0 Third Sector Economic Projects: A Charitable Business

This is a second case study illustrating how third sector organisations function in the local economy. I’ve based these case studies on real projects and as far as I know all of them still exist and have moved on since I knew them. Any case study is necessarily a snapshot in time. So, if anyone thinks they can identify the projects please remember first, my intention is to describe the issues and not to criticise the project. Second, these issues do not necessarily apply to this organisations today; they probably struggle with entirely different issues!

Social Enterprise or Charitable Business?

I believe the business I’m going to write about today is doing well. My concerns about it relate to an early stage in its development and its genesis raises some important questions.

It started as an attractive idea using the teaching of particular skills to support a group of disadvantaged people. Their business plan for a social enterprise won awards and some grants and loans to get started.

Whilst funding bodies recognised them as a social enterprise, they looked like a small business. They were in effect one person investing a lot of money in a risky enterprise. Whilst their values were positive, they lacked business acumen and their success depended upon the support of statutory sector funding bodies.

They were successful because they marketed themselves as a social enterprise.  Whether or not you are a social enterprise should not depend solely on your beneficiaries.  The beneficiaries for this project had particular disadvantages and so that made the offer perhaps charitable.  It did not make it a social enterprise.  It is a social enterprise where a group of beneficiaries form the business or maybe a neighbourhood organisation identifies this group of beneficiaries.

A Business Without a Market

What we have here is a sole trader business whose market notionally includes its beneficiaries.  In terms of where its funding comes from, its market was its funding bodies.

This business had no market.  Whether the market was their beneficiaries or others who might purchase services from the enterprise, they simply did not have a list of contacts.  They had run no trials to prove they had a market and had not a shred of evidence that it existed.   They were in effect dependent upon grants and loans. It was touch and go, but they did eventually land a large grant and so may be able to establish their business.

This story raises a number of issues:

0 Blogging the Local Economy

It may be helpful to say a little about my plans for this blog over the next few months.  Last Friday, I wrote about the new Cornerstone pages I’ve introduced to help with navigation around the blog.  I will add the new themes I’ve started this month to the Cornerstone pages when enough posts have accumulated.  The new themes aim to show how online technology can support action in the real world.

These new categories view the same argument from different perspectives.  Whilst they touch on common ground, they will develop in distinct directions.

Mondays: Local Economy

My plan here is to develop a thread about the local economy.  As always the Monday “Mutuality” theme is the nearest to my community development background and furthest from online approaches.  I hope to build up a picture of the local economy from the bottom up. It seems most of the material online about the local economy is about either developing countries or government schemes in the UK.  I start from the view that all neighbourhoods have their local economy, which might be stronger or weaker.

I hope to find examples of grassroots projects to explore some of the changes happening in our neighbourhoods.  This is not necessarily about the needs of disadvantaged areas.  Adapt examples of grassroots projects for more disadvantaged areas.  Economic projects are difficult to get off the ground and it might make sense to test them in more affluent areas.  Also, disadvantaged areas are more likely to draw down grant aid.  Whilst this might help, it distorts local economies and means neighbourhoods take a step backwards when grants stop.  I would like to know of grant-aided projects that have resulted in sustainable economies once grants end.

Tuesdays: Worldviews

Third Sector organisations bring distinctive features to the marketplace.  Marketing theory applies to organisations that do not see themselves as part of a market.  So, this thread will explore the marketing worldview contrast it with common third sector perspectives.  Whilst there are some incompatibilities, there are plenty of examples of overlap between the two.

There are a variety of worldviews or mindsets about the ways in which money circulates in the economy.  We need to understand these and work out where worldviews obscure what’s going on within the local economy.

Wednesdays: Organisations

Web designers or consultants must understand organisations.  Websites will never work to their full potential if their owners’ business or purpose is not understood.  What is their purpose and how does their website support it?  The problem is often, especially with third sector organisations, neither the client nor the designer understands the organisation.  It is possible to spend a lot of money on a website that does not meet the needs of the organisation and no-one is even aware there is a problem (other than that the website is pain).  If neither the client nor the designer understands the organisation then it cannot possibly work.  If at least one of them does, it is possible to do a lot more but ideally both need to understand the organisation to be effective.

