23-Aug-05 5:00 PM CST

The Concept of Distributed Authoring for Membership Associations – Getting Your Association to “Virtualization”

The three indicators of organizational success that we measure online are distributed authoring, strong subgroups and transparency. See “Engaging Your Membership: What Are You Doing and What Should You Be Doing?”

This article addresses distributed authoring in more detail, including how it relates to association virtualization and why this is important to you.

Distributed authoring as pertains to organizations is defined simply as "bringing the association to the desktop.” Organizations must drive functionality and participation down to the individual so they can interact, fully enabled, with your association from any desktop. They must not only feel they are a member, but be able to make tangible changes to the Web site on their timeline.

While controls are put in place so as not to wreak havoc, members in these organizations are powerful contributors to the organization’s Web site. They no longer have to go through a single Webmaster, but instead can author and post their content for consideration by a Webmaster. In this way, the members are the association. They are truly engaged, and this plethora of content makes for a more dynamic online presence, enhancing the entire organization and providing additional benefits to members.

The association world has adopted the word “virtualization” in reference to the increased expectations of the membership as to what they want out of the association. Right now, the virtualization delivery mechanism is typically the Web site, email, Real Simple Syndication (RSS), conference calls and Webinars. In the future, association virtualization may come to encompass all sorts of new technologies that allow the membership to be served on the platform of their choice at the time of their choice. In a way, virtualization is like Tivo for associations.

Virtualization – “People are interested in finding fellowship online - not just purchasing goods. They want to experience valuable conversation and information [through their association software]." - Matt Helms, PPAG 2005

So, we have all of this cool technology to deliver our content increasingly in the format that our audience wants and exactly when they want it. But what about the content?

In a virtualized world of Tivo, compelling programming is the key to capturing the viewers’ attention. There is no upfront-contract where viewers agree to sit on the sofa at 8:00 PM EST and hope that your programming is worth it when they arrive. At that point, the viewer would have made the initial commitment and may give you the benefit of the doubt if you get off to a slow start on your presentation. In the world of Tivo, viewers may or may not record your presentation and then will jump ahead to see if, in their opinion, the content improves. (For me, if I had watched Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom with a Tivo, it would have been a MUCH shorter show.)

So, virtualization for the association demands much better content to keep the association’s membership engaged so they don’t change the channel or tune you out altogether.

“Better content” implies more specific, more timely, more detailed, and more exact content. And where can you get this great and amazing content? From the association membership itself.

Content is any material that is of value to the membership of your association. Content is comprised of job postings, relevant articles, press releases and most definitely the descriptions of upcoming seminars and conferences with speaker notes and biographies.

Content also includes the photo gallery from your holiday party that combines pictures from 10 different cameras all uploaded to the same site. It is the mission statement for your study groups, technical interest groups, committees and special interest groups. It is archives of the chairman’s corner, electronic newsletters and the results from the last golf tournament posted the same evening for bragging rights.

In an association that is going through virtualization, the consumption of content by the membership can happen in any place and at any time. Clearly, content is king, and the quality of your content matters a great deal.

Content Authoring

One extreme method of virtual content authoring is to allow anyone anywhere to add or edit content on your site that you deem editable. In the case of www.wikipedia.org, this “virtual encyclopedia” makes this concept work by making it easier to remove vandalism than it is to create the vandalism. While I believe Wikipedia is a compelling social experiment, I also believe that it only works because it has a dedicated core group who monitor the updates and also because of the neutral point of view requirement on the site.

However, in virtual associations, we look for content authoring from the world at large, mostly the membership and subject the content to work-flow reviews. In practice, this means if you add an event to the association’s calendar and do not have administrative rights on the site, it should send an email to someone to approve the event and make it “live” on the site.

Unstructured content, or content that is not updated on a regular basis, also is an important factor in the virtualization of associations. This content still requires the distributed authoring functionality, but has a few more controls in place. Examples include:

1) Administrator-only content – includes items such as office hours, phone and location information.

2) Leadership-only content – allows for setting restrictions on pages so that only the board of directors can make changes, for example, monthly meeting minutes.

3) Membership-only content - this is content that can be edited by any members in the association, such as allowing the association at large to identify people who appear in event photos and make the edits in real time without sending emails to a Web master. Keep a history in case anything goes off track so the page can be restored to a previous version if needed.

4) User-only content - this is content that can be edited by users on the site that may or may not be members of the association. A typical example of this would be a volunteer job posting where someone outside the organization is offering an internship that may benefit someone in the organization so you want them to add/edit it, but do not need to require them to join the organization to do so.

5) Owner content - this is content that one person, either a member or a non member, has added to your site that they retain edit rights to even after the content has been approved. They can fix their own typos and upload speaker notes without help.

To encourage distributed authoring, Web masters and organizational directors must overcome the concept of control and relinquish that control to their trusted and paying members. If the author of the content is made aware that they can interact directly with the Web site, their behavior changes and they add more content. In a volunteer-driven world, what more could you ask for? And then you don’t run the risk of being tuned out or having your members switching channels in this Tivo-like society.