RIP KnowHow NonProfit

The website KnowHow NonProfit which I helped to build, finally disappeared this week. It launched in 2008 and merged into NCVO in 2012. NCVO launched a new website this week, finally putting KnowHow to rest. A 14-year footprint is pretty good going for a website. It made me reflect on what it was like to build something new and how our knowledge sharing as a sector has changed over the years.

About KnowHow

KnowHow was an innovative project by Cass CCE (now Bayes Business School CCE), led by Professor Ian Bruce and funded by the Lottery for three years. It launched in 2008 at a time when digital was coming into its own. Across the sector there was lots of useful information online but it was hard to know where to start or what was up-to-date. There were lot of umbrella organisation writing about the same topics. It was quite overwhelming, especially as the sophistication of search engines and our own searching skills were still developing.

KnowHow aimed to bring it all together, not replicate it. It collated, signposted and filled the gaps so people running small charities could be confident they could find information to help them. A hub for the sector.

I was part of a team of four, working with the agency Text Matters to build and launch the site. Coming up with a taxonomy for the site to reflect the things charities did, was one of the most challenging tasks of my career. It took months. Nothing else existed which we could base this on. I had a huge spreadsheet and endless print-outs to manage the categories and spent hours tweaking the naming of sections so they were clear and descriptive.

I managed the content. We researched what was already out there and the gaps that needed filling. Experts from CCE and across the sector were commissioned to write new information and I edited it all together. It had a friendly and accessible tone of voice. We had a persona of a helpful, knowledgeable friend you could always turn to. We were writing for Joan in Preston, running a small organisation with no HR team or fundraising strategy.

We had four months to build a basic site and another four I think to get it all done. It was a stressful but exciting time and I learnt a lot about running a charity from CCE colleagues, especially governance and strategy which helped me a lot later as a consultant.

We also had a storytelling section to help illustrate common issues faced by small charities in a fun way. A working group of charity experts, led by Adah Kay imagined a small town, Millcaster, which had lots of charities based there. It was a soap opera, like The Archers but with charities rather than farming. A storytelling expert who wrote for The Bill also helped us build a system so we could remember who was married or related to who and where they all worked. A brilliant illustrator bought each episode to life with paper cut-outs she made and photographed, much like 1970s Paddington Bear. It was a lovely, creative thing to work on. Here’s an episode of Millcaster Tales I wrote about Mark, returning to work after an accident.

Promotion and development

We toured the country on the charity conference circuit telling people about KnowHow. We mixed digital marketing (SEO, newsletters, very early days of Twitter) with in-person promotion to help people find KnowHow. We had merch including tote bags (think we were really early to do these too) and USB sticks. I still have some somewhere.

It was an exciting time to be working in digital as new ways of information sharing were growing. As the team grew, we added a forum, wiki how-to platform and later a portfolio of online courses as a StudyZone. All really innovative at the time. All needed lots of effort to encourage people to use them, the team worked very hard to make them work. I think I had three or four log-ins at one point to try and get discussions going!

Every time we saw the traffic growing, we celebrated. It’s a very different experience to build and launch something new. The websites I had worked on before were only 10 years old themselves but a new channel for established organisations with communities around them. KnowHow was totally new. Building traffic and waiting for the search engines to rate KnowHow was a long game.

KnowHow 2.0

In 2012, the site merged into NCVO and became its information site. Over 10 years, the site evolved but was still called KnowHow and with a knowhow URL.

It takes so much work to maintain a substantial information site like this. Keeping up with legislation, sector trends and best practice is time consuming. It’s costly and it is hard to make an income from it. Other sites which launched around the same time as KnowHow, folded once their funding ran out. We were really lucky to move into NCVO where there was a plan to keep it fresh.

When I left in 2012, traffic was growing fast and we had lots of positive feedback about how it helped people run their organisations. Since I wrote about its demise on LinkedIn this week, I’ve had lots of people contact me to say how useful KnowHow had been to them. As a web content manager, it is like gold to get actual feedback from people, especially so long after working on the project, so this was wonderful!

