget enterprise.  I want to show what is possible with modest resources, an idea that is at the centre of some of the most inspiring initiatives in the local economy.  Online resources offer opportunities to local businesses and community projects that have never existed before.  This will be one place where they come together.  The challenge will be to get the conversation started.

So, what changes will you see?  I’m planning

• new content for the website
• a new look for the site
• the blog to continue with a new approach
•  more promotion of the site, initially through social media
• new products and services, including free offers.

This will take a few weeks to put into place.  I’ll post updates as I add new features to the site and then re-start the blog when everything is in place.

Watch out for new developments in the New Year!

0 PDF Files in WordPress

Before anyone complains, there is no mistake; “pdf files” is no misnomer! PDF stands for “portable document format” and so it is OK to write pdf files.

Someone asked me recently if it is possible to link to pdf files in WordPress. It is very easy and an opportunity to learn a little more about the basics of working with WordPress.

Installing PDF Files

Open the editor and then click the Add Media button towards the top left. Then click the Upload Files tab. Drag and drop a pdf file from your desktop or click Select Files and navigate to your pdf file.

Now click on the Media Library tab. The pdf file will soon upload, depending on its size and will appear on the left of the top row. Highlight it by clicking on it once.

Using PDF Files

There are two things in the Attachment Details column on the right you need to know. The first is the url. You will see the pdf file has its own unique url. You can link to it from anywhere on the site or on the web.

Everything in the media library has its own unique url. You can set up an image so, when a visitor clicks on it, they see just the image. This can be useful if the image has a lot detail.

Let’s say you call your pdf file “How to install a frog pool”. In your text you have highlighted the words “install a garden pond” and want that to link to the pdf. You can do this by using the link button in the editor and pasting in the pdf url.

Usually, though there may seem to be little point in doing this because you will need to go into Media Library to find the url. However, if you click Insert into post, you will find “install a garden pond” is replaced by “How to install a frog pool”. Why?

You will find the name of the pdf file copied into the document title and if you insert from the Media Library, it pastes the title over the highlighted text. If you want to insert the document title, then simply position the cursor where you want the title and link to appear.

Alternatively, paste in the url in as I described earlier. If you know you will feature the pdf file only once, then it may be OK to change the text in the Title box but if you are likely to use it more than once, it is better to use the other method.

0 Capacity for Website Development

Last Wednesday I wrote about how organisations can lack capacity in four dimensions. Low capacity in one dimension might be offset by high capacity in the others but equally low capacity in one might inhibit an otherwise healthy organisation.

Today I shall review the four dimensions and show how organisational capacity can enhance or break a website.

Finance

With money you can pay someone to look after your site. However, plenty of money does not guarantee a good website. That depends on the other three dimensions.

If you can afford to pay someone to do the work it is worth asking whether this is the best use of resources. It will depend upon the purpose of the website. So, if it is primarily about sharing well-defined information, one person may be able to maintain it. However, if you want social interaction, for example, a team or whole organisation approach may be better.

Websites are not improved by throwing money at them. They are best when they a planned with care. Don’t do what one of my customers did and run the website by issuing edicts from on high to a sole worker. A good website is best designed through open conversations based on accurate information about the organisation.

Lack of finance is not necessarily a problem. If you cannot afford professional help, then you will sacrifice quality or it will take longer. A simple site with a blog facility might be all you need to start. A few people on a casual basis may be able to figure out what they need to do to progress the site.  When you have money you may have a better appreciation of how to spend it.

Personnel

People are essential to website development and maintenance.   If you are clear about the purpose of your site and know the contributions staff, members and others can offer, it should be possible to match people to specific tasks.

Professional assistance will save you time and well-managed can help you develop an effective site fast.  Small expenditure, if money is tight, on premium services with good support can bring expertise closer to your site at relatively little cost.

Paid staff can with training maintain your website and maybe help develop it.  Volunteers, who may be Trustees or helpers, can develop and maintain a site.

And don’t forget your customers, clients or visitors to the site. There are many ways in which they can contribute, eg through comments, testimonials or as guest bloggers.

Being pro-active finding people who are willing and able to help out is possible where there may be people who are willing to give their time to the cause.

Time

Time is a real constraint, especially for voluntary organisations with no paid staff. Looking after a significant website these days can be equivalent to a full-time job.

I have written about site maintenance and in these posts I show there is more to it than marshalling content.

One solution is to pay someone to look after the site, so volunteers can focus on content, confident their site will rarely crash and someone will rescue it if it does.  Many site designers and consultants offer a low-cost site maintenance service.  You should own the site and pay the host, which means you can change your maintenance service if you are not happy with it.

