Think Pieces News
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...
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...
Is climate change a gendered problem?
Gender and the Climate Change Agenda
The Women’s Environmental Network certainly argue that it is. In their recently launched report ‘Gender and the Climate Change Agenda’ (PDF), WEN state that
because of prescribed gender roles, and the fact that, the world over, women are more likely to live in poverty than men, women are disproportionately affected by climate change
WEN argue that set gender roles, including responsibility for food production and preparation, water collection and health...
Political legitimacy and membership
There's a good suggestion made on the Power 2010 campaign. It argues that:
No political Party should be registered with the Electoral Commission unless it has a democratic constitution which can be changed by a majority of its members on the basis of one member one vote.
This suggests an interesting idea - that part of the blame for the undemocratic nature of parliament and people's feelings of a lack of accountability stems from the fact that the membership of these parties themselves is...
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...
I am what I read?
For a while, my news mainly came from the RSS feeds I chose to come into my netvibes account. This was a form of personalising the news I received grouped into things more likely to interest me (so tabs for politics, culture, the third sector, technology etc) – still in the main from news providers and journals, but divided up by topic not source. Then I started to use my network on delicious to find my way to articles that friends and colleagues had bookmarked as being of interest. ...
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...
