1 Is it Possible to Rebuild the Local Economy?

In the last few Monday posts, I’ve defined the local economy. Before I move on I want to ask whether it is possible to rebuild the local economy.

On Saturday 4 October 2014, the Guardian newspaper ran an item on its front page, “Outcry as Osborne rails against ‘anti-business’ charities”. The chancellor of the exchequer addressed the annual convention of the Institute of Directors and said,

“You have to get out there and put the business argument, because there are plenty of pressure groups, plenty of trade unions and plenty of charities and the like, that will put the counter view. It is, I know, a difficult decision sometimes to put your head above the parapet, but that is the only way we are going to win this argument for an enterprising, business, low-tax economy that delivers prosperity for the people and the generations to come.

There is a big argument in our country … about our future, about whether we are a country that is for business, for enterprise, for the free market.”

I doubt the Chancellor would recognise a free local market even presented to him on a golden platter with watercress tastefully arranged around it.  So, let’s deal with some of the myths in his statement.

Deregulation

The Institute of Directors are hardly equipped to make the case for small businesses and the local economy. They are not primarily pro-business in the sense of free trade and a level playing field for small businesses. The corporations skew the economy to the interests of the 1% who accumulate wealth and so take it out of the economy. They are not behind the parapet; they are the owners of the big guns that over the last few decades have blown the parapet away.

The Chancellor mixes all manner of things together. Of course we need enterprise and business and we need a government that allows businesses to develop on a local scale. The great corporations are not businesses as we know them locally and his eliding of economic imperialism with entrepreneurship is not honest.

The low-tax economy again betrays the prejudice against the entrepreneur who builds wealth for the economy and not personal gain. Why should we not pay taxes? Why shouldn’t the success of my business benefit others?  There was a time when business owners genuinely saw their role as benefiting wider society.  Granted they exploited their workforce but they also aspired to be public benefactors.  I think they used the wrong means to the right ends.  They exploited their workers because they believed they could benefit society from their own efforts.  It was the mutuals that actually built the institutions that created modern Britain.

Whilst we need to be for business and enterprise, the idea of the free market is the get out clause for the corporate world. Their watch word is deregulation because their free market allows them to extract wealth from the economy.  All the major political parties in the UK support deregulation, as an unquestioned good.  It shows the rhetoric of national sovereignty, beloved of the new right, is a sham.  Why care about sovereignty when you’ve sold the power to regulate to the corporations?

Mutuals

A regulated economy, creates the spaces where small business can thrive. Mutuals for example need regulation, so that the work of their members builds wealth for the members together.

Which brings me to the point: can we rebuild our local economies? In the middle to late 19^th century, the co-operative movement, a grass-roots movement did it. I’ve written about how so many of the institutions, now owned by corporations, originated from working people who built them as expressions of mutuality.

We know it is possible. The question is whether modern corporations are too powerful. The answer lies in the self-destruction at the heart of their practice. They’ve built their world on debt and we are it seems a hair’s breadth away from a second collapse of the global economy. The Chancellor has not learned the lesson (nor the opposition) but the people sense something is wrong. The popular answer in the UK is UKIP who, whilst identifying some of the issues, have not found solutions that can possibly work.  They are fixated on Europe, where the local economy has many allies, and do not understand the UK government has lost far more sovereignty to privatisation than it has ever lost to Europe.

We will get the politicians we need when we understand the economy we need. This will arise when we have entrepreneurs whose values line up with a new vision. And it is to values I’ll be turning next.

2 Good Leaders are Mortal

Something said during Citizens’ Organising training in the early 1990s had a profound effect on my community development practice.  At the time there was a lot of enthusiasm about introducing Citizens’ Organising in the UK.  For some reason it never took off and whilst there are still a few citizens’ organisations around they have had little overall impact.

One of the things I remember from the training was one of the characteristics of a community leader is they know their own mortality.  This means not only do they know they are going to die, they are constantly aware of that fact.  At first glance this may seem to be a disadvantage.  My observations over 20 years have found it to be profoundly true.

It leads to a practice citizens’ organisations call ‘sloughing’, where no-one occupies a permanent leadership role.  (The word slough (pronounced “sluff”, is usually used of snakes shedding their skins.)  When someone vacates a leadership role it is to occupy a new role, thus extending their experience of leadership and vacates a place for someone else to fill and extend theirs.  Good leaders share knowledge and experience because they cannot know they will be around for sure.  Their role is to pass on leadership, not to build their own power base.