KnowHow was my first baby before I had real ones. I was very proud of what we all did to build it and how it grew over the years. So many brilliant people worked on it. In 2008 we would never have thought it would last for 14 years.

Knowledge sharing in the sector

The new NCVO website has a help and guidance section which still has echoes of KnowHow in it. But uses headings reflecting what charities need to know now. We didn’t talk about impact or digital so prominently in 2008.

Online courses are now a pretty standard way of learning, thanks to Zoom and the pandemic. Many sector sites share templates, checklists, codes of best practice, self-assessment toolkits and draft policies and job descriptions. There are countless blogs from people sharing what they have learnt, to help others.

As a sector we have always been generous with our learning to help others, like our fictional Joan, do the best they can for their cause.

What I do now

Since I left KnowHow, I have become a consultant. I use my knowledge of information sharing, digital content and how charities work to help organisations with different projects – from comms strategies to recruitment and digital reviews.

I also started Radio Lento from scratch with my partner, reliving the experience of building an audience from nothing. Last month we reached 200,000 downloads. A big celebration milestone.

Do get in touch if I can help your organisation. I have space for new projects from September onwards.

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I was able to illustrate this post with screenshots from the site thanks to the amazing Wayback Machine.

Getting started with social media

This week I have been mostly preparing for my Google+ webinar ‘Why Use Social Media’ (watch it on YouTube) which is part of the Grow Your Charity Online programme. It is aimed at small charities who are unsure whether social media is worth the time and effort or those who just don’t know where to start.

I have been particularly inspired by the four organisations who replied to my tweet sharing details of how social media has made a big difference to them. My huge thanks go to Make Lunch, Manchester Mind, Orphans in Need and Age UK Solihull.

There are so many resources and events out there to help charities get better at social media but not that many to help if you are just at the start of the journey. The how-to guides on KnowHow Nonprofit are excellent but the volume is quite daunting. To help, I made a new one which brings them all together: How to get started with social media.

The CharityComms guide to social media for charities is a slideshare presentation by Matt Collins and Vicky Browning. It is packed with useful advice to help you decide which channels (if any) are right for you.

Sometimes reading guides isn’t enough. It is useful to talk to someone who can help analyse which channels are right for you, help you think about how to use them and get you started. Please get in touch if you’d like me to help you.

The social media divide

This week it’s all about social media. It’s social media week – wickid! There are lots of events and hashtags to learn from. I’ve been reading Visceral Business’ Social Charity Index of the top 100 social charities where they ask whether we have reached a tipping point where social is the new normal. And today, Zoe Amar launched her top charity social CEOs competition citing research which said that “eight out of 10 people are more likely to trust and buy from an organisation whose CEO and leadership team use social media.”

But there are still many organisations who are very far behind. The digital divide is wide. Many are not on Twitter / Facebook / YouTube etc let alone Vine, Storify or Pinterest. Some struggle to have an online presence. Some don’t even have email (one example I heard recently was of an organisation run by women who had to ask supporters to email their husbands’ work accounts).  So the barriers of kit, skills, confidence, time are still very real.

Yet the benefits are big. We all know that the opportunities for sharing what we do, connecting with others and learning through social media are great. Visceral Business’ Anne McCrossan wrote very clearly about the benefits for small charities.

So, what can we do? As digital natives we can share what we have learnt to help others join the party. Can you add anything to KnowHow’s social media how-to guides? They are wiki’s so we should all keep them up-to-date and start guides on new topics. Do you support organisations new to social media with a welcome or #ff / #ct? Could you mentor someone via CharityComms who is just getting started?

Next week I am running a FREE google+ hangout via Media Trust’s Grow Your Charity Online site. The webinar session is called Why Use Social Media. Please join me or help spread the word using the #gyco hashtag.