Thursdays: Blogging

On Thursdays I shall post about how to run a website and blogging is a good starting point. Many of my clients are new to blogging and so this should be helpful to them.  These posts will be an aid to remembering the training sessions.  They will be helpful for those who are starting out and some of the later posts will include ideas about organising posts which will help those who are further down the road.  I may post videos from elsewhere as I develop this theme.

The plan is to use this sequence of posts when I have not been asked questions.  If you ask me a question I’ll answer it on Thursday or Friday.  I will answer technical questions on Thursdays and other types of question on Fridays.

Fridays: Miscellaneous

The same as last year, whatever takes my fancy.  This will continue to be a mix of case studies, website reviews and general observations.

Next week I shall open up a new subcategory about telling stories and in it I will tell stories and discuss how they might be used.

1 The Post Editor

This is the first post in a guide to the basics of blogging.  I shall refer to WordPress because it is one of the most frequently used blogging platforms. Most editors are similar; functionality is likely to be the same although you may have to hunt around to find the right button to press.

I suggest you open your website’s dashboard and then follow my description below.

When you first log into WP-admin, you will see the dashboard. There is a menu to the left. Click on Posts and you will find a page called All Posts. A secondary menu opens below Posts in the main menu. You will see Add New in this new list and you will also see a button labelled the same at the top of the main page. Click on Add New.

This page is the post editor. What you see depends to some degree on your active plug-ins.

The main menu remains in the left hand column. This enables you to move around your WordPress site. What you see in it depends on your user type.

A Tour of the Post Editor

Post Title

The main central column is where you enter and edit your blog post. The first thing you should see at the top is Enter Title Here. When you have finished typing and moved to another part of the editor, your post’s url will appear under the title. Various aspects of the url can be changed but the only thing you can change from the editor is the part of the url from the title. You will see the url includes your title highlighted, without capitals or punctuation and with hyphen between words. If you want to change your url, eg shorten it, then you can hit edit and do that. There isn’t normally any advantage to doing this. I find it most helpful if I change the title later because the url remains the same. So if you want the new title to be in the url, you need to change it manually.

Media

Next you will see one or more buttons. The one that is always there is Add Media and I shall cover this in a future post. If there are other buttons, eg Add Form, this will depend on your plug-ins.

Text and Visual Editors

Next down and on the right you will see two tabs, Visual and Text. The Text tab shows you your post with the mark-up (html) visible. Some people work in this view but I wouldn’t recommend it for a beginner, even if you know html. Visual shows you the post fairly close how it will appear following publication. However, it is not exactly the same and you can preview your pages.

Editor Buttons

Below the tabs there are the main editor buttons. I’ll look at these in future posts. Next there is the main text area for your post. Simply start typing or if you have copied your post from another document, position the cursor in the text area and press the control key and “V”. This will paste text into the text area. If you right-click you will find there is no paste control in the menu, so you must control-v.  (This works for text from Microsoft Word; to paste in text from elsewhere it is best to press the T icon in the menu before control-v.)

If you scroll down, you will most likely find nothing below the text area. However some themes include other controls and I’ll write about them another time.

Publishing

Back to the top and the right hand column. The first box headed Publish includes three buttons, two at the top labelled Save Draft and Preview and a blue one at the bottom labelled Publish. Whilst WordPress autosaves your work, sometimes it’s between saves and so Save Draft will make sure all your work is saved but not published to your website. This means you can break off, exit the programme and then return and continue to work on your post later.

Publish loads your post onto your website so the world can see your post. Preview opens a dummy webpage in your browser and shows you exactly how your post will look. This is particularly helpful when you include media in your post.

Below the first two buttons you will see Status, Visibility, Publish and Publicize. I find the first two have very occasional use. Publish is where you can schedule your post; WordPress waits until your stated date and time to publish it. Publicize shows you which social media receive notice of your posts. This may not be visible until you set something up.

I will cover the next two boxes, Categories and Tags, in future posts. There may be other boxes depending on your theme and active plug-ins.

Next time we’ll hop back and take a look at the All Posts page.  I’m happy to cover aspects in more detail on request – just leave a comment.

