The most significant change in the use of the internet in recent years has been the shift from a ‘broadcast’ medium (one organisation or person pushing lots of content out to a large audience), to a ‘conversational’ medium (many different organisations and people talking to each other and engaging in debate). This is the key implication of most discussions about ‘web2.0’, ‘social media’ or ‘social networking’ (for more, see our drivers on online communities and interactive websites).
This has clear implications for infrastructure. A core part of infrastructure’s mission is to support other organisations with information, advice, tools and ideas to help them to be more effective. The old-fashioned ‘broadcasting’ method of disseminating information still has a place (as does face to face support and picking up the phone!). But the web now presents opportunities to tap into the power and expertise of our networks, to allow those we support to talk to and advise each other, and share their own information and ideas. Indeed the expectations of our audience are increasingly that we will enable and facilitate this.
And infrastructure organisations are acting. This month, Navca (the membership body for local infrastructure) launched navcaboodle, a website for their members and others to share and discuss. NCVO will shortly be launching it’s own online communities. And many infrastructure organisation use twitter, a slightly less public but equally conversational way of talking with peers (for example [@BVSC], @bassac_ org _ukand @OCVYS). There are already non-infrastructure players in this area, as you’d expect, including Third Sector Forums.
Is taking advantage of the opportunities of peer to peer online support simple? No it is not! But the challenges for organisations are largely cultural rather than technological (after all, increasing numbers of your staff and volunteers use the internet to gather a range of range of recommendations, information and advice from other ‘ordinary’ people). Implications include:
being as responsive to online contributions as you would to people picking up the phone and calling you
the need to ‘listen’ to what others are saying about you online (see Louise’s excellent post on this topic)
the requirement to think through the question of who the real experts are in this new networked online world, is it you or is it really your members?
the question of quality and which information can be trusted, particularly in areas of advice where there are right and wrong answers (eg legal issues)
Are you facilitating peer to peer conversations between your members? What other challenges (or opportunities) are you finding in this new way of working?
Plans for a Social Investment Wholesale Bank to provide loan finance to the sector are progressing. The government is now consulting on design and functions for the bank. Stuart Etherington, NCVO's CEO has responded:
The Government’s consultation into the
design and functions for a Social
Investment Wholesale Bank is an
important step forward. However it is
also important that discussions start
around how the bank will be financed,
to make sure it is properly
capitalised. A properly designed and
funded Social Investment Bank will
provide a range of funding options for
existing social investment retailers.
This will have far reaching positive
outcomes for community cohesion and
well being.
“…new pilot city-region arrangements for Greater Manchester and Leeds, building on the Government’s recent economic reforms through the Sub-National Review. The pilot city-regions will benefit from the stronger integration of planning, housing, transport, regeneration, employment and skills programmes, increasing their ability to drive sustainable growth and economic development.”
Changes to tiers of government/governance always mean that new relationships have to be built and work has to be done to ensure the sector’s voice is heard in the right places. The sector currently already struggles to navigate the growing number of complex partnerships.
Richard Thaler, the author of Nudge, was in the UK doing the rounds of various organisations a couple of weeks ago. You can listen to the presentation he gave to Demos on nudging ourselves out of recession here, or download the presentation he gave to the government’s Strategy Unit here.
And of course if you’d like to try scenario planning, getting hold of our practical guide to scenario planning, Picture This, is an excellent way to get started!
As of December 2008, 11% of online American adults said they used a service like Twitter or another service that allowed them to share updates about themselves or to see the updates of others. Just a few weeks earlier, in November 2008, 9% of internet users used Twitter or updated their status online and in May of 2008, 6% of internet users responded yes to a slightly different question, where users were asked if they used “Twitter or another ‘microblogging’ service to share updates about themselves or to see updates about others.”
Scenario planning is a great tool if there are drivers that you think will have a big impact on your organisation but that are also quite unpredictable. This forum thread is to share your experiences of scenario planning.
On Tuesday Clay Shirkey gave a lecture at the LSE. I was prevented from attending by the snow but fortunately the LSE have published an audio file of his talk. Worth a listen.
The pollsters Populus have been tracking public confidence in the economy, reporting:
Nearly four out of five voters (79%) expect the economy to perform badly for the country as a whole over the coming year, and net optimism/pessimism has dropped to a new low of minus 61%, according to the latest poll by Populus for The Times. This gloomy view is to be expected, given the steady flow of bad economic news and bleak forecasts. But many people continue to see the recession as affecting others, not them. Nearly half (46%) think that the economy will do well for ‘me and my family’ this year, compared with only 18% who say this about the country as a whole. Slightly more (50%) think that the economy will do badly for their families, but, as the graph below shows, this represents a 57% difference in net optimism/pessimism when voters are thinking about their own situation as opposed to the prospects for the whole country.
