A lot of the organizations we work with and others we see in the policy-issue, advocacy, "intellectual-commerce" realm, are interested in their work being more influential. (Don't we all !)

Here are some thoughts on how to use the web to go beyond just providing information, to being more influential. These are drawn from some work we did in an evaluation (see the report) of the ReliefWeb web site of the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.








We've long believed that being able to exert influence comes down to becoming a trusted voice, to building strong relationships, and - having done those - to shaping how people view an issue and the possible solutions.

These are all things that can be done amazingly well online, and at a scale that cannot easily be replicated offline. The challenge is that many organizations hesitate - they are not sure if they want to be "out there" with their own opinionated views of what should be done, or they do not want to go through the leg-work of becoming a trusted source, building relationships, and then being able to shape the issue and the response.

One way to look at the stages of increasing value to web site users is shown in the chart above. The top row shows how a web site can be used to aggregate information - which is a valuable service for users, and which requires the web site host to collect/screen information, a fairly "mechanical" work process.

While aggregated information can help build trusted customers, it does not move the host organization to becoming influential.

To be influential a web site should frame an issue - tell people what is important about it and how they should look at at, and also analyze the issue and the possible responses. These get to the "highlighting" and "analyzing" approaches in the second and third rows of the chart.

We outlined this paradigm of influence in the evaluation of ReliefWeb, because it was grappling with whether and how to take a more direct approach to exerting influence in the humanitarian relief sector. ReliefWeb has been and is still primarily an aggregator of information for the humanitarian relief community - compiling every day 100-200 new pieces of content from many dozens of relief organizations. In our evaluation we concluded that for ReliefWeb to have more of an influence on how the humanitarian relief sector works, e.g. to make the various players more effective in responding to disasters, that ReliefWeb should go beyond just aggregating information. We recommended that ReliefWeb seek to provide greated value to its users online by increasingly framing key issues - providing expert context, and also analysis - commenting and recommending on how organizations should view and address key challenges.

Interested in any feedback!