7 Citizens’ Organising

[amazon_link asins=’0679721134′ template=’ProductAd’ store=’markettogether’ marketplace=’UK’ link_id=’4e0b520e-5dad-11e8-9735-af4bb1fcb2fa’] [amazon_link asins=’0679721126′ template=’ProductAd’ store=’markettogether’ marketplace=’UK’ link_id=’66f0ea4d-5dad-11e8-aad2-d12c714ba9fc’]

Citizens’ Organising is an approach to community development from the United States and an effective mutual method. It can be traced back to the work of Saul Alinsky in the 1970s. His books “Rules for Radicals” and “Reveille for Radicals” are still worth reading. The Industrial Areas Foundation, who organise across cities in the United States, built upon his work after his death in the early 1970s.

Citizens’ Organising in the UK

Attempts  to introduce organising to the UK from the early 1990s were not very successful.  Whilst a few groups still struggle on it never really took root in the UK. However, organising is worth considering and it is possible to add elements into community development practice.

One essential element is power analysis. This means we need to understand who actually has power in a given situation. Sometimes it is important to name the powerful and target them for effective change.

Equally important is its understanding of activism and indeed, if we are to take activism seriously, then organising is essential to community development. Anger, seen as a positive emotion, powers activism. It is important no one person becomes essential to the organisation; power is held collectively, not concentrated in the hands of any one person.  So, roles are held for no more than one year.  This means everyone had opportunities to increase their experience of a range of roles, building a pool of capable people, enhancing  the organisation’s capacity.

The emphasis is upon building relationships and applying pressure to key power-holders.  Activists claim you have “no permanent friends and no permanent enemies”.  The pressure applied to power-holders aims to bring them around to supporting the interests of the citizens’ organisation.  If no-one within the organisation holds power, it is harder to buy out the organisation.

Learning More About Citizens’ Organising

[amazon_link asins=’1932805516′ template=’ProductAd’ store=’markettogether’ marketplace=’UK’ link_id=’5027fa6c-5dae-11e8-bed1-a7680b584912′]The Citizens’ Organising movement is reluctant to write text books, preferring to pass on their methods through training. They have a point but it is also important to understand what they offer and so a few helpful texts have emerged over the years. One I have found helpful is “Building a People of Power: Equipping Churches to Transform Their Communities” by Robert C Linthicum.

Organising has traditionally involved churches because they are often the organisations that stay in neighbourhoods once everyone else has moved out.  Their persistence means they guarantee income through paying their dues and so the organisation is able to plan ahead.  Many other types of organisation can and do join citizens’ organisations, including other faith groups.

Have you used organising as a part of your development work or experienced a citizens’ organisation in your city?  What have you found helpful about their approach?

0 Case Study 2: Search Engine Optimisation

Last Friday, I described case study 2, my work with the Bristol European Jazz Ensemble website.  My client asked me about search engine optimisation (seo) and I thought it would be worth sharing my reply.  The interesting thing about this site is it uses WordPress.com and so seo is not so straightforward as it would be with WordPress.org or any other independently hosted site.  Another issue is my client is trying to promote the name BEJE and not the full name of the band.  This raises some issues.  Here is my response to his question, as I sent it.

“Here’s my response to your question:

Of more immediate concern is, the web site itself comes low down on a Google search of ‘Bristol European Jazz Club’, marginally better with ‘BEJE jazz’ and not at all just with BEJE. How can any of these combos get in the first 3/4 places with Google?”

Read this through to the end before you act on it!

Search Engine Optimisation is a rapidly changing area and in some ways it’s a lot easier than it was.  Let me summarise current search results [NB Blog readers: these results will change]:

That’s interesting!

A couple of observations.