The key is to develop a routine for work on the site and sticking to it. This might be a few hours a week or daily activity and each person should agree a role and work out how they are going to do it. Everyone should be alert to potential problems and know what to do if they encounter one.  Occasional meetings of all those who work on the site, help you review your routine and bring new ideas and people on board.

Knowledge and Understanding

Whilst knowledge and understanding of how the site works may be important, it is not essential that everyone working on the site has in-depth knowledge.

It is important though that the organisation is in command of knowledge and understanding of the site’s purpose and content. Good content will draw traffic to the site and so help your organisation achieve its goals.  But if you are not clear about purpose, then visitors to the site will not know how to interpret the site or respond to your offer.

Whether your site is simply information about your organisation’s activities or offers a valuable information service, accuracy is important.  If your site advertises events for members, it is still possible to mis-type dates, times and venues.  So, you may find some provision for proof reading is important, even for a simple site.  The good news is mistakes can be quickly changed, although you don’t know how many have seen the inaccurate information.

If you provide information where accuracy is important, eg legal or medical advice, you may need to take further precautions.  Many organisations use a disclaimer that the site is for guidance only and the visitor should take professional advice before committing to a course of action.  Even if you have professionals working on the site who are confident the information provided is accurate, you still cannot be responsible for how a visitor might interpret the information they read.

Websites provide knowledge and depend upon the visitor to provide understanding.  What you can do is provide guidance so the visitor is shown how to use the information they glean from the site.  Some organisations offer one-to-one support, so visitors can make contact and discuss their issue with someone who understands it.  This type of consultancy or coaching can be charged at premium rates although many organisations offer a range of support packages to meet a range of pockets.

If you enjoyed this post, you can sign up to my email list at the top of the right-hand column. You will receive a weekly summary of my posts, an email sequence about community development and occasional emails about community development online.

0 How to Overcome Low Capacity

Last Tuesday in a post about the strengths of community organisations, I wrote under the heading “Alternatives”:

“But a project that brings people together to a common cause and through which they learn about how to run a project and how to relate to others can lead to new ideas. When one door closes, maybe other doors open.  Failure can inform the growth and development of the next project.

Lifestyle experiments to bring about social and economic change will almost always fail at some point. But we now have the means to record and share our experiments and perhaps by learning from others’ failures we can improve our future projects.

Setbacks can be the grounds for new initiatives that benefit from experience and not lead to dispirited activists who lack the energy to try anything new.”

The Compassionate Company

In this video Pavi Mehta tells the story of a compassionate company, the largest provider of eye-care in the world. Towards the start she explains the ground-rules under which the company grew.  They have no external funding and give away 60% of income.  They work exclusively for people who can’t pay, provide world-class quality, accept no donations and no fund-raising.

This approach will not work for everyone but the point is, under those extraordinary constraints something brilliant has grown. So, lacking capacity is not always a curse, maybe it is an opportunity you cannot see, just yet.

0 My Vision for the Local Economy

Over the autumn I’ve blogged about the local economy, supported by posts on Tuesdays and Wednesdays comparing the private and third sectors and considering organisational structures.  These are links to the first post in each sequence and I will prepare cornerstone pages soon.  So here is my vision for the local economy from August 2014.

My Vision from August 2014

My vision is of bringing the marketplace back to the centre of our lives. I don’t mean the marketplace politicians drone on about. They mean the market in financial assets, mediated by banks and institutions in the City of London and other global centres.

I mean the centre of community life, where people go to trade, yes indeed. But that is not the main reason they go there – the market is where you visit the library, go for a swim, enjoy a concert (on street or in a concert hall), join in public worship, meet friends and build relationships with acquaintances. Giant corporations, who dominate the shopping streets and malls, have takenthis from us in recent decades.

It has been eroded by the activities of large corporations, and this corporatism is not the same as capitalism. It is the enemy of small businesses, sucking finance from local economies.

Online Implications

The Internet is also dominated by corporations. But if we plan to reclaim our neighbourhoods as marketplaces we must also claim the Internet for the same cause. It can support local economies. It can encourage collaboration between small businesses in their neighbourhoods. We need to learn how to use it to help rebuild local economies wrecked by the plundering corporations. This is what this site is about.

It is about how we can use our online presence to support local economies. It is about creating a positive interface between small businesses and community, voluntary and faith groups.

This will need a great deal of collaboration between many people if it is to become a reality. Politically the aftermath of the Scottish referendum in the UK may be an opportunity to devolve power from the London-based establishment to the regions. I will write about this and other developments that have a bearing on local economies.

But my contribution is to support small businesses and voluntary groups who want to work together online to support their local marketplace.

What do you think?

