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Readers as Resources: A First Look at our 2006 Blogging Survey
By Michael C. Gilbert, December 4th, 2006
Note: This is a first look at a very simple survey we did of our readers a few weeks ago. We plan on continuing our exploration of community and blogging in the weeks to come. This article touches on one key strategic insight that will be explored in greater depth in our upcoming online seminar on Nonprofit Blogging Strategies.
I subscribe to the notion that one of the very first web sites was a blog: the What's New page at CERN that listed and linked to new web sites. Links to those early websites were displayed in reverse chronological order in a scrolling list. If you were staying connected in the early days of the web, that was the page you watched.
It's only in the last few years that nonprofit organizations have gotten around to taking this model seriously. Partly this is because of how the metaphor of the document has guided nonprofit web design, and partly it's because the notion of blogging (which only got its name at the end of 1997) has matured to the point where it includes some concepts which organizations can find a bit challenging. I have written elsewhere about how to overcome those challenges.
In this piece, I want to focus simply on the idea of readers as resources, drawing largely on the results of our recent reader survey at Nonprofit Online News. My goals are to encourage organizations to do similar surveys (of their newsletter readers, volunteers, members, and donors) and to highlight some fairly well-understood strategic insights.
Survey Results
I want to provide some context first. In 2005, the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that seven percent of American adults had a blog and twelve percent had posted comments on a blog or similar site. For a narrower, more tech-savvy sample, you can look at the results of a Netsquared survey in which about 26 percent of respondents reported blogging. The Nonprofit Online News readership came in between those two numbers.
Here is what our readers told us about blogging: About thirteen percent of you have a weblog and just as many more plan on blogging. Fully one third of the bloggers actually write more than one blog. Just under four percent used to have a blog, but no longer do.
Social bookmarking, as most of you know, can be seen as a very lightweight form of blogging. Educause described social bookmarking as the "practice of saving bookmarks to a public website and tagging them with keywords". As with blogging, the default view is reverse chronology and RSS is used to syndicate content. The main difference is that most of the network benefits of social bookmarking are still restricted to the boundaries of a single service provider, whereas blogging has a more distributed architecture. Rather than just using tags, blogging also usually involves writing anything from a few sentences to a few pages, which makes it a bit more work.
Here is what our readers told us about social bookmarking: Just under thirteen percent of you already maintain social bookmarks (of which about a fifth maintain more than one system) and just under six percent of you plan on doing so. Just over two percent of you used to keep social bookmarks, but don't any longer.
One of the techniques that has served us very well for years in our technology and communication planning work is to identify the many informal communication patterns that exist within any organization or community. We can often build on those patterns and create better technology and better adoption as a result.
The question we asked our readers about information sharing is an example of this kind of research into informal channels. We asked them: "How often do you send links to interesting online content to staff, colleagues, or friends by email, instant messaging, or the web?"
Here is what our readers told us about that sort of informal sharing: Less than eighteen percent said they shared information that way either rarely or never, leaving over eighty percent who do so on some kind of regular basis. Twenty seven percent said they did so several times a month. Just over forty percent said they did so several times a week. And almost sixteen percent fell into the most frequent category, doing so several times a day.
Usable Insights
The most obvious lesson is that a survey of this nature can serve as a kind of resource identification process for an organization. Chances are good that donors, volunteers, and others who have opted into an online relationship with an organization will be even more likely to blog, bookmark, and share information than the general population. I would be surprised if most organizations didn't find that one out of ten of their stakeholders have a blog.
Unlike broader skill surveys, this survey can be put to much more immediate use by an organization. Bloggers have audiences and might be able to put additional information from you or access to your staff to good use. This can give you access to a much larger group of people, who will be spoken to by a trusted source -- the blogger they already know. Alternatively, among the many blogs you discover might be fresh, interesting, or powerful new voices, whose material (if its relevant) could prove valuable in your existing channels of communication, such as your website or newsletters.
The first thing to do after the survey is to subscribe to all the blogs and social bookmarks in a tool that allows you to skim content easily and search for keywords. Soon, you will have a pretty good idea of who among your stakeholders is actually writing about the concerns that you share in the form of your organization's mission and issues. On top of that, you will have laid a new groundwork for actually listening to those particular stakeholders in a way that leverages your mutual interest.
The fact that fifty five percent of our readers share information with people between several times a week and several times a day is revealing. Most of these folks are not bloggers, of course, but they are engaged in a very blog like activity. Certainly this reveals why the blog model, with its chronological trickle of publication, works so well for so many people. It also reveals that, with a little gentle exploration, there are four times as many potential bloggers and bookmarkers as there are people already doing it.
Finally, a few words are in order about the emphasis created by this survey and the approach it represents. In those instances where a communication technology project is designed around people's needs (as opposed to the "needs" of technology or content), it is almost always focused on the users' roles as consumers of information, rather than as producers. This is a main cause of the failure of most intranets, community networks, and knowledge management systems. Designing instead for the producers of value, starting with knowing who is producing already, can lay the groundwork for success.
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