1. Check your Linked-In and YouTube accounts and make sure they have clear links to the website on them.  Not just the link but also copy encouraging people to follow the link.  Why should they go there?  The description below the video on YouTube does not include your web address.  If you do include it, it will be added as a special kind of link, called a nofollow link.  Nofollow links are not followed by Google bots, so it won’t effect the website ranking in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page).  However, people can follow it and so where the video is ahead of the website on the SERP, there will be a chance they’ll find their way to the website.  You need to place the link at the very start of the description: http://bigbromo.wordpress.com/ – to look just like this.  The reason is that when the video is described on other pages, it usually only reproduces the first few lines of the description, so for example, the url would appear on the SERP under the video.
   
2. In all searches but “BEJE” there are some sites mentioning the band.  Check they have links to the website.  If you know the site owners, ask them to add a link.  Eg thebristolfringe.com features the video only.  colstonhall.org has a link to the site but it is on their site as a naked url.  They need to use the anchor text “Bristol European Jazz Ensemble”.  Google doesn’t know what the url on its own signifies (the rules for YouTube are different and there you must use the url).  You could ask them to use BEJE but I would advise not to because at present BEJE on its own is not ranking.  (It appears to be Lithuanian for “the way”.)

You could visit all the sites that mention Bristol European Jazz Ensemble and check how they are referencing you.  You ideally want a link to your site with anchor text that says something positive, the name of the group is fine or something like “for brilliant jazz listen to B… E…” although that might be too long.  The name includes the words Bristol and Jazz which is a good foundation.

But Google “Bristol Jazz” and you don’t feature at all!  Is this a target search for you?

One thing to consider is having your own domain name.  I’m afraid I have to introduce the concept of “link juice”.  If you have a link from a website with lots of authority, then this link will be especially juicy (I think this is what passes for American geek humour).  The problem is your site is on WordPress.com, which operates a bit like Facebook.  People can link to your Facebook page directly but it is part of a much bigger site.  Your website is part of the bigger WordPress.com site.  This means the link juice is shared with the entire WordPress.com site.  You don’t get the benefit.  (Your site has a domain authority of 100% and a page authority of 1%.  This means all the juice goes to the WordPress domain and virtually none to your site.)The remedy is to get your own domain name.

You can do this by going into wp-admin and accessing the shop, where you’ll find you can purchase a domain name.  You need to think through the domain name – it should reflect the content of the site, eg bristoleuropeanjazzensemble.org.uk – you’ll be offered a choice of endings.  The fee is something like £5.99 per year.  There is no limit to the length of urls and the advantage of this one is it tells Google what’s inside the site (I think you can use hyphens to separate the words if you wish).  I wouldn’t use BEJE because it isn’t ranking and it doesn’t inform the search engines.

You need to decide whether you want your own domain name before you implement the other recommendations above because you don’t want to go round a second time asking them to change your url.  But a change in url is a good reason to contact your current back-links.

So, in summary

1. Invest in a domain name that reflects the content of the site.
2. Make sure the new domain name is on YouTube and Linked-In.
3. Contact sites you know have back-links to change the url and use more relevant anchor text.
4. Contact other likely sites and ask them to include a link.

1 Content Management System Problems

This new sequence about website maintenance, asks how to maintain a website using a content management system, eg WordPress.

A few years ago, you employed a designer to build a site from flat html and css. You would provide copy and images (or instructions about images) and the designer would do all the work. They installed the site on their server. They usually entered into a maintenance arrangement so the site could be updated by the designer.

Many voluntary organisations found it difficult to pay commercial rates. They found their sites were almost impossible to maintain and so rapidly went out of date. Unless you could afford a team to look after your site, updating websites was a big problem.

Content Management Systems

All this began to change with the content management system (cms). Designers were able to set up sites for their clients to maintain. Systems such as Joomla are still going strong. The way it works is the designer hosts the site, determines client needs, installs relevant plug-ins and offers training.  They may do a lot more to make the site distinctive but here my focus is on the cms.

This works rather well and should the client need to extend the site’s functionality, they return to the designer and ask them to upgrade their site. There are two potential problems:

If the client is tied to one designer and has staff who understand the technical side, it can be frustrating to have to work through a designer who has other ideas.  It can be worse for voluntary groups who may have an old website set up by a commercial designer at a charity rate.  If the designer’s main interest is commercial contracts, then it can be difficult to contact them perhaps after a couple of years and get the changes made.  Gratis work can be even more problematic.  A website is a long-term investment and people move on.  Many sites are inaccessible because the person with the passwords has gone!  This is simply failure to think through the consequences of a website as a long-term investment.

