Grogs and Associations

There are a lot of associations in the U.S. Their trade group, the American Society of Association Executives (yet another association) says that there are “86,054 trade and professional associations, and 1,010,365 philanthropic or charitable organizations” in the U.S. The ASAE goes on to describe the primary purpose of associations to be to develop connections between and provide communications and information to its members.

Wow, what a case for social media! Social media is enabling connections and communications among us all like never before. This provides a great opportunity for associations to evolve and provide even more value to their membership. Stuart Meyer, principal at Social Frequency, an association social media consultancy, recognizes this great potential for associations and social media:

The social web is an opportunity to expand your association sphere by listening, connecting, engaging and building vital relationships which expands your association sphere.

Why is this important?  Because conversations and relationships are what led to the creation of associations in the first place.  Further, social cohesion is the glue which holds together and propels our organizations.

A member’s commitment to an association is measured by the extent to which they feel a connected part of the organization.  The way members connect to an association is through some form of engagement or participation.  Before the social web, it required a greater sacrifice and investment to participate (planes, trains and automobiles), but today the social web provides an inexhaustible opportunity to connect and participate.

And indeed, associations are recognizing this opportunity. Take, for example, the American Institute of Architects. They’ve set up a blog the “Ideas Exchange.”

Here’s the blog’s About section:

Small Projects and Small Firms Ideas Exchange offers advice and commentary by and about small-firm and small-project architects like you.We encourage you to share your thoughts, comments, and opinions. Don’t be shy; join the conversation. Our door is always open. Suggest a blog topic

This is spot-on. Instead of the traditional top-down model publishing, the AIA here is embracing social media: in an “exchange” they are encouraging their members to “share your thoughts, comments and options” and to “join the conversation.” But then, what offer do they give their members to share or join the conversation? Just a link “Suggest a blog topic” to an email address!

Wow! The AIA here is trying to be open. Their About section is saying “We want to have everyone come in the house and join the party!” but they are keeping the door locked and just giving an address to which everyone can send a letter.What are the results? The blog averages just over 1 post per month. The “Ideas Exchange” is not happening.

I don’t mean to blame the AIA here. They are trying (likely more than most organizations). The problem is that the tools aren’t available. Blogs were built the be the “web log” of a single author and can be expanded to half a dozen, maybe a dozen contributors. But the AIA has a thousands of members: opening their blog to all of them would be a train wreck. But trying to get contribution through a “suggest a blog topic” link at the same time does not provide the engagement or incentives to get them to participate.

But fortunately now there are grogs! The grogs or “group blogs” we produce at Grogger have been made precisely to enable large groups of contributors to connect and post information–the exact idea exchange the AIA is looking for. In particular Grogger focuses on two things that enable group blogs to succeed: attracting content and filtering content.

Let’s take the AIA example again. In order to attract content, that blog first has to provide easy ways for users to contribute. Grogs do that through easy publishing tools–think Facebook ease-of-use–that make it simple for architects to post their content in. If an architect already has a blog (and doesn’t want to have to submit their post to both their own blog and to the AIA) grogs even enable users to automatically import content from their existing blog to their grog.

But beyond an easy experience, architects need an incentive for sharing the content into a grog. That motivation comes from recognition, in this case, recognition within the architect community. So grogs highlight the author of each post with links to the profile page of each user, where they can develop their identity within the community.

But even with the right incentives in place, the AIA blog would be a mess if it were to open itself up but not have the right filters in place: there would be some good content, but there’d be weaker content too, with no way for visitors to differentiate the two. Grogs step in by providing the following filtering tools:

• Tiers: grogs welcome a lot of content in, but by default content appears in the lowest tier / feed (call it “most recent,” “unfiltered,” “raw” or what you will); it has to “climb the feeds” from there to get in front of non-power users. These tiers sort the good and the bad.
• Community Filtering: users can vote up content (a la Digg) and this ranks content in the “most liked” feed
• Curator Filtering: curators can then look over what is coming in the “most recent” and “most liked” feeds and then choose feature the best, whether in a feed or as an above-the-feed “sticky”
• Categorization & Following: Architecture has a really broad range of topics. Imagine a topic page for each, allowing deep amounts of content around “Architecture Financials”, “Green Design,” “Recruiting & HR” etc. Users can then chose to follow different topics pages and users and then have a personalized “My Feed” of posts from those pages
• Tasks: direct the contributions of the community by assigning tasks, e.g. “Write up a review of 2010 AIA Conference on Green Design”
• Moderation: if you chose, approve / reject all of the content that comes into the system; elevate certain users to “trusted” to bypass moderation; develop user reputations for quality

There’s a lot more detail to all of the features above. Check out this blog post for a deeper dive, or contact us and we’ll let you in our closed beta or set up a demo to walk you through.

The bottom line is this: associations need to facilitate connections and communications for their memebers. The old top-down model of having an association magazine that interviews some members and writes some stories–will still an important piece–does not provide the level of connection and information that the social web can provide. And while associations are under more pressure than ever to deliver value for their members, the tools available to them–blogs–do not enable the exchange they need either.

But grogs do! Using grogs, associations’ communications teams can start to serve as facilitators of their communities and editors of their contributions, and in doing so provide a much more powerful experience for their members. We are already working with associations and we look forward to working with many more.