0 The Anatomy of Organisations

Organisations imply greater complexity than, for example, sole trader businesses. So, it’s worth considering how they work and the implications for their web presence. The anatomy of organisations, whether they are businesses or other types, implies managing four things:

Projects

Projects are the organisation main activities, its reason for existing.  The web designer must understand the organisation’s purpose to design something that helps the organisation meet its needs. Furthermore the designer needs to be sensitive to how their decisions can have an unintended impact on the organisation’s purpose. Their role is to discuss these issues with the organisation. It is certainly not to introduce changes on their own whim or that of their client. The client will not necessarily understand the impact of online changes for their organisation.

Staff

Employment of staff is the obvious difference between an organisation and a sole trader. The designer needs to find out who will be responsible for the organisation’s web presence and the time and skills they will devote to it. Do they know more or less than the client about how websites work? A significant part of the designer’s role may be training the staff who will be responsible for site maintenance.  But it goes further than that because the site is likely to have an impact on the work of all staff.  The organisation may need help to anticipate consequences for staff and to instruct staff about the changes.

Resources

The website designer needs to understand the financial resources and time available to maintain and develop the organisation’s web presence. There may also be practical issues about equipment to consider. Outdated equipment might seriously limit what can be done by the organisation. And always a business will be aware of its bottom line – just how beneficial to the organisation is their web presence?

Information

Information is the life blood of any web presence and whatever form it takes the organisation will manage information through its web presence. As well as identifying the main sources of information and how they need to be managed, there are also a number of issues such as privacy and security that will apply. Remember important information will include things like email lists as much as information relating directly to the purpose of the organisation.  Even if the organisation produces physical objects or activities, available locally, there may be potential to market them through information.  The designer needs to help the organisation identify the information and work out how to market it effectively.

All of these can have significant implications for an organisation’s web presence. However, you may still not be convinced this is a part of the web designer’s role. This is one reason I prefer the term “web consultant” because organisations these days need more than a designer. I’ll explain more next time.

1 Marketing Before the Internet

I’m not going to spend a lot of time on marketing before the Internet. There are loads of histories but I want to make two points to kick off my review of marketing online.

Broadcast Marketing

My first point is marketing was expensive. Advertising via billboard or TV/radio commercial cost a lot of money and so in effect it was available only to large businesses. Without a doubt, it was very effective.

Large businesses invested in broadcast marketing.  Broadcast is a word that comes from farming. Broadcast sowing is where you spread seeds around and not planting individual seeds in specific places. Some people will know the parable of the sower where seeds fall on the path and stony ground. This particular broadcast sower was not very good at his job as most farmers would avoid the places where the seeds would not thrive.

The broadcast approach meant targeting of marketing was perhaps a bit less important. Certainly billboards and television would be seen by many people. You might put your adverts around certain TV programmes; children would see adverts about ice cream and not insurance, but mass media meant you could depend upon enough of the right people seeing a strategically placed advert to make it worthwhile.

This approach has not entirely disappeared but it is possible to target advertising online in ways not available pre-Internet.

Long Sales Letters

My second point is perhaps one of the more targeted approaches pre-Internet was the long sales letter. Older readers might remember the days when our letter boxes were full of junk mail. Most of this has disappeared into the ether but at one time a lot of unsolicited mail arrived almost every day. The long sales letter was the letter that accompanied the glossy brochures. It often covered several pages and would explain some special offer in detail with bonuses, guarantees, etc. More sceptical readers may find this hard to believe: the reason they did this was because it worked! It worked if done properly. One-size-fits-all sales letters going out willy-nilly to anyone and everyone were less successful than targeted letters but overall they worked.

And they worked when they went online. More of which next time.  Reminiscences about junk mail will be gratefully received!

2 Third Sector Economic Projects: A Grocers’ Shop

This, the first of two case studies, illustrates some of the issues third sector economic projects encounter when organising projects in the local economy. Both case studies are snapshots of real projects.  Any case study is necessarily a snapshot in time. So, if anyone thinks they can identify these projects please remember my purpose is to describe the issues these projects faced at a certain time in their development. I do not intend to evaluate their response to the issues they faced.  These issues do not necessarily apply to these organisations today; they probably struggle with entirely different problems!

Fairly Traded Grocers’ Shop

Today’s example is a shop selling fairly traded goods, mostly groceries. It is still going and as far as I know it is doing well. In its early days it struggled with the contradictions of straddling two sectors. Its values are pro-fair trade, organic food, against animal cruelty, etc. They use window displays for example to get their message across.