Their predictions for the future:
Over the coming months this gap is likely to close: either people will come to feel that the economic prospects for the country are not as bad as they now seem, and will become less pessimistic about ‘Britain as a whole’, or – if the nation’s economy performs about as badly as voters now expect – more people are likely to find that they are seriously affected by the recession than they currently expect, and pessimism about ‘me & my family’ will rise. Which of these scenarios unfolds will almost certainly have a profound impact on the outcome of the next election, which has to take place sometime in the next 16 months.
Which of these scenarios do you think is most likely?
The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project has released a new data memo revealing that the share of (US) adult internet users who have a profile on an online social
network site has more than quadrupled in the past four years, from 8% in 2005 to 35% now.
Overall, personal use of social networks seems to be more prevalent than professional use of networks, both in the orientation of the networks that adults choose to use as well as the reasons they give for using the applications. Most adults, like teens, are using online social networks to connect with people they already know.
When users do use social networks for professional and personal reasons, they will often maintain multiple profiles, generally on different sites.
A partnership of US organisations (CompassPoint Nonprofit Services, The Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Meyer Foundation and Idealist.org) have published a survey of nearly 6,000 emerging nonprofit leaders, Ready to Lead? Next Generation Leaders Speak Out (PDF). The headines say that “a skilled, committed, and diverse pool of next generation leaders would like to be nonprofit executive directors in the future. However, the survey also finds that there are significant barriers: work-life balance, insufficient life-long earning potential, lack of mentorship and overwhelming fundraising responsibilities which may prevent many younger nonprofit staff from becoming executives”.
I’d be interested to know whether the Leadership 2020 group thinks the findings read across to the UK context.
I recently came across the notion of ‘soft paternalism’, which seems relevant here. It refers to an overt process through which individuals are
encouraged to buy in to particular kinds of behaviour in order to improve their own welfare, and is described by Wikipedia as a “political philosophy that believes the state can help you make the choices you would make for yourself—if only you had the strength of will and the sharpness of mind. But unlike ‘hard’ paternalists, who ban some things and mandate others, the softer kind aims only to skew your decisions, without infringing greatly on your freedom of choice.”
That’s an interesting question Stephen. The ‘disintermediation’ question came up many times when we were working on the ICT Foresight project. In relation to giving we concluded that intermediaries would not necessarily be cut out, but that new kinds of intermediaries would be required. Here is the relevant extract from ICT Foresight: charitable giving and fundraising in a digital world (download PDF)
Future organisational models
This report has explored how the internet can facilitate connections between donors and organisations, and between donors and beneficiaries. It has also explored how the internet can potentially empower donors to make an informed choice about which organisation to support, to choose where to direct their money, and to use their networks to fundraise for organisations. If indeed power does shift away from organisations and towards individuals then this will raise questions about the most effective models that organisations can use to direct donations towards their work on the ground. As Nick Booth and Andy Dearden discuss, some organisations may shift from being deliverers to facilitators and market makers:
Nick: What we’re describing in terms of the network means that charities become a couple of things: firstly a safe place to store money, and secondly a network to distribute other resources, but not much else. In the future you could imagine a model whereby beneficiaries are telling the stories and are nominating a safe place to store donations, so they’re saying ‘if you want to help us please do it through this mechanism’. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be a charity, it could be a bank. Obviously there are issues with this model but it could mean that potentially the role of charities is shifting or there’s a gap for a new kind of charity.
Andy: If we go back to the comparison with ecommerce we can learn from what Tescos do. Tescos don’t buy products to sell; they rent out shelf space to their suppliers who then compete. The Tesco brand operates simply to bring people to the market place; they’re the market makers.
Nick Booth and Andy Dearden (roundtable discussion, June 2007)
These new intermediaries already exist. Chipin.com provides a safe place to store money, raised for any purpose. Realitycharity.com connects donors directly to individuals requiring help. In the future VCOs may need to become aggregators of projects and allow donors more choice over who they give their money to, or else risk new intermediary organisations, which may not even be charities, moving into the gap.
Karl has been working hard to gather evidence about what happens to the sector in a recession. You can now read a summary of his findings in this news post.
