Facilitation – what is it?
- Facilitator’s engage and connect community members by encouraging participation, facilitating and seeding discussions, and by keeping events and community activities engaging and vibrant.
- Guiding a group to use its knowledge, skills and potential to achieve its goals.
- Helping by making the processes easier. It’s about guiding rather than directing.
- Looking at the process rather than context – how you do something rather than what you do.
- Making it easier for the group to get to their agreed destination.
- Striking a balance between ‘the group’ and ‘the task’.
Factors influencing success:
- Forums, blogs, events, library. Wiki less so.
- Good quality, active facilitation: making it useful; concise, informed, informative; and giving community members ‘room to breathe.’
- Day to day content; monthly update summarising key content + alerts; one-offs (e.g. on-line conferences)
- Size – critical mass. Confidence that someone will respond.
- Face to face element
- Honesty and trust (who else is listening in?)
- Keep on topic (urgent, immediate, wide interest, range)
- Openness, honesty, trust (who else is listening in)
- Technology – ease of use, facilities, integrated elements (e.g. wiki draws on discussions)
- An art. Non-linear: results don’t automatically match your efforts. A few small things can make a big difference.
- Presentation at regional and local events
- Promotion through other online channels (website pages and bulletins)
- Links with social media channels, e.g. having a Twitter account
- Organised regular ‘Hot’ and Warmseat’ events to stimulate interest
- Use of regular polls to assess member opinions
Lesson Learnt:
- You need trained and dedicated community facilitation
- On-line events take at least as much organisational resource as traditional – but save time, money and the planet!
- Need to constantly engage members with interesting and new content
- Membership rises whenever we promote events – it keeps their interest fresh
- Use social media channels for promotion for the new on-line generation
- Lots of work needed to engage older, traditional generation.
- We are social beings who thrive from human interaction; technology is just an enabler.
- Don’t be over-prescriptive; give the community a range of collaborative tools and let them decide which ones they want to use and how to use them.
- Don’t assume everyone understands how to use social media tools.
- Identify and look after your (power) contributors.
- Identify and look after your facilitators – they are quite often the difference between successful and unsuccessful communities.
- Condition your managers for failure – not every CoP is going to be successful.
- Most senior managers still don’t get it!
- Command and control will hamper the development of a community.
Be First to Comment