Volunteers ran the shop. Its profits were for charitable purposes. This sets up some interesting contradictions. First, it means the shop is competing with other shops who pay their staff. This must mean it has an unfair advantage in the marketplace.  No-ones livelihood depended on this shop.  So, the balance is between its charitable aims and the likely impact it might have on its competitors who may be dependent upon the success of their businesses.

There is a more subtle issue. At one time, the shop was under-performing, unable to generate the income you might expect given its location. The reason seemed to be, not having the overheads of similar businesses, there was no incentive to exploit its advantage.

At the same time, it set up a second shop in a disadvantaged area. It was unable to support it financially and so the second project closed. The second shop did not attract volunteers from the first and had to find its own in a community that questioned the idea of working for nothing. But the first shop was not at the time generating sufficient income to support the second.   The second shop arguably supported the charitable aims of the shops’ parent charity.

Leadership

This highlights some of the issues when taking a third sector approach to private sector activity. This project brought its own bureaucracy not so much from the statutory sector, it was never grant aided, but from the church.

Its leadership was ideological, not practical and used bureaucracy for control. This is a common problem in any organisation but is less of an issue where there are clear lines of ownership and/or leadership. If you don’t have to do well financially, it opens up the path to management by whim.

Because it could survive without staffing overheads, it had no incentive to exploit its advantage in the marketplace.  Consequently it found it was unable to grow naturally and so contribute to the second shop.

The charity could have used the first shop to fund the second but it was unable to manage effectively a shop with significant advantages in the marketplace, namely reduced overheads, so it could support the charity’s other activities.  This undermined the fairness of its activities competing in the local economy.

The problem was in part lack of experience and an over-complicated management structure.  Most small shops are managed by their owners and rarely by a committee of people with little day-to-day involvement in the enterprise.  The focus of the organisation was on its charitable activities and not on the local economy.

However, nothing is ever achieved without trying new things.  The shop is still going and seems to be doing well.  Maybe they are finding a place in the local economy and a role that makes sense.  Their low overheads provides them with the time they need to experiment and make mistakes.  This is a luxury not always available to small businesses.

0 Cornerstone Pages

Over the August break, I’ve done a lot of background work on this site.  There are not a lot of changes to see just yet, but I have a lot of plans for the future and will discuss them here as the site evolves.

I suggest you open the home page of my site in another tab so that you can follow the account below.

The main change is the Cornerstone Pages.  If you look in the main navigation, you will see I’ve added four new main menus.  They share names with the four main categories I use for the blog on Mondays through to Thursdays.

If you click on “Blog” this will take you to the start of the blog.  You will find the latest post at the top of the page and then as you scroll down you’ll find each post in the reverse order of posting.

Hover over “Blog” and you will see a drop-down menu.  These are the four main categories and if you click on them you will see the latest post in that category and scroll down to find earlier posts in reverse order of posting.

There are further subcategories and their pages can be found by clicking on the links in the right hand sidebar.  I have rationalised these over the summer and so some of the names have changed and I’ve also made sure there is one sequence per subcategory, which should be less confusing.

One problem is if you want to read the posts in order you need to scroll down to the bottom and then read them backwards.  And it is not always easy to see from a subcategory title what a sequence is about.  These are the reasons for the Cornerstone Pages.

Click on one of the new main categories, eg Mutuality.  You will find this takes you to a page, ie not a post, which explains what this main category is about and then offers a brief description of each of its subcategories.  Follow the link and it will take you to a Cornerstone page for that subcategory.  This lists all the relevant posts in the correct order. You can also access subcategory pages through the drop-down menus.

This means you can quickly find out what a sequence is about and access the more detailed blog posts if you wish.  These pages can be search engine optimised using keywords.

I shall add new Cornerstones from time to time as posts accumulate in new categories.

Do you find this approach helpful?  How would you improve it?

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.

4 Why Blogging is So Important

Blogging has evolved over the years. The problem is whilst things online evolve quickly, public perception evolves more slowly. Consequently there are many myths about blogging.

