Collaboration for Funders: Use the Right Tools

This is the final post in our series on online collaboration for grantmakers. In part one, we look at determining the value of creating a collaboration community. The second part explores challenges in facilitating collaboration. The third post is an encouragement to know your community, and the fourth discusses the importance of timing in launching a community and running its programs.

When you've thought through the benefits, obstacles, audiences, and timing for an online collaboration community project, you will need to determine how to deploy it. This technology selection and implementation phase can be daunting and complex. Here are a few guidelines to help you along:

Do a few things well.

Many community platforms, whether simple or complex, offer a large number of options for user interaction: user-generated content contributions, discussions, groups, wikis, blogs, real-time communication, Twitter-like updates, photo galleries, collaborative file management, etc.  Even if the collaboration platform you buy or build has many powerful capabilities, resist the temptation to use all of them. Figure out which two or three activities best meet your community's goals, and focus your energies on them. You'll create better-quality programs, gain greater traction with community members, obtain more focused feedback, and enable yourself to be more responsive to initial usage trends and to rapidly change course if needed. 

Iterate. 

Communities take time to grow and needs change over time. Don't expect to get everything right upon first launch. Limit your initial exposure to risk by launching a version 1.0 with the most valuable capabilities, with plans to add more in stages as you learn what kinds of interactions your community finds truly valuable.  

Be wary of big, complex visions. 

If you're going to do something sophisticated, like integrating your grants management system with your grantee community, be sure you have very solid management support, a healthy budget, and a very patient stakeholder group.  Big visions often mean higher likelihood of disappointment. 

Choose an appropriate platform and deployment strategy.

The world of collaboration platforms is a bit of a jungle.  Here are three broad approaches:

• Grab a free or cheap tool and get started fast. There are plenty of options (Google Sites, Ning, and GroupSite, to name a few) that allow you to host discussions and share documents with groups of people relatively easily. You can learn a lot, especially about the needs and behaviors of your end-user community, by taking this approach. However, you can also get ahead of yourself if you don't create a cleart roadmap. WARNING: using an inexpensive, easy-to-deploy tool does not mean you can skip or shortchange the strategy and planning phases outlined in the earlier posts in this series.

• Evaluate and select an enterprise solution.  Working together with your IT department, you can go through a formal requirements-and-selection process to identify a system to meet your long-term needs. Pro: you can be thorough and thoughtful, and can select a system that plays well with your organization's other IT systems. Con: this process is sometimes slow and costly, and may prevent you from having the flexibility to deploy rapidly and make iteractive adjustments. If your organization is ready to adopt this more comprehensive approach, here are two helpful guides:

• CMS Watch has a detailed for-fee report on collaboration solutions, aimed at the corporate market.  Even looking at the outline of the report offers a useful breakdown of the types of functionality and vendors in the collaboration space. An extra bonus at CMS Watch is their SharePoint report, if you are inclined (as many are) to explore that tool's collaboration capabilities.
• Forum One's own Online Community Research Network regularly publishes results of surveys from online community managers about community platforms. The latest platform survey is available here.

• The middle path is a combination of the two above approaches: select a rather lightweight and flexible solution but choose and deploy it in a more structured, strategic way. It would be very possible to deploy a Ning or GroupSite project using this approach, but there are also some mid-tier collaboration platforms, such as Jive and Central Desktop, that require more of a financial commitment than the cheap-or-free but don't necessarily need an enterprise-level commitment to deploy. 

People and programs before platforms. 

Throughout our work with our clients on collaboration projects, we have seen time and time again that the successful initiatives prioritze the elements of collaboration in this order: people (first), programs (second), and tools (third). I had a fascinating conversation recently with a program officer about running an online community for African educators making use of good old-fashioned Listserv technology. This community is using email as its sole virtual communication tool - and yet engagement strategies and community management techniques are well planned and carefully thought out, perhaps more so than many "build it and they will come" collaboration projects involving much more expensive tools.

Designing and building a collaboration community is a rich and multi-layered experience. Approach it carefully, but remember to also have fun. Oh, and let us know what you're learning!