Since 2004, the ChangeUp programme has increased funding to infrastructure organisations, together with the heavily oversubscribed Big Lottery Fund BASIS fund. The future of infrastructure funding after the current spending round is highly uncertain and will depend on a number of factors including how well the sector and Capacitybuilders can make a case for continued support of the sector’s infrastructure, the state of central government finances, and which political party is in power. In particular, the Conservatives, in their recent green paper, suggested dramatic changes to how infrastructure is funded. Their proposals suggest more direct funding to frontline organisations to enable them to identify and commission the support they feel they need. This remains a very uncertain driver as the proposals are only currently being consulted on.
The implications that were discussed included:
*Our members are finding it hard to navigate procurement and commissioning processes and some are losing out
*Our own organisations and our finances could be impacted
*Our members may need to consider collaboration or even merger, and we may need to support them with this
The potential strategic responses that arose included:
*Taking a strong leadership role locally advocating about how procurement and commissioning processes could be improved for our members
*Developing new/improved support to help our members compete and win contracts
*Developing new support around collaboration and merger
*What is our position on merger?
Hi all
I’ve created this new forum as a space to debate the drivers that particularly impact on infrastructure organisations. We are now working with many infrastructure organisations through the Improving Support programme (funded by Capacitybuilders) so we’ll also be sharing insights from our training workshops and other conversations.
Megan
This short blog post from Henley Centre Headlight Vision reveals an interesting snapshot of some research they’ve done into public attitudes about sharing data with government. Michelle Singer writes: “citizens’ first reaction is one of extreme wariness – no doubt exacerbated by recent media stories about data that has gone ‘missing in action’. However, when requests for personal information are sweetened by the promise of “better service”, the picture changes dramatically. Over two thirds of citizens are then happy to provide their details to government departments.”
Hi Susan Instinctively I think you must be right about the power of ‘preferred futures’. I think that most organisations in our sector have no problem communicating about what they would like the future to look like – that’s the essence of the vision and mission of organisations, and it usually permeates right through an organisation. However, for many organisation in our sector the desired future of ‘the vision’ is often a long long way from the present reality (hence why so many in our sector describe themselves as being in the business of change), and many of the barriers (eg adequate funding) can seem insurmountable. So for me, the key is to understand change and to respond in the best possible way to navigate your organisation towards the ultimate goal of the vision. So, I think we agree on this!
Megan
Third Sector ForesightI've just uploaded some new sources of further information in the 'want to know more?' section of this driver - happy reading!
Megan
Third Sector ForesightLove the graphic summaries! Who did them?
Megan
Third Sector ForesightThe most significant change in the use of the internet in recent years has been the shift from a ‘broadcast’ medium (one organisation or person pushing lots of content out to a large audience), to a ‘conversational’ medium (many different organisations and people talking to each other and engaging in debate). This is the key implication of most discussions about ‘web2.0’, ‘social media’ or ‘social networking’ (for more, see our drivers on online communities and interactive websites).
This has clear implications for infrastructure. A core part of infrastructure’s mission is to support other organisations with information, advice, tools and ideas to help them to be more effective. The old-fashioned ‘broadcasting’ method of disseminating information still has a place (as does face to face support and picking up the phone!). But the web now presents opportunities to tap into the power and expertise of our networks, to allow those we support to talk to and advise each other, and share their own information and ideas. Indeed the expectations of our audience are increasingly that we will enable and facilitate this.
And infrastructure organisations are acting. This month, Navca (the membership body for local infrastructure) launched navcaboodle, a website for their members and others to share and discuss. NCVO will shortly be launching it’s own online communities. And many infrastructure organisation use twitter, a slightly less public but equally conversational way of talking with peers (for example [@BVSC], @bassac_ org _ukand @OCVYS). There are already non-infrastructure players in this area, as you’d expect, including Third Sector Forums.
Is taking advantage of the opportunities of peer to peer online support simple? No it is not! But the challenges for organisations are largely cultural rather than technological (after all, increasing numbers of your staff and volunteers use the internet to gather a range of range of recommendations, information and advice from other ‘ordinary’ people). Implications include:
Are you facilitating peer to peer conversations between your members? What other challenges (or opportunities) are you finding in this new way of working?
Megan
Third Sector ForesightPlans for a Social Investment Wholesale Bank to provide loan finance to the sector are progressing. The government is now consulting on design and functions for the bank. Stuart Etherington, NCVO's CEO has responded:
Megan
Third Sector ForesightThe 2009 Budget announces
“…new pilot city-region arrangements for Greater Manchester and Leeds, building on the Government’s recent economic reforms through the Sub-National Review. The pilot city-regions will benefit from the stronger integration of planning, housing, transport, regeneration, employment and skills programmes, increasing their ability to drive sustainable growth and economic development.”
