Collaboration for Funders: Know Your Community

This is the third in a series on online collaboration for grantmakers posts. In part one, we looked at determing the value of creating a collaboration community. The second part explored challenges in facilitating collaboration. This post discusses the importance of understanding your users and the user community.

Foundations fund a wide variety of sectors in many different ways, and every group of grantees has a different set of characteristics. Forum One has built collaboration communities for a wide array of populations, including library groups and research scientists (dispersed international groups where language and cultural differences are huge issues) as well as commercial consortia (regional groups that are already well-connected). In each case, the community was different and needed to be treated and managed as such.

In starting out your community, be sure to take time to talk to your prospective community members so you understand the likely dynamics. Assume you'll revisit, and even adjust, your approach once the community launches and you gather additional info. Some things you'll want to look out for:

How well do participants know each other? How well do they know you?  It's often a good idea to link community launches or new programs with face-to-face events — real-time personal connections will greatly increase the value and meaning of online interactions.

How "sharesy" are they?  I've worked with library communities in a couple of contexts and the result has always been the same: since librarians are professional information sharers, they are very well suited to online community participation. This is not always the case with grantees (who are competing for funds) or in for-profit firms that have a vested interest in protecting prioritey information or intellectual property. In these instances, well, the sharing quotient goes down quite a bit.

This is not to say that such communities cannot be successfully crafted, but the approach and expectations need to be quite different. For example, we've worked with groups of grantees that are not necessarily willing to share, but are eager to absorb information coming from their funder about strategy and future directions. In this case, we ended up crafting the community to be rich in news and information, with relatively low expectations of contributions from community members. This puts the onus on the funder, but it does meet the needs of both funder and grantees, and that's what collaboration is all about.

How open can the community be? In many philanthropic contexts, the sharing will be better and deeper if participants know that only their close peers and colleagues are present. However, some foundations seed communities to include participation by a whole sector, and not just by their own grantees (Community Clinic Voice is one outstanding example). In cases like this, openness is powerful and effective to expand the reach and participation in the community.

In addition to understanding your audience, if you know why you're starting a collaboration community, and how you'll overcome the obstacles, you can focus your attention on finding the right time to engage. We'll explore that in the next post.