What to do with a Moribund Website

The client is left with a number of unattractive options.  They can:

1. Stay there and remain dependent on a designer who may in point of fact be out of date and not understand their business needs and simply no longer be interested in the work
2. Appoint a consultant to work with the designer to develop the site and hope they agree and the original designer doesn’t take umbrage.  This might work if the new consultant can get access to the host and upgrade the cms.  Sadly this is not always the case.  Charging for upgrades may be a nice little earner.
3. Set up a new independent site and transfer their domain name and content across to it.
4. Abandon the old site and start afresh with a new domain name

This can be problematic whether or not the client and designer get on. If the relationship is positive it can, especially for voluntary groups who are not motivated by profit, be an enormous step to move to independence. If the relationship has broken down it might be easier but the designer may not co-operate.

And of course when the designer disappears with their passwords, leaving an out of date site with the same name as the new one you create, it will forever present a bad impression to everyone who stumbles upon it.

Next time I’ll suggest an alternative to this model.  Have you any stories about how a website has become stuck with an old designer?

0 Selling Causes Online

Selling may seem an odd way to describe promotion of a cause! But we do sell causes, whether we work online or not. Over the years I’ve handed out leaflets for many causes, such as the peace movement, the environment and a political party.

Standing on the high street handing out leaflets, is participation in the marketplace. It always has been. Political and religious views have always been expressed in the marketplace, just as much as it is a place for buying and selling products and services.  All three depend upon conversation to make a sale.

Selling a Cause

The purpose of selling a cause is to get a response from the customer. This might be a financial response although sometimes finance can be illegal, eg buying votes, requesting donations without a license. Aside from finance, you may be seeking responses such as:

Why Causes are Different

So, the boundaries between causes and products or services, are not always watertight. Even if there is no financial exchange, there is little  difference between a cause and a commercial exchange. Given that some businesses give a lot of stuff away and see themselves as educational, some may be hardly distinguished from a cause.  The distinction is income destination from the marketplace; goes into private hands or to finance the cause or its beneficiaries.

If we imagine a spectrum from those who are out solely to make money through to those who have a cause and no intention to make a penny, experience shows both ends tend to move towards the centre. The money-maker, if successful may find they need a cause to build relationships with their customers, whilst the cause may find it needs finance to meet its aims. An entrepreneur with integrity and an efficient cause may find they meet somewhere along the spectrum.

The term “social entrepreneur” was in vogue a few years ago. Really, any successful entrepreneur has to be social because they must build relationships with their customers. The term aims to show commerce can have social roots. The present argument about  accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few, rather than distribution of wealth among small entrepreneurs who make sure finance circulates in the economy, perhaps shows the tension between business and social causes is still current.

To what extent do you find the distinction between a cause and a business helpful?  Do you have examples of business people and causes working together for mutual benefit in the marketplace?

0 How to Write Copy

After several weeks of guidance about copy, today I finish this section with a few things you can do to improve your writing.

Remember, on websites people have a shorter attention span than they do for print.  They tend to scan the page, so anything that helps them is helpful, eg subheadings, bullets and numbered lists, short paragraphs and short sentences. Loads of subordinate clauses are generally not a good idea.  Consider how you can:

Have you any practices that improve your site’s readability?

1 Mutual Methods: Community Development

Community development is a recurring theme on this blog because it is a fundamental approach to supporting transformative change.  The big difference between neighbourhood work and other third sector work, is neighbourhoods often lack access to resources.  They have little access to political power that can bring about change.  Very often resources are not available and so the only recourse they have is to organise, by building solidarity or community between local residents.  This is not always easy because neighbourhoods, divided by race, faith or politics, lack common interest.