Changes to tiers of government/governance always mean that new relationships have to be built and work has to be done to ensure the sector’s voice is heard in the right places. The sector currently already struggles to navigate the growing number of complex partnerships.
For more info about the 2009 budget see here
Megan
Third Sector ForesightRichard Thaler, the author of Nudge, was in the UK doing the rounds of various organisations a couple of weeks ago. You can listen to the presentation he gave to Demos on nudging ourselves out of recession here, or download the presentation he gave to the government’s Strategy Unit here.
Megan
Third Sector ForesightAnd of course if you’d like to try scenario planning, getting hold of our practical guide to scenario planning, Picture This, is an excellent way to get started!
Megan
Third Sector ForesightReceived this from the American Pew Internet Project this morning:
As of December 2008, 11% of online American adults said they used a service like Twitter or another service that allowed them to share updates about themselves or to see the updates of others. Just a few weeks earlier, in November 2008, 9% of internet users used Twitter or updated their status online and in May of 2008, 6% of internet users responded yes to a slightly different question, where users were asked if they used “Twitter or another ‘microblogging’ service to share updates about themselves or to see updates about others.”
Full report
Megan
Third Sector ForesightIt’s also worth reading Natalie’s reflections on developing scenarios, and the particular challenge of creating the ‘axes of uncertainty’
Megan
Third Sector ForesightBack in 2007 we ran a seminar with the Performance Hub about scenario planning. You can download the free seminar report here
Megan
Third Sector ForesightHere is an interview with Simon Blake, Chief Executive of Brook, about their experience of scenario planning.
Megan
Third Sector ForesightScenario planning is a great tool if there are drivers that you think will have a big impact on your organisation but that are also quite unpredictable. This forum thread is to share your experiences of scenario planning.
Megan
Third Sector ForesightOn Tuesday Clay Shirkey gave a lecture at the LSE. I was prevented from attending by the snow but fortunately the LSE have published an audio file of his talk. Worth a listen.
Megan
Third Sector ForesightThe pollsters Populus have been tracking public confidence in the economy, reporting:
Their predictions for the future:
Which of these scenarios do you think is most likely?
Megan
Third Sector ForesightThe Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project has released a new data memo revealing that the share of (US) adult internet users who have a profile on an online social
network site has more than quadrupled in the past four years, from 8% in 2005 to 35% now.
Overall, personal use of social networks seems to be more prevalent than professional use of networks, both in the orientation of the networks that adults choose to use as well as the reasons they give for using the applications. Most adults, like teens, are using online social networks to connect with people they already know.
When users do use social networks for professional and personal reasons, they will often maintain multiple profiles, generally on different sites.
The memo is available to download here.
Megan
Third Sector ForesightA partnership of US organisations (CompassPoint Nonprofit Services, The Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Meyer Foundation and Idealist.org) have published a survey of nearly 6,000 emerging nonprofit leaders, Ready to Lead? Next Generation Leaders Speak Out (PDF). The headines say that “a skilled, committed, and diverse pool of next generation leaders would like to be nonprofit executive directors in the future. However, the survey also finds that there are significant barriers: work-life balance, insufficient life-long earning potential, lack of mentorship and overwhelming fundraising responsibilities which may prevent many younger nonprofit staff from becoming executives”.
I’d be interested to know whether the Leadership 2020 group thinks the findings read across to the UK context.
Megan
Third Sector ForesightI recently came across the notion of ‘soft paternalism’, which seems relevant here. It refers to an overt process through which individuals are
encouraged to buy in to particular kinds of behaviour in order to improve their own welfare, and is described by Wikipedia as a “political philosophy that believes the state can help you make the choices you would make for yourself—if only you had the strength of will and the sharpness of mind. But unlike ‘hard’ paternalists, who ban some things and mandate others, the softer kind aims only to skew your decisions, without infringing greatly on your freedom of choice.”
Megan
Third Sector ForesightThat’s an interesting question Stephen. The ‘disintermediation’ question came up many times when we were working on the ICT Foresight project. In relation to giving we concluded that intermediaries would not necessarily be cut out, but that new kinds of intermediaries would be required. Here is the relevant extract from ICT Foresight: charitable giving and fundraising in a digital world (download PDF)
Future organisational models
This report has explored how the internet can facilitate connections between donors and organisations, and between donors and beneficiaries. It has also explored how the internet can potentially empower donors to make an informed choice about which organisation to support, to choose where to direct their money, and to use their networks to fundraise for organisations. If indeed power does shift away from organisations and towards individuals then this will raise questions about the most effective models that organisations can use to direct donations towards their work on the ground. As Nick Booth and Andy Dearden discuss, some organisations may shift from being deliverers to facilitators and market makers:
Nick: What we’re describing in terms of the network means that charities become a couple of things: firstly a safe place to store money, and secondly a network to distribute other resources, but not much else. In the future you could imagine a model whereby beneficiaries are telling the stories and are nominating a safe place to store donations, so they’re saying ‘if you want to help us please do it through this mechanism’. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be a charity, it could be a bank. Obviously there are issues with this model but it could mean that potentially the role of charities is shifting or there’s a gap for a new kind of charity.
