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Avoid the lure of blogs and forums when redesigning your website 1

IT | Ingrid Marson | 8 Nov 2010

Charity PR specialist Ingrid Marson recommends you think hard about the implications before jumping into the social media beehive.

I was chatting to the manager of a small charity the other day, who is looking to redesign the charity's website. After chatting for a few minutes, he dropped in the words I'd been dreading: "We're thinking we need to make it interactive - perhaps have a forum and a blog."

I often hear this from charities. Whenever a website redesign is being planned, people often start thinking about incorporating interactive technologies, such as blogs, forums or member areas.

It's true that the internet is no longer purely about passively viewing content and that people want to interact with each other and generate their own content. However - for small charities at least - trying to incorporate Web 2.0 technologies into their website is likely to be a mistake, unless staff have plenty of time available to regularly write content and to put in the hard work of creating a community from scratch.

I remember from when I worked as a journalist at an online technology news site how hard it was to get people to comment on the stories we posted - despite posting dozens of stories daily, the majority never attracted comments, and those that did, got comments from the same limited set of readers. Shortly after I left the company, they hired a community manager whose full-time role was to focus on encouraging user-interaction.

Rather than creating your own forum and spending the time getting people to take part, why not set up a Facebook page? Many of your supporters, service users and volunteers will already spend large amounts of time on Facebook, so it will be less effort for them to sign up to and interact with your page. However, if you do create a Facebook page, make sure you promote it to your supporters (via your website, newsletter, email signature etc.) and regularly update it with new content.

Blogs are another thing that charities often think they should add to their website. Before adding a blog...

Think about the following things:

1.  Do you have enough time to regularly update your blog, and will you continue to have time for the next few years? Blogs require a long-term time commitment as they must be regularly updated and it can take years to attract a loyal readership.
2. Do you have a unique perspective that you can bring to a particular issue? Read blogs that are already writing about the issue you care about. Do you have something new to say?
3. Are you willing to be controversial? A blog that expresses strong viewpoints will attract more readers, but this may put off supporters who disagree with you.

Rather than going down the blog route, why not try out Twitter? As posts are limited to 140 characters, it's less time consuming. You can use Twitter to post information about what you're working on a particular day, snippets of news about your charity, or links to interesting articles or websites you've found.

For more information about making the most out of Web 2.0 technologies, check out Acorn PR's Web 2.0 tutorial.

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Who's Who: Ingrid Marson