This courtesy of Brian Shaler’s very cute crappy graphs graph-maker.
So… I reckon a number of unions and some membership organisations are having problems in taking up as much of the 2.0 whizziness as they could because we’ve been a bit too used to our organisational structures too long.
You have a communications department, and an organising department. The comms people specialise in getting the highest number of eyeballs possible for their skimpy investment. Each interaction is low in value, but they get lots and lots of them through PR, broadcast and publishing, which more than makes up. They love the web as it scales for next to no money, and so they’ve been building up their web comms skills for 10 years, learning all manner of geekery and working out where to get the best tips and tools.
In an office down the hall are the organisers. They focus on a much smaller number of interactions, but each of the people they talk to may be worth their weight in gold. Supporting people to win a new recognition or through their first pay bargaining is extremely time intensive, and you will waste a lot of time coaching someone with 1-1 conversations that don’t pay off. They know their practical stuff on industrial relations, and are great people-people and resourceful investigators.
The comms guys got all excited about 2.0, but I think they’re starting to realise that they can’t support high-value low volume interactions properly. They could start making blogs they can’t keep up to audience expectations, communities where the moderation slips and users feel neglected, social networking actions that aren’t properly promoted because they couldn’t go the last mile before they had to move on to the next one. This I know as I’ve been more than a little guilty of it at times.
A lot of organisers are excited about 2.0 too, but many of them are having to reinvent wheels that comms have got bored of and hidden away behind the office pot plant. Some of them head off alone, making 2.0 actions that similarly don’t get to their proper potential, as they might not have all the skills to make a site convincingly polished-looking, or usable for different groups, and they mightn’t be integrated into the organisation’s audiences enough to make the most of it.
I think the big wins for us might be happening in the middle.
You mean the washroom off the hall that runs between the two departments?
No, the store cupboard opposite… 😛
Yay! Three cheers for the man behind the pint glass. This is the kind of flash of insight which the movement needs so badly. It has often struck me as odd and sad that union comms staff are (usually) kept in different physical spaces — their whole role needs to be recast as an organising one, with the same goals as those set before organisers. Just as organisers are increasingly expected to be lead communicators. Good on ya, innit.