Andy: If we go back to the comparison with ecommerce we can learn from what Tescos do. Tescos don’t buy products to sell; they rent out shelf space to their suppliers who then compete. The Tesco brand operates simply to bring people to the market place; they’re the market makers.
Nick Booth and Andy Dearden (roundtable discussion, June 2007)
These new intermediaries already exist. Chipin.com provides a safe place to store money, raised for any purpose. Realitycharity.com connects donors directly to individuals requiring help. In the future VCOs may need to become aggregators of projects and allow donors more choice over who they give their money to, or else risk new intermediary organisations, which may not even be charities, moving into the gap.
Megan
Third Sector ForesightKarl has been working hard to gather evidence about what happens to the sector in a recession. You can now read a summary of his findings in this news post.
Megan
Third Sector ForesightSince 2004, the ChangeUp programme has increased funding to infrastructure organisations, together with the heavily oversubscribed Big Lottery Fund BASIS fund. The future of infrastructure funding after the current spending round is highly uncertain and will depend on a number of factors including how well the sector and Capacitybuilders can make a case for continued support of the sector’s infrastructure, the state of central government finances, and which political party is in power. In particular, the Conservatives, in their recent green paper, suggested dramatic changes to how infrastructure is funded. Their proposals suggest more direct funding to frontline organisations to enable them to identify and commission the support they feel they need. This remains a very uncertain driver as the proposals are only currently being consulted on.
Megan
Third Sector ForesightLast week we were up in Doncaster with 12 chief officers and chairs of local infrastructure organisation. One of the discussions revolved around the implications and strategic actions that could flow from consideration of this driver (and the related drivers of increasing role of the sector in service delivery, procurement practice and polarisation of the sector.
Read the participants’ ideas about implications and potential actions.
Megan
Third Sector ForesightLast night we were up in Doncaster with 12 chief officers and chairs of local infrastructure organisation. One of the discussions revolved around the implications and strategic actions that could flow from consideration of one key driver. The one that we discussed was described as “commissioning and procurement” (see drivers on this website on bringing markets into public services, increasing role of the sector in service delivery and procurement practice) and the related driver of polarisation of the sector.
The implications that were discussed included:
*Our members are finding it hard to navigate procurement and commissioning processes and some are losing out
*Our own organisations and our finances could be impacted
*Our members may need to consider collaboration or even merger, and we may need to support them with this
The potential strategic responses that arose included:
*Taking a strong leadership role locally advocating about how procurement and commissioning processes could be improved for our members
*Developing new/improved support to help our members compete and win contracts
*Developing new support around collaboration and merger
*What is our position on merger?
Megan
Third Sector ForesightHi all
I’ve created this new forum as a space to debate the drivers that particularly impact on infrastructure organisations. We are now working with many infrastructure organisations through the Improving Support programme (funded by Capacitybuilders) so we’ll also be sharing insights from our training workshops and other conversations.
Megan
Megan
Third Sector ForesightThis short blog post from Henley Centre Headlight Vision reveals an interesting snapshot of some research they’ve done into public attitudes about sharing data with government. Michelle Singer writes: “citizens’ first reaction is one of extreme wariness – no doubt exacerbated by recent media stories about data that has gone ‘missing in action’. However, when requests for personal information are sweetened by the promise of “better service”, the picture changes dramatically. Over two thirds of citizens are then happy to provide their details to government departments.”
Megan
Third Sector ForesightHi Susan
Instinctively I think you must be right about the power of ‘preferred futures’. I think that most organisations in our sector have no problem communicating about what they would like the future to look like – that’s the essence of the vision and mission of organisations, and it usually permeates right through an organisation. However, for many organisation in our sector the desired future of ‘the vision’ is often a long long way from the present reality (hence why so many in our sector describe themselves as being in the business of change), and many of the barriers (eg adequate funding) can seem insurmountable. So for me, the key is to understand change and to respond in the best possible way to navigate your organisation towards the ultimate goal of the vision. So, I think we agree on this!