2 Humour and Organisations

One simple thing I’ve seen over the years is laughter as a sign of healthy organisations.  Laughter is not always a positive.  It can be cruel and discriminatory.  The excuse the insensitive or exclusive person makes, “I was only joking”, rarely rings true. Genuine laughter makes for an organisation at ease with itself.  So, what is a healthy relationship between humour and organisations?

Tedious Meetings

Look at this way.  I have sat through thousands of meetings and most of them are a complete waste of time.  People sit around a table, poe-faced, grinding their way through a remorseless agenda.

From time to time, someone will climb onto their hobby-horse and take it for a swift canter around the table.  Agenda items return time and again because no-one actually wants to deal with them.  Then someone tells a joke that falls flat.  I’ve been told off for not taking things seriously enough.  I do take losing the will to live very seriously indeed.

The Clique

Another pitfall is the clique.  A group of people run the organisation and have done so for years.  They have no interest in opening up to outsiders.  There may be humour as between friends but not the humour of a group genuinely open to others.  People who get on with one another are likely to get the job done, they should be aware though, they may like each other so much they become closed to outsiders.

Hospitality and Fear

To be light-hearted does not mean you don’t take things seriously.  Hospitality is at the centre.  The stranger should feel welcome and valued.  They may not always agree with the organisation but they will go away with a spring in their step if they receive respectful listening.  A group in good humour knows when to stop laughing, how to pay attention and build up even those they send away empty-handed.

Lack of humour is common where there is fear, where the organisation has taken a place in the hearts of its leaders, where they are clinging to power.  The ironic thing is the power to which they cling is illusory.  People who bully to maintain their place in a twopence halfpenny organisation that’s going nowhere in the real world and every which way in its leaders heads, will find they’ve wasted their time.

In a healthy organisation, people know their limitations, they greet an ironic comment with recognition of our common humanity and not as a threat to their oh so important authority.

Yesterday someone shared a dream project with me.  It might work.  I told him one of my rules of community development: “Most things don’t work”.  He could invest in his dream and the likelihood is it will not work.  But look closely at that phrase.  The fact is the only way you can find the things that do work is to try them.  When you try things, most will not work.  Ironic, but somehow liberating.  Perhaps he will try his idea and perhaps when it fails he’ll remember what I said and smile and be encouraged to try it another way.

0 Delivery of Needs Assessments

In the two previous posts I described how needs assessments can be helpful and outlined the questionnaire I use for needs assessments.  Now we move onto delivery of needs assessments.  (This is an early post and my approach has changed beyond recognition.  But some of the ideas herein may be helpful.)

This post is about how I deliver needs assessments and options for delivering them in the future. I’ve found the questionnaire is a turn-off for clients. Yet many consultants use something similar and so I shall review some options in this post.

Most assessments have four stages, although movement between them is fairly seamless; most people move through them without being aware of it.

1. The initial needs assessment, usually by questionnaire.
2. Evaluation of the results
3. Planning the website
4. Implementation

My practice so far has been to send out a Word document questionnaire for people to complete and return by email. I usually send it to several key people. This is not proving to be effective.

Some options

As they answer the questions, it is likely people will start to evaluate. One question will be whether to allow that or to take a break to complete and circulate the questionnaire, check out they’ve covered everything and then a return session for evaluation and planning.

1 Building Capacity

Most third sector organisations lack capacity in some respect. The same is true of most businesses. Effective organisations know how to supplement their resources when they need to do something for which they lack capacity.

However small community and voluntary organisations can struggle with lack of capacity. I’m going to review capacity in four dimensions, two in this post. Of course, increased capacity in one dimension is unlikely to make an organisation viable. So, the reason why many organisations fail when their grant money runs out is because they have not built capacity.

Competence

An organisation can fail to build capacity because it lacks competence and that can be good news. Maybe they can do something about it. One problem many organisations encounter is their culture blocks their growth in capacity. For example, insisting decisions must go through Trustees who meet once every three months is easy to diagnose and fantastically difficult to change.

Market

Lack of capacity might also be in their market. Their clients have real needs and no capacity to meet them from their own resources. An organisation that aims to help these groups is dependent on external sources of income and so will be slow to build capacity. Indeed many groups know they will never build financial capacity, eg work with older people is unlikely to result in a viable organisation through trade in the local economy.

However, an effective organisation whilst unable to build financial capacity locally may be able to build other dimensions of capacity. And this may help them build financial capacity externally.

The point is many groups are unaware they struggle with capacity. They may find they have some early success but don’t use it as an opportunity to build capacity and so collapse when their money runs out.

Next Wednesday I’ll look at capacity building in finance, personnel, time and knowledge and understanding.