In June 1997 I traveled the UK visiting economic development projects.  I visited only one place twice. On my first visit to Moss Side in Manchester my host, then chair of their development trust, was moving into a new office.  He was a Church of England vicar and had just retired.  He was moving into the vestry of a local church from where he could continue to support the work of the Trust.  I found he was someone who had taken the basic tenets of leadership to heart and so agreed to visit again in a couple of weeks to continue the conversation and visit the trust.

One year later I was writing a report and wanted to refer to my visits to Moss Side.  I needed more information and so I phoned my contact.  A woman answered the phone and told me he’d been incapacitated by a stroke.  She had taken on his work.

What was impressive was she knew who I was (she must have had some record of his contacts) and was able to answer my questions.  It was as if I had met her first.  She told me my first contact had prepared her for his own departure.  He knew he would not last forever and so he made sure his work would continue in his absence.

Next Friday I’ll explore what happens when leaders forget they are mortal.

0 Scheduling Posts

If you blog regularly, you need to think about when to schedule your posts.  There are at least two ways to do this. Whichever approach you use, your purpose is to publish your blog to be seen by followers and new people.

How and When to Schedule

Inside the WordPress post editor, top of the right-hand column notice box labelled Publish. The fourth item in the box reads Publish Immediately followed by the word Edit. If you click on the link you can set the date and time for your post to be published.

Do this and click OK, notice the label on the blue button below changes from Publish to Schedule. Finish editing, press Schedule and the post enters a queue to be published at the date and time specified.

This has a number of uses:

What Time?

When is the best time to publish? This is a difficult question. One issue is whether you broadcast to more than one time zone. If you are it probably doesn’t much matter what time you publish. However, if you know most of your market is likely to be in one time zone, you may be able to work out the best time to publish. Obviously, the same time will not suit everyone but it may be best to publish early to mid-morning so followers find it when they switch on their computers at work. Later in the day may be better for some people, once they have dealt with the back-log of posts from overnight.

Social Media

If you look again at the Publish box, you will find the last item in it reads Publicise. You can set up your system so that it post publishes on social media. There are various plug-ins that help you do this.

Email Lists

A second way to schedule your posts is using email lists. Set up your email service to monitor the posts you publish and to send out an email with all the posts published over a day, a week or a month.   You can specify the time, day or date when the email post will schedule this summary email.

This is useful if you believe your market is active at different times of the day or the week. So, if you publish from WordPress in the morning, you could set up your list to send a notice to everyone on your list in the afternoon.

If you publish a lot of posts, a weekly round-up may be more acceptable, so that you are not sending an email to your list every day. People on your list will know when it appears and so may watch out for it. If your posts are infrequent and not urgent, a monthly post may work. The service does not send an email if you do not post.

Think carefully about scheduling as it is an essential part of your marketing.

Have you any tips or tricks for scheduling your posts?

2 Your Website is not an Advert

It is important to know and understand the purpose of your website and to do that you need to understand your organisation’s purpose.  If you assess your organisation’s needs, you may find your website develops in unexpected directions.  In this post, I address the third issue that tends to cause organisations to lose sight of their website’s purpose.

Many people think of their website as an advert because they are not aware of what they can do for their organisation, . They have a website because everyone has one and it offers credibility. They can give people their website address where they can go and find out more about the organisation.

This may be all a small businesses needs. However, it is one option available after considering all the options and must not be your default option.

So, why do organisations fail to consider all the options?  A lot of it is about mindsets.  People have seen and want to copy certain sites, perhaps belonging to organisations similar to theirs.  This perpetuates poor designs across dozens of sites.  Finding a new direction requires investment of a lot of time and can be threatening, particularly if a lot of time and money has been already been invested in a poor design.

There’s No Point in Advertising

If you are in a competitive market, you will need to do more than simply advertise your presence. Even if you mainly drive business through off-line means, eg business cards, flyers, announcements at meetings; your competitors can still do better if they offer more through their sites.

The issue here is traffic and conversions. An organisation in a competitive market that drives the most relevant traffic to their site and then get visitors to respond will do best.

Websites are not like traditional advertising hoardings, where many people walk or drive past and see the advert.  Very few people see most websites unless they take steps to drive people to them.  What they find on arrival will decide whether they maintain contact and return to your site.

Not all sites are designed for new visitors.  Some sites are for members; they correspond with members and add content for the benefit of members.  A local group, for example, might do most of its recruiting through personal contacts and needs a site to aid communication.  They may be a community group whose members need information about their neighbourhood for example.

But the type of site that simply tells the world some organisation exists is not going to recruit members or attract subscribers.  A lot of time and energy can go into sites that drain resources from the organisation.  How many organisations use their site to effect change and not to simply tell the world they exist?

