Think Pieces News
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...
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,...
How important is the voluntary sector in public service delivery?
As we approach the chancellor’s autumn statement and a likely general election in Spring 2010 the debate over public spending levels is in full swing. What’s more, the language of cuts is now official government terminology: it’s no longer if, it’s now when, and how much. Everything is under review, which organisations in the voluntary sector – who are both delivering services to users and fighting for their rights – both fear and welcome. The mood is one of both trepidation and...
The future is not what is used to be
This Autumn the latest in NCVO’s Third Sector Foresight pocket guides series, Future Focus 7, will study the future of campaigning. Here Nick Wilson, new Third Sector Foresight Officer and winner of a Sheila McKechnie Foundation Award for campaigning, looks at what the recent Camp for Climate Action tells us about that future.
Over the Bank Holiday weekend Climate Camp staged six days of protest in Blackheath, London, under the banner “The future is not what it used to be”. This was just the ...
Free: what membership organisations can learn from newspapers
Simon Jenkins wrote persuasively in yesterday’s Guardian about the future of the paper and of the newspaper model in general. I read it online, for free, here. It’s also in print, but that would have cost me 90p [the fact that I had to look this up exposes the last time I felt the need to buy a daily paper] and it’s this problem – "Why would you pay when you can get the same thing somewhere else for free?" – that he’s addressing.
And the answer he provides is simple – “ensure that "the...
Is this the new direction of [party] membership?
GP Sarah Wollaston was yesterday elected as the Conservative candidate for the Totnes seat currently held by Anthony Steen.
But it was not so much her election as the manner in which it took place that is interesting: Wollaston was elected through a postal ballot open to everyone on the electoral register for the constituency.
A back of the envelope (groan) calculation suggests that around 16,500 people voted, in other words just under a quarter of those eligible to do so. Whilst therefore...
