Collaboration for Funders: Get the Timing Right

This is the fourth in a series of posts dedicated to the topic of online collaboration for grantmakers. In part one, we look at determining the value of creating an online collaborative community. The second part explores challenges in facilitating collaboration. The third post showcases the importance of  knowing your community.This post focuses on timing and its role in the success of an online community.

As you plan to launch your community, be mindful of the calendar: pay attention to when your grantees will be willing and able to participate, and find ways to align participation with other important events you have planned.

Is a grantee ready to participate? 

For any grant project, not all weeks (or months) are created equal. Securing funding, kicking off a project, running the project, evaluating progress, and following up: at each step in the program lifecycle, grantees have different needs. It is extremely beneficial to sync up the activities of your online community (including launch and ongoing growth and management milestones) with these known grantee cycles. This will help you build off natural momentum and encourage participation.  

• When projects are starting up, grantees may be buried with a multitude of tasks, such as hiring, finding partners, or setting up infrastructure. Asking them to participate in collaborative activities at this point may be futile, for them, and for you. At this stage, it may not be their top priority, and it may be best to wait until there is a natural need or justification for their participation.
• During strategy development, grantees may be eager for input from their funder, or from peers who have more experience with a given program. 
• During the assessment and evaluation phases, grantees may be more motivated to share their work and show off what they have accomplished. 
• When a group has secured a new round of funding, it may be willing to play a mentorship role for other grantees, sharing their experience and providing guidance.

Consider your grantees, their program/grant lifecycle, and how their needs at each stage will influence their willingness and/or ability to fully participate. Ask yourself, "when will collaborative capabilities add value to and support this community?" Let your answer guide you in establishing a timeline and informing your community building activities.

Connect the virtual and the face-to-face.  

If in-person meetings are part of your grants management process, synchronize them with your online community activities. A face-to-face workshop or presentation is a great context for a launch: you can get members signed up, oriented, and enthusiastic about collaborative possibilities as part of an in-person interaction. Once a community is up and running, you can use it to prepare grantees for meetings, sharing agendas and discussion items, introducing attendees virtually, even facilitating meeting logistics.

There are also rich opportunities for using collaboration tools during meetings, including capturing and posting video of activities (at a recent international convening, a group used a Flipcam to immortalize a memorable group dance session!). And the community can often carry forward the energy and enthusiasm that started at a meeting using online collaboration (we have often seen traffic spike up in the months immediately following a get-together).

So, look for opportunities to use online collaboration before, during, and after meetings, as a way to motivate users to participate in the community and provide services around the in-person convening. Users will find added value in the tool.

The last post in this series will offer some thoughts about selecting and using collaboration tools.