Blogging is a tool and like many tools, blogs have multiple uses. Maybe once blogs were primarily an online diary. Today they are much more than that. Their versatility makes them valuable tools. Whatever else you have on your website you should include a blog. Even if you don’t need it today, the chances are you will at some time and you may find blogs do things you’re currently doing by some other means more effectively .

Advantages

Blogs are a great way to organise content. Each post has a unique url. This means you can link to them from other posts and pages on your site, as well as from other websites. It also means you can organise them and so build a searchable library of posts.

You can delete blogs without disturbing the structure of your website. If you display a lot of ephemeral information on your site, you can easily keep it up to date.

Types of Blog

I think there are three main types of blog:

There must be other uses – do let me know if you think of any!

A Myth

There is a myth about the need to regularly update blogs. This originates from the requirements of search engine optimisation (seo). If you need to organise your blog to attract traffic to your site, regular posting may be important. For many websites it is not necessary and a focus on good content is more important than how regularly you publish.

Next Time

In this new sequence I shall post about the basics of blogging. These posts will include tips I’ve picked up that will help you blog regularly and relevantly. Later I shall move onto looking at how you can organise blog posts to increase accessibility.

This sequence may be interrupted as and when I receive requests for help with various aspects of your website. Simply make your request in a comment.

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.

3 Organisation Theory

It may at one time have been enough to be a techie, to understand the subtleties of mark-up languages and other coding. But the reality is the days of amazing flash animations are almost over. There may be a few designers doing this stuff but it is not what most organisations need.  Arguably, you will find knowledge of organisation theory more helpful than website development.

You see, only a few years ago web design was peripheral to most organisations. A website was an extra something you had because … well everyone else had one.  Whilst many organisations, especially in the third sector, haven’t understood the revolution happening around them, the trend is relentless and anyone who doesn’t get it will lose out.

Why You Need Organisation Theory to Explain Why Websites Don’t Work!

The fact is, if you are not going to take your organisation’s web presence seriously you are better off not being online at all. For many groups that may be the best solution. Why waste time and effort maintaining some online system that you don’t really need?

I know of many organisations whose performance would be enhanced without their current online presence. There are various reasons for this. May be:

Pulling out of a significant investment of time and money can be difficult even if it is in the organisation’s best interests.

Many groups don’t understand what websites can do for them and perhaps experience websites as millstones around their necks; websites as burdensome creators of unnecessary work and not as helpful tools.

This sequence will look at how your web presence shares in planning your organisation’s purpose. I shall explain why technical skills are less important than organisational skills in future posts.

So, what’s most important?  Web skills or understanding your organisation?

2 Marketing Worldviews

Today’s new topic will compare two worldviews, marketing and third sector.  Worldviews, sometimes called mindsets, refers to the often unexamined assumptions we make about the world.

In the UK, for example, our worldview makes clear distinctions between statutory, private and third sectors. This can be helpful but like a lot of helpful models there comes a point where the model constrains thinking.

These powerful distinctions are not held universally. Outside the UK people don’t see things in the same way.  I first became aware of this in the early 1980s, while studying with the Urban Theology Unit in Sheffield, UK.

Can Community Groups and Businesses be Natural Allies?

I read about community development during that year and I remember one text in particular (although I cannot remember what it was). It argued that in the US, community organisations and private businesses are natural allies. Businesses took up and developed further participative methodologies that began in community groups. As businesses developed new models, they shared them with community groups. Many of these groups, eg the Industrial Areas Foundation, were church-based and so Gospel paradigms can be traced through many of these methodologies.  Community groups, churches and businesses are natural allies in the US.  When I read management text books I can see approaches to strategic thinking shared across these sectors.

I’m sure the resulting relationships are healthy and in the US businesses have tax incentives to fund community organisations through charitable foundations. We have no comparable legislation in the UK, where community groups see the statutory sector as more natural allies.  There have been some exceptions but when community groups need money they turn first to government funds, next to charitable trusts and at a distant third, to businesses.

In both countries community organisations have to follow the money. But in the UK at a time of so-called austerity, there may be an opportunity to re-appraise these relationships. If so, online marketing is going to play a major role. We may not yet be clear about that role but this blog is a contribution to working out the direction this re-appraisal might take.

I’m going to start with a basic review of approaches to marketing and then review the marketing worldview before moving onto examining third sector worldviews.

How do you understand relationships between private, statutory and third sectors?