Not a Load of Old Minutes

Some organisations seem to think there is interest in their old minutes. There isn’t. Neither are visitors interested in mission statements or arcane discussions about the area the organisation covers or such matters.

If you need to share these things with your members use an email list, a members’ area or perhaps a blog post. Definitely keep this stuff well away from the home page.

Your website is not a filing cabinet. It is a communications tool and you need to learn to use it for that purpose. Why do you think your filing cabinet’s content is what visitors want to read?

What we see on such sites is a design failure. Yes, I know its content but content is a part of your design. Whoever designs your site, be it in-house or external really has to understand the purpose of the site. It is never a matter of bunging up a template and hanging a few baubles on it.  Your content needs to be good copy that will draw people to your site.

The Second Visit

The question many organisations need to ask is: why would anyone visit this site for a second time?

If there is no reason then the question becomes: why do you invest time and effort into something that is not designed to attract return visitors? For a few organisations there may be a positive reason but that is not an excuse for poor design.

Brochure sites aim to add credibility to an organisation and perhaps to enable a once and for all response. Even that limited ambition requires design. If someone visits because they’ve got your business card, what do you want them to do?

If you’re selling wedding dresses you may not expect people to pass through your site more than once. But you still have competitors and need to persuade the visitor to decide to run with your organisation.

You need good content including social proof and you need a strong call to action. The potential to improve your site’s performance is there even for this type of one-off business.

Where you do need return visits you will need to do more. To work out what you need to do you must understand your organisation and what it needs to achieve online.

Know Your Purpose

These are three examples showing what happens where organisations do not think through their purpose and default to thinking of their site as an advert. Knowing your purpose is central to good site design and next time I shall explain why.

1 Evaluating the Marketing Worldview: Ka-ching!

Over the last few weeks I have reviewed some major trends in online marketing. I have contrasted online marketing with traditional forms of marketing. Methods that were once available to a few are increasingly available to everyone with access to the internet.

In evaluating these approaches there is a wider context: wealth concentrates in the hands of fewer people. Part of the solution is in the marketplace but we need to be careful about how we define it.

This leads me to my biggest issue with marketing and that is ka-ching; the sound of a cash register, presumably. Marketing is big business, especially in the United States where desire for personal wealth motivates it. A few marketing gurus have done very well selling training in how to market and there are it seems many small businesses that have done very well applying these methods.

Now, I don’t begrudge their success – they have worked hard to get to where they are and that’s great. They are not the 1% élite who are syphoning public wealth out of the general economy. I don’t suppose there are many successful marketers using the extreme tax avoidance the financial élite use – if there are, I withdraw my support!

Ka-ching! Undersells Marketing

My problem with ka-ching, apart from it making my skin crawl, is that it undersells marketing. Money offers no vision of a better world but use it to change things for the better. Marketing is not solely about generating cash, just as local marketplaces are not solely about financial transactions.

To be fair many marketing gurus make this same point but my impression, after subscribing to several of them and perhaps some of the second rank gurus, is the over-riding theme is “get rich quick”.

But this is the point. Marketing is not a “get rich quick” method. There are tools that sometimes work if you put in the work and have something of value to sell. I think it would be more honest to sell them as get moderately better off slowly approaches but that also undersells them.

My point is we should see these tools for what they are: a means to get a message across. By all means charge for your message, I think the idea that everything should be free on the Internet is pernicious. We need to appreciate that if something is worthwhile then the person who created it deserves a contribution to their income. This is in no way similar to corrupt financial institutions and indeed I believe successful entrepreneurs offer us a glimpse of a viable alternative to the financial markets.

This is the first part of my evaluation. So that my post is not too long, I’ll deal with some more positive stuff next Tuesday.

0 More Reasons Why the Local Economy is Important

Last Monday I suggested large corporations reduce wages and use fractional reserve banking to extract value from the local economy. Today I cover why the local economy is important as an alternative to the neo-liberal economy.

Builds Community

The local economy builds community by developing relationships within a neighbourhood.  Does anything increase community in a neighbourhood more effectively than the local economy? What are the alternatives? Community and possibly faith related activities? Most community activity is for particular groups with shared interests; parents of small children, young people, the elderly are perhaps the most common. These activities exclude those who do not meet their criteria. Whilst there can be community forums for all residents in a neighbourhood, these will be occasional meetings. A strong local economy will be where the neighbourhood mixes and can do so for several hours most days of the week.  It is trade and other transactions that take place in a space everyone recognises that most effectively builds community.

