What do community groups gain from maintaining a blog?

Q: What do these community groups gain from maintaining a blog? What are some of the drawbacks and difficulties?

My A: One of the most valuable thing that non profits and community groups offer through engaging in blogging and other online ventures is economy of scale.  One of the reasons why Big Donors feel such love is because big donors are allocated the time, resources, and energy commensurate with their donation — and there’s a certain level of accountability and daily/weekly/monthly touches associated with “this is what we’re doing with all that money.”  Before the Internet, especially before social networks and blogging, small donors were treated like third-class citizens.

However, while $50,000 might be simply “done for tax reasons” by a corporate donor as a right off, for mom and dad, their parents and kids, yearly donations of $25-$100 is an important decision during gift-giving season.

They competitive advantage in leveraging custom email and newsletter systems, of process and case study blogging, of listening and attentively responding to queries and questions, and the ability to “check in” on what’s going on with the “money that I have donated” to see good happening — and not just at the end of the year.

Since each person who has donated money has almost explicitly committed to the organization they have donated to, it is much easier to “ping” these donors.  Having spoken/voted with their money, they’re almost always keen on being kept tighter in the loop and are generally very excited to receive updates — even very specific and very detailed process and “daily bread” experiences, challenges, frustrations, and — of course — wins.

The most obvious drawbacks include greater transparency, which is always a double-edged-sword.  When you open your daily goings ons to the masses you might very well realize that these small and medium-sized donors might feel like they have better ways of doing things or might take it upon themselves to give their two cents… which is also a blessing and a curse because this sort of empowerment to the community — and a community would be thus created were you to get such attention — is often very rare and should be cherished, respected, encouraged, appreciated, and nurtured.

So, instead of going silent, or getting defensive, it is really all about listening, considering, and engaging.  However, this comes to the even great drawbacks and difficulties: the more successful and online campaign becomes — be it blogging, a Facebook Page, a Twitter account, or a message board — the more financial and human resources it will take.

First to create content, second to moderate responses (not all responses are appropriate and really awful responses on FB Pages and in blogs need to be removed immediately), and third to respond, reply, engage, encourage, and learn.

What I see every day is that organizations have enough energy and enough steam for about three or four months and then peter out out of exhaustion or because they Intern they gave the work to has left and there is no HR position to make sure this sort of staffing and budgeting is mandatory and built into the main funding and not through some tenuous and easily-cut special projects budget.

I see so many “social media ghost towns” and while 50 million blogs may well be created every three seconds, I daresay that 99% of them are shuttered well before they make any purchase into the conversation space.

And while blogging is a perfect way to fortify your village with the platform to address and the platform to have your fans and supporters defend you out and about, it also raises your profile online and also reveals some or most of your flaws (especially if you do it right and allow your more human, personal, and “sometimes flawed” side intentionally and with pride, shamelessly.

Well, while you’re doing that, you may very well attract the trolls and the haters and those who are just looking for someone to beat on for some reason or another, be it how you spend your money, how you choose to use the money you spend, and so forth.

It is all in the balance.  It is all in the listening and it is all in the trust and in the willingness to make this a long game decision versus something that’s simply short-term and a fashionable bit of social media bling.

(Awesome questions from Madelaine Paterson — more to follow) Via Marketing Conversation

Tagged as: Blog, Facebook, Facebook Page, Non-profit organization, online communities, Social Media, social network, Twitter