Strategy News
Will to change?
We have just completed an in-depth collaborative project with Disability Lib to find out more about what the future could hold for disabled people’s organisations. We'll be posting the drivers that Disability Lib came up with during our work with them into our drivers bank very soon – so keep an eye on the site or sign up to our bulletin if you want to make sure you catch them as they go up.
In the meantime, take a look at these great graphic summaries of what participants in a recent...
Implications of the budget
First, apologies for the dry title: it feels like the puns have been taken a little too far, for example in the constant references to ‘axes’ across the front pages of all the major newspapers today.
These give a pretty clear sense of the overall tone of the budget. But how does that affect voluntary and community organisations, and more important, how can we anticipate and plan for the changes that may come as a result in the way we work, who we help, and who funds us?
Some major...
Reflections on yesterday's seminar
We had a great session yesterday afternoon at Third Sector Foresight’s latest Leading Lights seminar. If you weren’t able to make the session, I hope this will give you a taste of what you missed. If you were one of those taking part in a bursting-at-the-seams room, I’d welcome your comments on what most struck you about the speakers and the discussions. And if you’re interested in reading more, the links below will take you to drivers on key areas on our site.
Tessy Britton, our...
Lessons from Labour
Some time back, I wrote about the lessons from the fall-out from One Alfred Place’s change of strategy, which was seen by some members as a voiding of the terms under which they joined the Club. We may now be seeing similar patterns at play in political party membership.
Maybe it’s something about the British loving an underdog, but Labour Party membership dramatically increased – with daily recruitment levels up 1000% (though from what must have been very low numbers based on a back of the...
Private actions, public consequences
What One Alfred Place can teach us about how to treat your membership in the age of social media.
The private members club One Alfred Place is a very nice institution. I’ve had delicious lunches, relaxed teas and friendly drinks there, and admired the congenial, professional atmosphere and the people I’ve met.
But there’s trouble in paradise: the new Chief Executive, Sharon Brittan, has been forced to publicly apologise after emailing members to tell them their memberships have not been...
What do we value?
On the day we have officially come out of recession, and new research on our social attitudes has been published, I would recommend taking a look at the McKinsey interview with the extremely lucid Jim Wallis (you can watch, listen to or read it here on the McKinsey Quarterly website, though you will have to create a free account to do so). In the light of the current discussions taking place at Davos, he suggests that the question we should be asking about the economic crisis is not ‘when...
On trying to map membership
We had a great dinner for CEOs of the organisations involved in the Future of Membership project last night, which followed a productive – if exhausting – day of scenario planning for the full project think tank last week.
Over supper, we got into a long discussion as to why we have membership. It’s a question that’s come up again and again throughout the project – what do we mean by membership? Often, it really it depends on what each organisation says it is.
We’ve tried throughout the...
Walled gardens and climbing over fences
Last week I spoke at the NCVO Membership schemes conference on what the future of membership might look like. I raised one of the key things that has struck me in our research to date: the difference between recruitment and retention for membership organisations. As Colin Rochester puts it in his Making Sense of Volunteering,
“the cocktail of motives that lead people to engage [in the first place] may be very different from the factors that maintain their involvement”
In general – and I’d...
More on whether we get what we pay for
A while ago, I wrote a piece on the ‘freemium’ model that seems to be growing in relevance as people’s patterns of consumption of information and products, and their willingness to pay for them.
If you are interested in this topic and have a spare few minutes over the weekend, you might like to take a look at this slideshow (warning - there are 263 slides). Since we're all time poor, I thought I'd highlight that of particular interest to membership organisations are slides 200, 216 and 217...
Social media and membership organisations
The apparent threat (or opportunity) that social technology presents to membership organisations is summed up in the subtitle to Clay Shirky’s zeitgeisty book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of organizing without organizations. If ‘everybody’ can organise action by themselves (or rather, together), what possible reason is there for organisations to exist?
The first answer is, of course, that ‘everybody’ is not coming quite yet. Older people in particular – precisely those who,...