Marketplace

The Local Economy as a marketplace at the centre of the community is a natural focus where people can meet friends, share experiences and encounter new activities. The place for voluntary activities is in the marketplace. It makes sense to plant what you’re doing in the place where people pass by. Community development needs to focus not so much on projects based in designated community centres, as participation in the already existing economy. We need imagination to do this. How can local traders take part in community development? Using online and offline methods how far could traders collaborate in building their trading centre as the heart of a distinctive community? How can traditional community activities be a part of the local economy?  Are there projects, eg a community café that might support local traders by drawing more people into the area?

Employ Staff

The local economy is where small businesses employ and support staff. I remember my father’s small business and the struggles he had to find and retain good staff because he could rarely pay them enough. He was a lifelong socialist and mortified to find himself on the wrong side of the unions. The reality is many small businesses in the UK struggle to pay the living wage.

Small Traders

The local economy is where small traders are in business because they are passionate about what they are doing. Whilst they would be delighted to generate more money than they need, many are content to continue to do what they enjoy with a low-income.  If they can generate enough income, the strengths of these businesses are in the business owner’s vocation.

Experimentation

The local economy is diverse with many small businesses and so will see rapid turnover. People will have confidence to try new things and will move on after a few years for many reasons. But a robust local economy will survive the failures. A small business closing will not destroy the local economy in the same way the closure of one major business.

Identity

Small businesses together contribute to making an area distinctive, a place to visit simply because it is good to be there. The big retail corporations have made town centres up and down the land practically identical. Now they are pulling out, leaving loads of empty shops no-one can afford. Meanwhile small shops in the suburbs or in small towns can do well. Where the rates are low and reputation draws people, small businesses can provide specialist stores and services. It helps if there is a major attraction but it need only be a park or a riverside walk.

Conclusion

Perhaps none of this is new but it is radical because the local economy rarely features in the practice of development workers. There are exceptions but a systematic community development approach to the local economy is overdue.

I’m hunting online for community development approaches to the local economy. As I find stuff I will share it.  Do let me know if you are aware of blogs or websites about the local economy.

0 How to Tell a Story

I’ve no idea how to tell a story!  Let alone how to do it online. Story-telling is not my natural habitat.  Perhaps it needs to be.  I’ve found this simple formula which may be helpful and will share it because you might find it helpful.

I don’t remember where I first saw this but the idea is that you can write in four modes.  The first is the most popular with writers and least read by site visitors.  The fourth is the hardest to write but is more popular.

Theory

Most writers, myself included, write in the theoretical mode.  I trained as a scientist and so that cold distant, objective approach comes naturally.  I have no problem writing in this mode and the words flow.  I suspect those who attempt to read it have difficult staying awake.

As I’ve explored this I see the value of this style of writing as a resource I can adapt to other styles in the future.  When the words flow, I can at least capture them and then work out how to use them later.

Technique

This style answers the question, how?  I have a post category called Technique and on Thursdays I try to focus on the practicalities of looking after a website.  This style of writing is more popular than theory because people often need to find instructions about how to do things.

Transformation

This style answers the question:what change do you want to make in the world?  This is not mission statements (Theory!) but genuine accounts of change I have witnessed or change I hope to see.  This is where telling stories is the primary style of writing.

Transcendence

This final style answers the question: why?  Occasionally a story touches on something deeper.  It is at those moments that a story will go viral, because it moves people when they read it.  Perhaps it is not possible to set out to write such a story.  But it is where a story somehow communicates how things are or perhaps a possible future.  These stories reach out and touch the lives of their readers or hearers.

How have you learned to write stories that transform or transcend?

1 Using Tags

Tags may not be so useful as categories. WordPress features both and most blogging applications feature something similar.  They are navigational aides.  There are usually more tags than categories and posts might have several whilst they typically have 1 or 2 categories.  Using tags offers more detailed information about a post’s content and help visitors find relevant posts.

Categories work because there are relatively few of them. They can be nested and used in navigation. Tags can’t be organised like categories but there is no practical limit to the number of tags.

If you click on one of the tags listed at the end of a post, it will open a page listing all the posts that share the same tag. Also if you search for something on a site, if it exists as a tag all those posts will appear in the search results.

Things to Watch Out for Using Tags

Tags can get out of hand. Large numbers are not a great problem but for example, do I use “blog” or “blogs” for my posts about blogging (or “blogging” for that matter)?   These 2 or 3 names should probably be a single tag. But then which do I choose? What are my visitors most likely to search for?

In the post editor there is a useful box in the far right-hand column, headed Tags. When you start to type a word in the box, type slowly because once you make a start, all the tags containing that sequence of characters will appear. You can check the tags you’ve used before.

