Community Websites
Bring your Group Together On-Line
Working as a Team
We’ve all been there – flying by the seat of our pants, working off the back of an envelope, adrenaline pounding. Exciting but too exhausting for long. How about bringing your team together by providing them with the tools to share knowledge and experience, to harness the “wisdom of crowds”, and maybe get them all to your meetings on time!
We can help you with websites where you can share information with your team, your wider group of stakeholders and even the public at large, if that’s what you need. Your teams can go to one place to get the latest. Your volunteers can see the contributions they make CAN make a difference. You can use the latest social media go out and grab interest from all over the world and bring it in to work for you.
The websites we build can do this and more, often using apps and software your group is already familiar with – Twitter, Facebook, blogs, discussion forums, group calendars – this and more can galvanise your efforts.
Read on to see how we can help you make things happen.
We want to come together!
Harnessing the internet in the interests of your group has never been easier! If you want to explore how we can help your group, organisation, school or class work together using tools that most of them are already going to be familiar with, just get in touch. You’ll be pleasantly surprised how we can help you get organised!
Every community is different
But using general purpose applications over the internet in ways that work with the organisation can make all the difference. Let’s take a look at a few examples:
Managing, motivating and engaging with volunteers
If you have a team of volunteers you’ll be looking for ways to maximise their efforts. How about providing them with a way of sharing their knowledge and experience with other volunteers, publishing their material on-line in their own words? We can set up a content managed website where each volunteer can contribute content, and a central administrator (or two) control which entries to publish when. Have your community create its own story on line, but you stay in control (more or less) of the public face of the website.
“Crowd sourcing” expert knowledge
You’ll have come across the term “crowd-sourcing” where you get many people to search for the answers you need. Why not harness that technique for your community? Publish your question in your blog and have it posted automatically onto Twitter. People who know will be only too happy to help out, come back to your website and provide some answers. While they’re with you, they’ll hang around and see what you’re about, and maybe, now they’ve found you, join in again.
Encouraging conversations
Websites that offer discussion forums. Weblogs that have facilities for visitors to make comments on your content. Websites that enable your wider community to share their experiences in words and pictures. Websites that tell your story and invite (provoke?) feedback and discussion. Websites that enable your communities to contribute and grow in confidence knowing their messages are being taken seriously.
Nick Prior Designs can help you with this and more. By plugging together standard parts of the internet and software jigsaw, we can help you bring your community together and grow into something much more interesting.
What do these websites contain?
We’ve been building sites out of different parts of the internet jigsaw for some years now. So we can be pretty sure we can put together a site that can support, engage and grow your community of users. Our sites typically present a combination of pre-built modules and some smaller elements of bespoke work to join them together. The modules usually consist of some of the following:
- A content management system (CMS) which enables your team to build the contents of a website themselves
- The CMS also provides for different roles so the website doesn’t become a free for all – editors edit, contributors contribute, stories get told properly.
- User profiles can turn part of your site into a “people and skills” search tool
- You can provide all sorts of different ways to search the website – local Google search, tag clouds, category searches, and more
- Discussion forums with both public and private areas
- Blogs – each users can have their own, or you can have just the one. You can have too much of a good thing sometimes!
- Your users can upload their own pictures, and link to their own Youtube videos
- You can link your website to all sorts of social media – Facebook Like buttons are just the start. Publish your news automatically to Twitter when you create it. Connect with people and encourage them to interact – use tools they already know and bring them into the fold.
We want to come together!
We can write about all the things our websites can do for ever. However its much easier if we get you to tell us the sort of thing you want to be able to do – go wild! Think laterally, go blue sky! Then we can suggest how we might be able to make things work. If you want to explore how we can help your group, organisation, school or class work together using tools that most of them are already going to be familiar with, just get in touch. You’ll be pleasantly surprised how we can help you get organised!
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