From August 2006 to July 2007 I worked with CILIP’s Department of Knowledge and Information to help them prepare for, establish and nurture their online membership communities. It was a wonderful experience; we all worked hard breaking new boundaries, and we all learnt a huge amount about all sorts of things one encounters while getting online communities up and running in a membership association.

I remain very proud of the job and am a great admirer of the communities team who pulled together magnificently in the face of a brand new challenge.

At the end of the project, we had a ‘lessons learnt’ session in order to capture as many of the findings we found as possible. I am pleased to say that the resultant document is now available to all for downloading and reading.

Download the document here (approx 61k, MS Word document)

The document is structured chronologically – into findings from the pre-pilot, kick-off, pilot, live, and evaluation phases. It ranges from organisational findings in a membership association context to technical findings while using Community Server (with very few adapations, and then in it’s early days). It’s the bare bones of our honest and open analysis of the situation and we all hope that it can help others in a similar situation, providing guidance, learnings, wheel non-re-invention, and whatnot.

Download the document here (approx 61k, MS Word document)

Other CILIP related learning materials on this site:

• Membership engagement story (presentation for Online Information)
• Membership communities story (Social tools conference presentation)

Enormous thanks to the CILIP communities team for agreeing to sharing their learnings.

All too often we chose not to share the ups and downs of our work, preferring instead to keep quiet about stuff in the name of ‘private-ness’ or ‘professional-ness’ or whatnot. But how can we all learn together if we don’t offer eachother the fruits of our experiences? So well done to CILIP I say.

My main point of contact was Lyndsay Rees-Jones (Senior Advisor, Membership Support Unit), who was working closely with Patricia McHugo (Web Officer), Stephanie Baxter (Web Editor), Alan Cooper (Web Manager), Hilary Morris (Deputy Information Manager), Kari Channell (Head of Corporate Marketing and Membership), and Mark Taylor (Marketing Executive), who were all admirably managed by Jill Martin (Head of Knowledge). The technology (Community Server) was provided by cSCape and I was subcontracted to do the consultancy work by Sift.

Lyndsay Rees-Jones (CILIP Membership Support Advisor) and I gave another presentation about the CILIP membership communities at Online Information yesterday. It was fun and we hope everyone enjoyed it.

You don’t have to read all this post; you can go straight to slideshare from here:

See the presentation on slideshare

We had already focused on the social models and technology in other public presentations, so this time we decided to look into how the ‘communities’ team within HQ had evolved to meet the purpose of the communities as a whole.

There wasn’t a communities team when we started, nor processes to ensure that issues arising from the communities were handled professionally and promptly and fairly. This was an important element of our work:

How to ensure that when issues come up in the communities, the members can get the influence and support from HQ they need when they need it?

This is a strategic management question which we think is on many organisations’ horizons. Since talking about this project publicly, we have found that there are very few ‘community’ teams in HQs which are pragmatically integrated into the membership communities, so we wanted to share our findings to help others.

In parallel to this, in the introduction to this year’s Customer Engagement Survey, Richard Sedley writes:

“… organisations do not always manage to assign individuals or departments to taking ownership for implementing and monitoring engagement strategies.”

So we’re seeing something similar; organisations want ‘engagement’ but are not necessarily sure how to go about facilitating it. And for membership associations, this is the core of their being.

We are not saying this is the one and only way to achieve this form of collaboration between members and HQ, but it worked for us and we feel it’s a good story to illustrate the issues. If you have found another model, please let us know – the communities are in a constant state of evolution.

So; to the story…

This presentation tells a simple story about how the CILIP members chose to use one of the private membership forums as a ‘virtual hustings’ in advance of their council elections, and how they managed to get support from HQ when they needed it.

The website has an election page and the individuals’ manifestos, but no space to converse with the hopefuls and to kick the ideas around, so the members set up a thread in the forums, which proved to be exceptionally popular. It gave everyone a transparent opportunity to discuss their ideas and hopes for CILIP in 2008 which had not been there before.

The members agreed that they wanted to promote the elections as much as possible and identified all the channels of communication available to them (from their own blogs to the formal CILIP communications). They felt that the CILIP website itself wasn’t promoting the elections enough and pointed this out among themselves. Within one day, the web editing team in HQ had put a banner together and placed it right in the middle of the homepage.

This doesn’t sound like a revolution, but it was the first time that the members influenced the management and got space on the homepage under their own steam.

Most organisations’ homepages are tightly controlled spaces with rather formal processes for booking space on them; otherwise there would be great tension between departments seeking the all hallowed homepage slot. CILIP is no different.

The thing to note is that these processes reflect the needs of HQ, so the members getting a say in what goes on the homepage is really quite exciting.

This was enabled because of having a communities team in HQ who were aware of what was going on in the communities and who were actively influential in HQ and who could therefore advocate for the members where suitable.

The slides show how this team emerged over a year and how we hope it will continue to evolve in the future.

See the presentation on slideshare

As always, many thanks go to CILIP for being good eggs and agreeing to share their findings. Jill Martin (head of the department of Knowledge and Information) says we can publish our lessons learnt document next year (previously only for members), so keep it up all – sharing is caring.