Let’s share the love.

Other reading

• Small Charities Coalition CEO Alex Swallow has shared 5 tips to help small charities get big benefits from social media.
• Grow Your Charity Online including videos of previous webinars on YouTube

Charging for content?

I recently did a proposal for a charity (here after known as MyCharity) who amongst other things were interested in exploring how they could generate funds from their content. Is it possible? Let’s look at the challenge…

Costly information sites

Charity websites generally have one big section which contains lots of useful information about their cause (such as information about living with XX condition / legal rights about XX / how to look after donkeys etc). They work hard to make the information clear, up-to-date and easy to find. It is worth doing this because they want the information to help people. Also they want to be high up in the search results to raise profile and to build relationships with new supporters.

However, it takes a lot of time and money to maintain so much information. When I was at KnowHow NonProfit we had lots of discussions about how to reduce the cost of maintaining information which lead us to experiment with wiki-fying sections of content. Hooray – the sector would maintain it’s own information! Not so fast…. It worked to some extent but took just as much time to nurture relationships with potential wiki editors.

A wiki is just not going to work for authoritative medical, legal or care-based information. So are there ways charities could generate funds from content to cover costs?

How to make content pay

1) Ask for donations

MyCharity was interested in how they could monetise their information guides as these were read by thousands of people each month (on and offline). There are lots of examples of information leaflets with a donation ask at the end such as this one from Epilepsy Society.

Online it is a different story. Lots of sites have a donate button at the top of the page but don’t specifically ask for a donation related to the transaction which has just taken place (ie the user reading, downloading or sharing the content).

This example from Blue Cross is the only one I found of a charity clearly and calmly asking for a donation at the end of an information page. The button at the end of the content says ‘How much was this information worth? Click here to donate’. They don’t give a suggested donation and the link goes to the general donation page.

I imagine that someone reading this would be inspired only to give a small amount. Many online donation forms have a minimum amount, usually £5. So what happens if someone feel inspired to give a donation of £1 or £3? If this type of ask is only likely to generate small donation, an SMS donation option (eg JustTEXTgiving) may be more appropriate. Doing it this way is quicker, has fewer stages and doesn’t obviously lead to the donor being added to a database and sent further requests for money (often off-putting for small amount donors). Of course it means that the charity gets this type of donation without the personal details but that’s the trade off.

A suggested figure may also help here (as with online donation forms – see previous blog post). For example, a sentence in the style of a church sign ‘it costs £X to heat this church everyday, please consider making a donation’ or a museum ‘thanks for visiting today, please consider making a donation of £X’. This is stronger, more persuasive and gives the user a clearer idea of what is appropriate.

2) Ask for contact details

It may be more valuable to capture data than small donations. MyCharity was keen understand and communicate with their readership as well as ask them for money. With thousands accessing their content guides each month, they felt like they were missing an opportunity to connect with these people more deeply. So it may have been appropriate for them to ask people to register for more detailed content to start that process.

There are lots of non-charity examples of this such as this report download from nfpSynergy ‘to download this report for free add your name and email address’.

And organisations giving premium content to members (whether membership is free or not) such as this exclusive fundraising video from KnowHow NonProfit.

Charities often have additional, special content produced for members, such as a magazine which can be accessed online.

I haven’t managed to find any examples of charities asking people to register for premium content or information guides. Would this work?

3) Asking for payment

Are there any examples of non-profits asking for payment before access is given aka The Times paywall?

Conclusions

Generating funds to pay for expensive and complicated websites is a big issue for charities. However, it doesn’t feel like many are testing out ideas or that anyone has cracked this yet. Publishing detailed information guides online is the standard and we all want people to read them. But many may fear that applying the three methods above could mean a loss in traffic or trust. But in these tough times, can we really continue putting so many resources into something which people use for free?

If you have examples or experience to share, please do add a comment we can all learn from.