The Groupery staff were at the Online Community Unconference yesterday, in Mountain View, CA.
Top Five Takeaways:
(1) Everyone and their brother has online communities! There are online communities for retired people, people with brain health and injury recovery, caretakers of elderly or ill people, those organized around environmental preservation goals, for governmental agencies, companies, consortia, and for people who bring those separate sectors of society together to produce social good.
(2) It's not about the specific tool, it's about how to best help the community. Choosing a tool because just because your competitors (not community members) use it is a strategic decision similar to creating a "me too" product in order to offer a product line that includes everything your competitors do. Instead, the "which tool?" decision should be made to meet the strategic needs of the community membership.
About competition in the non-profit space, a conversation in a forum hosted by the Skoll Foundation's Socialedge.com led to the wisdom that while consortia are imperfect, they're the best mechanism to date for overcoming "competition" in the non-profit sector. For education environments, this is not only PTA's / PTO's, but Local Education Foundations, which even have their own consortium!
(3) Tying the online community to the physical community requires deliberate effort. At the groupery, we focus on this specifically. In some environments, the online community has an independent validity. But in most efforts represented at the unconference, it was important to make the community relevant to the day-to-day life of its members.
(4) It's about making sure you're "where your community naturally is already online" and not try to force control of the location; you may need to be in several places. At the Non-Profit Technology Conference, a lot of conversation happened about the sheer amount of time and effort required to not only to aggregate and sort through information, but to reach out and cultivate the community. This was underscored at Online Community Unconference.
(5) While tools are emerging to help organizations keep track of their communities as they are roaming about in the real world, the fact is that control itself is an illusion, and the most any community manager does is shepherd and nurture the community.
It was a fabulous conference, and I encourage people who are interested to look through the posted materials when they are up.
#octribe