If you click on “Choose from the most used tags” you get a cloud of tag names, the most frequent ones bigger. The least frequent ones don’t appear in the cloud. But it is an inspiration sometimes to glance through it.

If you click Tags in the left hand column subcategory of Posts, you will see a similar cloud and then below it the means to create a new tag. You are unlikely to use this as you can easily create new tags within the post editor.

0 You Don’t Need Coding or Mark-up

Last Wednesday, I challenged the idea organisations are not the website designers’ job. To make that claim implies you don’t need coding or mark up.  The expert is perhaps redundant.  Whilst this is something many people accept it is still not widely understood.

Two reasons you may still need coding or mark-up

1. There are occasions where you need coding (because you want your website to do something and there’s no suitable plug-in for it) or mark-up (because you want a special design for your site).  This is when you might need the services of a web developer.  They develop themes, plug-ins and platforms to their clients’ specifications.  You will not need these services unless your site needs a distinctive appearance or you want to do something and cannot find a plug-in or application that does it.
2. Even with a standard theme you may want to make a few changes and knowledge of html and css may be an advantage.  Whilst you may not know how to do this yourself, it is a small part of the work of a web designer or consultant.

So, most of the time you don’t really need this expertise. Most of the time the issue is understanding your organisation’s needs and not the technical side of web design.

With a robust content management system (CMS) such as WordPress, with thousands of plug-ins, you can do pretty much anything. But like any other walk of life you need to choose to do the right thing and to learn how to do the right thing properly. These days the problem is choosing, from a number of viable options, the one that works for you.

Beware the Rush to a Solution

The temptation is to rush to a solution. Sometimes clients will approach a designer or consultant with a solution before they have described the problem. Often there is more than one solution and the rush to a favoured solution can prove to be a major disadvantage.  You wouldn’t walk into a doctor’s surgery demanding he remove your appendix on the spot.  You expect an interview where you discuss the problem before moving onto considering possible solutions.

A feature that a few years ago was too expensive or too difficult is easy today. For example, videos are relatively easy to make (perhaps easy to do badly but still easy to do). Many people walk around with the means to film live action videos in their pockets and never use it.

They don’t know that for a few hundred pounds they can download software that will enable them to edit a professional  looking video from recordings. Of course there are pitfalls but they exist because the technology has advanced so much.

If you need a professional video you can still find businesses that will help you produce it. But for most purposes you can easily produce something usable.

So, you have many more options at your fingertips at lower costs. This raises many issues but my point is this: these issues did not exist a few years ago and for many the power and potential of working online is unexplored territory. They simply have no idea about what is possible.

To build a website without this awareness is a big mistake. There are still many designers out there who will do you a website and never mention the potential of modern content management systems. These designers are not interested in organisations and design to the abilities of usually one contact person. This is why so many organisations find their websites a liability.

2 Stories

These days stories are the cutting edge of marketing theory. In this last of a short sequence of posts looking at approaches to marketing online, I’ll discuss two approaches to using stories on your website.

The first approach is your personal story. People will respond to your message if they trust you. They may have never met you and so they need to hear your story. The chances are they have a problem and what they need to hear is a story that shows you understand their problem.

Why a story? Probably because stories are memorable. You might be a qualified divorce lawyer with many years’ experience. But perhaps the story of your own divorce is what people need to hear to appreciate that you really understand what they’re going through. If you can find the right story, it may give you a competitive edge over other equally qualified people.

I am sure you can see the potential of this approach and its dangers. Perhaps there are people out there who can concoct a story that rings true but misleads. This is why it is important to provide other content that demonstrates you do in fact understand your topic. Caveat emptor applies online whatever marketing method is in use.

The second approach might broadly be described as case studies. These are the stories that illustrate the problem and your solution, eg testimonials.  Stories are memorable and good case studies with in-depth testimonials are helpful. The usual type of thing you see where someone you’ve never heard of says something anodyne about how brilliant the product is may be better than nothing, but not much! If you can interview your customers and draw out their story and go deeper, this is likely to be much more effective.

One final point: consider using video or audio for your stories. OK it’s not always practical but it is effective. People seem to find video more convincing than text, I suppose if they can see a real talking head they find it more convincing.

So, what is the point of all this?  Through stories and other site content, you aim to be divisive.  You want to attract those who relate to your offer and deter those who do not.  You can never appeal to everyone and so your site must communicate decisively with those who are your natural supporters.  If they visit your site and don’t get it, then they will not support you.  The challenge is to find the content and the stories that do this for your business or organisation.

Have you found sites that have communicated in this way to you?