My aim here, as part of a review of mutual methods, is to point to a few resources.  Community development in the UK has been systematically under-valued, not least by many of its practitioners.  Its role and purpose is sometimes highly contested by practitioners and the upshot has been its devaluation to the extent that most funding for development work has been withdrawn.

Community Development Standards

One result of conflicting approaches is community development workers have never agreed on standards for community development and have never had a representative body.  Whilst the Association of Community Workers and the Community Development Exchange, are examples of attempts to represent the interests of community development workers, there is nothing like the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, for example.  This has had a devastating effect because without a career structure, experienced workers have had to move into other roles if they needed to increase their income.  This means there has never been effective mentoring of new workers or recognition of their expertise as development workers.

Community Development and Activism

One major issue is confusion between development and activism. Some people think this distinction favours development (as an activity carried out by middle class professionals) over activism (carried out by local residents). This is nonsense. Both roles are important but they are different and need different approaches. I do both and find remembering which role I’m playing is really important.

Activism is issue or task driven. The activist’s focus is upon social change or transformation. They take responsibility for seeing a change through. The development workers’ role is to equip activists for their tasks. This is partly knowhow but also understanding how things work and so inevitably has an ideological dimension.

Should the development worker be a local person? Community development can work where the worker is local although local commitment can make the work more difficult where the development worker identifies with the cause. I’ve found it helps to have a little distance from the activists. But each worker needs to understand the dynamic of their particular role.

The model of a development worker in every neighbourhood is not necessarily the best approach. A small team could easily cover a city and equip activists to take on more of the role traditionally taken up by a local development worker. In my experience, a good administrator is of more value than a local development worker.  Indeed, many development workers find they are doing administration because they have the time to do it!  City wide development work reflects the model of citizens’ organising (see next week).

A Community Development Resource

There are loads of books about community development. One of the oldest, still worth reading, is “Skills in Neighbourhood Work “ by Paul Henderson and David N Thomas. The first edition came out in 1980 and the fourth in 2013. The new edition reflects major changes since the first and includes new case studies.

1 Case Study 2: Bristol European Jazz Ensemble

This is my second case study; the first was about Hope for the Future.  The Bristol European Jazz Ensemble was a coaching project mainly.  I should have taken a screen shot of the site before we started work on it.  The one on the right is how is appears at the time of writing.  The project was to equip David, the client, with the skills to maintain the site.  I also carried out some changes to the site.

Bristol European Jazz Ensemble is a WordPress.com site.  WordPress.com is really an enormous website hosting thousands of websites and blogs.  The analogy is perhaps Facebook where, instead of hosting profiles, WordPress.com hosts websites and blogs.  The alternative is WordPress.org, where WordPress has an independent host and so each website/blog stands alone.

One big difference is .com does not have plug-ins.  This makes it less flexible than .org.  It is possible to extend functionality of .com but at a price.

The main market for the client’s site is promoters and venue organisers.  The by-line in the header makes this clear.  Also the home page includes a contact form and invitation to the market to make contact.  The public may also be interested in the site and so the site publicises events featuring the band through the blog.  Promotion of events is usually carried out by other means and so is not a priority for this website.

What We Did

I worked on the site with David, using Skype and email.  It is possible for two people to be logged into the WordPress wp-admin panel simultaneously, although only one can work on the site at a time.  We are a few hundred miles apart and this is just as good as meeting in a room with a digital projector!  I also did some work on the site:

Outcomes

Here are David’s comments on my coaching work with him:

Chris is a meticulous mentor who helped me define what I wanted from him and from the web site. Just articulating the questions and goals was helpful. Even more, it helped motivate me to actually get on and do it in my busy schedule. Chris’s style is unflappable, approachable, analytical, non-judgemental, clear – and clear about what he doesn’t know but can find out. It’s a co-learning exercise as Chris himself improves on his already well-developed skills and I learn to use the website. I recommend Chris to anyone in the creative or voluntary sectors.

Do you like the site?  What additional information would you like to see on it?

0 Blog Post Content

Last Thursday I described my approach to producing blog posts day after day.  This week is about post content.  Everyone approach is different but they will all have some combination of planned and spontaneous posts.

