I ran across a great case study of a research institution adopting a progressive online distribution strategy within its publishing department on Lessig.com:

Eve Gray, of Eve Gray & Associates. Gray was asked to study the publishing strategy of the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) in South Africa. This research institution had a traditional strategy of publishing lots of research books, and selling them. Gray convinced them to change their strategy -- to give away all their research books for free online, and offer a high quality print-on-demand service for anyone who wants the paper version. The result: "the sales turnover of the publishing department has risen by 300%." As she concluded her presentation, "giving away books and lead to an increase in our book sales."

Read the full case study, an analysis of HSRC's decision making process for adopting this forward thinking approach.

It's a great story. A traditional research institution facing the same challenges we see again and again, opts for a progressive integrated online distribution strategy, and gets real results.

Here's some exerpts...

The challenges (these should sound familiar):

• Publications are seen as the necessary outcome of the research process; a visible manifestation of the project concerned.
  
  
• No coherent approach to funding publications from research grants; rather, the production of a report or book seemed to be ‘tacked on’ at the end of a project, with some confusion over funding mechanisms and cost recovery.
  
  
• Motivations from HSRC staff for publishing particular reports and books were often phrased less in marketing terms than in terms of the internal staff evaluation needs of the HSRC and the ambitions of individual researchers.
  
  
• There was a pervasive sense that publishing was a numbers game – researchers and units were judged by and promoted according to the number of publications that they produced and there was considerable store placed on the size of the print run for books published (even though most of the books appreared to land up in lcoked storerooms). This was coupled with an explicit or implicit assumption, which seemed deeply entrenched,
  that publishing projects should recover their costs from sales.
  

Reasons to aggressively utlitize online distribution as core to publishing strategy:

• The research and policy market is wired – even in Africa;
  
• Lower production costs;
  
• Greater flexibility – colour, multimedia;
  
• Appropriate for highly specialized, low volume products;
  
• Content can be updated;
  
• Links to abstract services and research indexes;
  
• Strong control over branding.
  

Last Friday Forum One formally released ProjectSpaces 3.0 - our online collaboration suite that...

helps working groups collaborate across organizations, space, and time by providing document sharing, email management, announcement, discussion, calendar and scheduling tools in a secure, private work space.

That's a mouthful. It's press release for "an easy way for groups to work together online". What groups? Committees, research teams, departments, program staff, task forces, field offices, any group that needs a simple way to stay on the same page.

We've worked hard to get the interface right and to keep the price points low. You can be up and running in an afternoon, with no user limits for 200 bucks a month. There's alot more information on our website, where you can see a live demo, and sign up for a free trial.

Here's a screen shot of a sample ProjectSpace:



Please, let us know what you think!

technorati tags: nptech

Beth Kanter commented on my last post, asking:

Have you written anything specifically about the practice(doing it and doing it well) of discoverablility in a nonprofit setting? Not the technical stuff, but the art of bloggish conversation and participating in the network effect.

Despite my 10 years of experience consulting to nonprofits on the use internet technologies, I'm actually pretty new to blogging. So nope, I don't have any previous writing to refer to. But I think the two points you make on your post are good ones (that context matters, and dont be afraid). And I'll add this...

Blogs are great for starting and facilitating conversations. But, talk is cheap, as they say, and conversations don't solve problems. So, for nonprofits, you must be blogging not to blog, but to insert your message into the world's ongoing conversations. How?

6 Guidelines to Behaving Bloggishly (or How to be Discoverable)

1. Speak in a human voice.
   
2. Place your message in context to others by directly linking to an existing article, post, story, web site, resource, or whatever.
   
3. Make your mission clear. If you dont have a position to be advancing, you're just noise.
   
4. Find like minds, and comment directly on their sites.
   
5. Find dissenting minds, and comment directly on their sites.
   
6. Ping the powers that be. Everytime you post, make sure to ping blog aggregrater services (I know we were trying to avoid tech tips, but needed to get that one in there)
   

As a practical examples of those who are embracing these guidelines, I can think of two.

From a grassroots/advocacy perspective, I would point to what Jason Lefkowitz is doing over at Oceana. By having Oceana staffers speak directly to the public, they are heightening awareness and extending their message in a way that no direct mail campaign ever could (or would, I should say).

From a policy standpoint, The Center for Global Development, is following these approaches with 2 weblogs: The Millennium Challenge Monitor Weblog and the The Vaccine Development Weblog. (full disclosure, CGD is a Forum One customer).

What we need now is some solid evidence that behaving bloggishly has had a positive impact on these NGO's missions. I'll ask around for some evidence, and see if that can be a subject for a future post.

Ed Batista had a great post the other day, stating that Blogs are Obsolete. His basic point is that a blog is just a web site that has certain qualities, so do we have to keep saying Blog? It's a great post, and I completely agree - you don't need a "blog" to make your web site "bloggish". Here's what he said:

Can we all agree that the term "blog" is now meaningless and should be retired? We have a perfectly good word we can use in its place: website. Just what does "blog" signify anymore that's different from most well-managed websites? Frequently updated content? Nope. An easy-to-use content management system that allows non-techies to publish online? Nope. An authentic, individual voice? Perhaps--but that's changing too.

However, when defining the qualities of what makes a blog a blog (or a website a 'bloggish' website), I think Ed misses a very important one, or perhaps just doesn't state it strongly enough.

Namely, to be bloggish, your site must connect to the network of conversations and people that are also being bloggish in a formally recognized way. Technically it should happen via RSS, trackback, and blogrolling - but it's not the technology that is important. What's important is that there is an unwritten, but agreed upon, standard for discoverability.

To illustrate the importance of this bloggish quality think about a moderated listserve with a web archive. Authentic voices? Check. Fresh content? Check. Permantently available archives? Yep. But there is no "listserve-o-sphere". Why? Because your listserve conversation is taking place without any context to make it discoverable by all of the other exciting conversations taking place in other similar listserves. Its the network effect of Blogs, I believe, that has really made them take off.

The informal standards of interlinking and syndication have essentially guarenteed that Blogs reach a tipping point because playing by the blogger rules, by definition, creates an infectious viral network that quite simply works.

I have lots of conversations with our nonprofit clients about "stories". They want to know how to get some impact from the program stories that originate in their field work. They have good reason to ask. When you hear a good story about a cause, an event, or a position - you get engaged. And engaging key audiences is a main goal of most issue-focused organizations. And what's more, most organizations have lots of good stories to tell.

In the past, the approaches to leveraging these stories online have not been very exciting. You might even have a "success stories” or "stories from the field" section on your web site today. How much impact are those areas of your site making? How much energy are they creating around your mission? Probably not a whole lot.

Today, we are starting to learn (yes, you would have thought we'd learned it by now), that a big part of what brings energy to things on the Web is their authenticity, their transparency. Users can tell the difference between a "story from the field" that has been run through the communication and legal department, and one that belongs to real a person.

So here's the takeaway: People don't want to hear stories from your organization, they want to hear the stories from your organizations' people. Or even better, from people just like them.

Does this mean you should stop issuing press releases? Of course not. Does it mean you should be less afraid of un-moderated storytelling? Absolutely.

Building from those principles, last week we helped the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation (VVAF) launch www.VietnamViews.org. It's what we're calling a collaborative journal (coJo, to coin a phrase)- an online space that captures the stories of people that shared a common experience. The idea is to create a dynamic online history for soldiers, families, friends, or anyone who has been impacted by the war to share their stories. We're hoping the result will prevent the significance of these events in world history from fading away without deliberate retrospection.

We think its a refreshing and compelling way to use stories to advance your mission. What do you think?