Overview: Online Community Management
Convening a community can be the most powerful communication tactic there is.
Online communities offer enormous opportunities to the right organisation. Community members are far more likely to read your content, think of your organisation, give you feedback, share your content, attend your events, get involved in your programmes, and buy your products.
On the other hand, convening a community is hard: few people have time for more than a couple of online platforms in their lives, so attracting them to yours means you need to be uniquely useful to them.
That generally requires a change of mindset and new internal processes across the organisation, because it’s not your community - it's theirs. And getting their involvement means really listening to what they have to say, and then visibly acting on it.
I built the EU Commission’s first online community in 2002, and have built many more successful ones since. If you’d like to chat, get in touch.
More services: start with Communication strategy.
Relevant resources
www.wired.com
"Our digital public sphere has been failing ... [but] History offers a proven template for how to build healthier public spaces."Filter Bubble author Pariser hearkens back to Walt Whitman's creation of NY's Green Park, when "New York City had no public parks ...only walled commercial pleasure gardens for those who could af…
www.theatlantic.com
The union faces a double crisis of legitimacy... it is hard to sustain the fiction that ordinary citizens have a meaningful say over what happens in Brussels... If many voters don’t believe that they have much sway over what happens in their national capitals, the feeling of impotence is even more profound when it comes to Brussels.... the EU ... …
www.euractiv.com
‘Conference on the Future of Europe’ will open this spring... will not be enough... also... a real democratic debate on the final text, so that it can be followed up... if there is to be a reform of the Treaties... to be ratified in all Member States...Referenda are ... not suitable for the ratification of a new treaty... not allow a debate on its…
www.bertelsmann-stiftung.de
to make participatory democracy a reality, it is essential to avoid only paying lip-service to the idea of participation — and give citizens a real say...European federalists are hoping to gain momentum for treaty change. Many member states are afraid of that very outcome...Citizens’ participation is being tested out far more commonly across Europ…
www.hiig.de
Europeans feel disenfranchised ... alternative forms of active citizen engagement in democracy must be experimented with... Our approach combines ... random sample voting (RSV) with secure digital identities... if anyone in Europe, from the European parliament to a local government or NGO, wants to find out how people in a certain region feel abou…
medium.com
a system that could bring some structure to the legislative advocacy ecosystem — listing all bills online; organizations and constituents would create accounts and post input in a structured, transparent way with outward anonymity but real names and addresses sent with messages to lawmakers in a way that could be easily processed by offices... th…
papers.ssrn.com
CFPs also have the capacity to help foster and strengthen non-parliamentary democratic structures and practices. As such, they should be supported and encouraged as part of a framework of further European democratization and civic integration.
www.linkedin.com
give ourselves the following assignment: Government engagement must contribute to the quality of democracy.... provides a solid foundation for the design and execution of ... communication and participation forms and processes... an angle to critically review ... collaboration formats and tools. Participation is not an end in itself; reinforcing …
www.theatlantic.com
rather than asking “Is the internet good for democracy?”... explore whether the human characteristics ... amplified or diminished by the internet support a functioning democratic system... The internet... collapses geography, greatly amplifies people’s ability to make connections ... However, the American democratic system is structured in a wa…
www.theatlantic.com
Interactive and participatory media allows viewers to get involved, to become expressive, and give voice. It is inviting and contagious for those who share views—seeing enough notes and posters in public makes it more welcoming to add your own... civic action... moves from digital support to public support only when it is clear that such actions h…
mathewlowry.myhub.ai
With independent journalism increasingly looking like an endangered species, a EU communication strategy that helped European media build the European Public Sphere would be a smarter longterm move than propaganda and brochureware
www.economist.com
Plebiscite-pushers have got Europe's voters hooked on the cheap rush of direct democracy
medium.com
If there was an idea that could ‘fix’ democracy, it would have been thought-up already... When I started working on GovTrack, I thought I was building an accountability tool. If only the American public had more information they could head-off failures in government by voting more effectively in elections. ... I was wrong. The world is complic…
www.digitaldemocracy.parliament.uk
A whole load of recommnendations for the UK's House of Commons, including some intriguing ones - eg: "We believe the public want the opportunity to have their say in House of Commons debates; we also believe that this will provide a useful resource for MPs and help to enhance those debates. We therefore recommend a unique experiment: the use of…
www.jonworth.eu
"The MyVote 2014 tool is the latest in a series of tools of this sort ... but this time it’s different in one crucial way: MyVote 2014 uses data about MEPs have voted in the past (between 2009 and now to be precise), and uses this as the data for the tool. This makes the outcomes of the MyVote 2014 tool more solid than previous efforts. Rather tha…