1 The Strengths of Third Sector Organisations

Over several weeks, I have identified some weaknesses in common third sector worldviews. Whilst I generalise, these are real issues we must understand.  In this post, I shall show why it is important to support the strengths of third sector organisations.

Solidarity

At its best a group of concerned citizens can act quickly to support a cause, eg a disadvantaged group. Is the statutory sector better equipped to tackle the problem? Maybe but politicians can take time to name the problem, plan and respond.

There are many issues where the state is unlikely to respond. Climate change is an example. Many vested interests groups lobby politicians.  Concerned citizens, who campaign and experiment, may be the first response before an issue becomes established policy.

For many issues, the self-help group is a good starting point; finding others who share their problem and can share their solutions or experiences. There is no question these have been effective in bringing about real change.

But the problem is the organisational structures available to these groups, especially if they generate significant income, employ staff or occupy premises.

The basic structures of registered charity and company status are hardly fit for purpose.  There are a few new options designed for social enterprises, still a poor fit to the needs of these groups.  Legislators designed them for businesses and so they don’t meet the needs of groups made up of mostly volunteers who are occasionally involved.

Mutuality

Much the same is true about legal structures for mutuals. Industrial and Provident legislation dates back to the nineteenth century and is even more complex than conventional incorporation.

However, values are important and mutuals match the values of the third sector more closely than the values of charitable status or company status. Few organisations practice mutuality and so many forget its features.

There was a time when small groups would naturally form a mutual or friendly society. These self-help groups practiced a range of experiments leading to the social and economic institutions we use today, eg building societies and insurance companies. People need to work together for mutual benefit. Their investments protected and  structures simplified.

I have argued in this blog mutuality is the key to developing new ideas. Once understood, mutuality inspires people to see new possibilities through collaboration. Collaboration can be between organisations too, they don’t have to be mutuals.

Alternatives

Which leads me to the main strength of the third sector, which is the opportunity to experiment with alternative lifestyles and approaches. It is one of my basic observations in community development that “Most things don’t work”.

But the few things that do work can have implications far beyond their first reach. The only way I know to find innovative approaches that work is to try them. These social experiments will mostly fail but it’s worth it for the ones that work out.

But what do we mean by fail? Receiving large grants that lead to mission creep, some success and then loss of the work when the grants run out is a dispiriting failure.  Perhaps creative inspiration will come out of the few groups that refuse grant aid and find ways to work in the economy.  At first sight this may seem impossible but commitment applied to a cause can lead to unexpected developments.

But a project that brings people together to a common cause and through which they learn about how to run a project and how to relate to others can lead to new ideas. When one door closes, maybe other doors open.  Failure can inform the growth and development of the next project.

Lifestyle experiments to bring about social and economic change will almost always fail at some point. But we now have the means to record and share our experiments and perhaps by learning from others’ failures we can improve our future projects.

Setbacks can be the grounds for new initiatives that benefit from experience and do not lead to dispirited activists, who lack the energy to try anything new.

0 Effective Local Economy

I have discussed a new vision for a national localised economy. It would run alongside the neo-liberal economy. It needs to be rebuilt following the rise of neo-liberalism in the 1980s.  Today I shall describe three qualities I see in the retail co-operative movement that I believe led to its successes.  These are just as applicable to localised economies today as they were in nineteenth century.

Democracy

The retail co-operative movement, in common with all types of co-operation, thrives when its members share decision making. The UK retail co-operatives have struggled with this concept in recent years because they have become  large remote institutions.

The early co-ops were successful because their members were enthusiastic and could see the impact of their decisions first hand. They learned from their own and others successes and failures.

Many small retail co-operatives created the massive institutions we see today, by working together to create networks for wholesale (for example) to serve their interests.  They were pioneers and most of the large retail empires we see today are copying the old co-operatives.  Contrary to political rhetoric, it is democratic institutions that find creative approaches and not top-down experts.

Education

It wasn’t the dividend that kept them going, it was their vision. The first retail co-op at Toad Lane in Rochdale had a library and meeting room above the shop from day one. Education of the membership was central to what they were doing. They learned not only the practicalities of setting up and running a co-op but also how mutual principles can transform society for the better.

Perhaps these days people are less likely to voluntarily go to regular meetings for education but maybe online education can to some degree replace those meetings.

Quality

The Rochdale Pioneers founded retail co-ops to tackle food adulteration. They were able to guarantee the quality of their products to their members. Where people know one another and work together they are in a better place to establish their quality standards.

The retail co-operative movement was the first movement of active consumers. They were not just consumers but actually members, a part of the movement. For all the talk of the consumer economy, we have lost sight of what it means to be an active participant in the economy.

The local economy is an opportunity for everyone to take responsibility for the environment and the shape of society and not to leave it in the hands of government or the corporations.