With planned posts you have a theme, divide it into bite sized chunks and follow it, usually publishing at a particular time each day or each week.  With spontaneous posts you are on the lookout for suitable content and post about it as it become available.

Currently, I plan posts each day Monday to Thursday and prepare spontaneous posts on Fridays. (OK they’re not as spontaneous as some people’s posts but I write them in the same week!)  There is no reason I can’t produce spontaneous posts at any time but time constraints mean I find it easier to stay with my established pattern.

I find content through reading and visiting sites online. I draw on experience as a development worker and website designer. It then depends on how it all comes together.

Sequences

Sometimes I plan a sequence, about conversations for example, that evolves in my mind. I sketch out several emails and drop the sketch into a word processor. This means I know where it is. Every post in that sequence is in the same file.

For this sequence about working with a consultant, I used an e-book as a guide. The authors write about how to design a site yourself. I developed a variation on the theme and with a few exceptions have followed their structure. My purpose and content is very different from theirs. They provide detailed instructions, whereas I am more concerned about what you need to know to work with your designer.

I find that once I start writing, the content flows and often surprises me. I know more than I know I know! Often I find I leave my plan because I realise I need an extra post. Maybe a post turns out to be too long and so I need to split it. Or else I realise my original plan did not allow for the information the reader needs to make sense of the theme.

One challenge I have is how to present the posts in sequence. The blog presents them in reverse order and it is a pain to follow a sequence on a blog. Cornerstone Pages are my solution to this problem.

You may find your blog is not so much sequences as discrete posts serving a variety of purposes. Use categories in your navigation. So, for example, if some posts are about events, you can have an events category in your navigation.  Past events can be archived on your site or removed.

How do you write regular blog posts?  Where do you encounter difficulties?

1 Selling Services Online

The difference between products and services is a service is usually a one-off. It is tailor-made for the customer and so takes up more time for the producer than a product, where the same thing can be replicated many times.

So, a book is a product whilst consultancy based on the book, is a service. You would expect the price of a service to acknowledge the extra time and effort involved.

The issue for anyone selling services, online or offline, is scalability. Scalability is how you fit sufficient work into the time available to make a living. There are two ways to do this:

1. Charge a higher price. This works where there are corporate customers who can afford to pay consultants thousands of pounds a month. They do this because the consultant generates more than their fees for the business. In the third sector, this is unlikely to work on the same scale.
2. Develop services to sell to more than one person or organisation at a time. So, rather than one-to-one coaching, you set up group coaching. This means you may be able to do more for the same unit costs. Let’s say you typically charge for a session a sum that means you need to sell twenty a week to make a living. If you can run four sessions for five people, this reduces the work and maintains the income.

If option 2 works for you, then your service is scalable. Hairdressing is an example of a service that is not scalable.

Examples of Scalable Services

To deliver any service requires conversation, even hairdressers need to discuss their service with their customer.  Conversations are central to some services, such as consultancy and coaching.

Coaching is an example of a scalable service. Where coaching is about passing on a skill, eg website maintenance and so a number of people can share the same session. Consultancy may not be so easy where it addresses issues unique to a client.

Masterminds are another example of a scalable service. They bring a group of people together to share their expertise. They pay an organiser who holds the ring and sets the theme for each meeting. So, in a mastermind of website designers participants contribute their work for comment or bring issues or questions about their work for discussion. They are in touch because someone has set up the network to which they belong, usually someone who has a good track record with the theme of the mastermind.

Can you think of other scalable services?

0 The Call to Action

The call to action is the point of the copy on your webpage.  Everything you write should lead to a call to action that brings the current page to a logical conclusion.

It is often mishandled. Something like this on the home page: a h1 heading followed by the words “click here to download our newsletter”,  is a missed opportunity.  Let’s take a look at what’s wrong with this call to action.

Some Ground Rules

So, you need to think carefully about your call to action.

How do you encourage visitors to respond to a call to action? What do you think is the secret of your success?