Carii: The Next Generation of Community Networking

Transcription

1 White Paper Carii: The Next Generation of Community Networking "Supporting the social way in which communities interact" By J. Gerry Purdy, Ph.D. Principal Analyst Mobilocity LLC (404) For Denise Hayman-Loa CEO, Carii, Inc June 11,

2 Communities and Digital Interaction Most of us, at one time or another have been a member of a group or participated in a group activity. Perhaps it was a church group, a club or a non-profit organization like the Red Cross or Komen for the Cure. One thing becomes apparent very quickly: these groups and organizations have a big unmet need to provide specific community-based (mostly private) digital interaction to easily support interaction among its members. Here are a few examples: An organization like the Red Cross has chapters throughout the world. And, each chapter has a staff as well as volunteers and donors. The Red Cross wants to enable private community interaction with their chapters and each chapter wants to enable private community interaction with their volunteers and donors. A software company may have a number of user groups and desires for the members of the user groups to interact. They don t want such interaction shared on Facebook. However, in some cases the software company might want to send messages across all user groups and enable dialog about that one broad topic, e.g. Should we increase member dues in order to provide better tech support? Or, consider a pharmaceutical company that has medical practices as customers with many staff members including physicians, nurses and administrative personnel. The pharmaceutical company might want to have a way to set up a private community network for each healthcare institution. Finally, take a sports franchise like the running. There are running clubs all over the country as well as race organizations and equipment providers that all may want to enable private community interaction within their clubs or races. Groups and communities need to send information to the group members which is easy to do via or, if the need is more of an alert, via text messaging. But, they also need to facilitate group interaction, enabling the group to share among members. This is much more difficult to do because current information systems do not support the requirements of community interaction. Until recently, this was a big unmet need in digital technology. , collaboration and social networking systems do not effectively support communication within a community of people who share a mutual interest. It gets even more difficult when there are sub-groups or chapters and even more difficult to enable sharing among affiliated organizations that require cross-community collaboration. In a nutshell, how do you manage effective communications among members of a community? Or, how do you manage chapters within a national organization or between affiliated communities? Existing information systems such as social networking, collaboration 2

3 and messaging simply are not designed to support interaction by and between complex communities. To appropriately support community interaction, you need a fundamentally different information system architecture made up of a different data structure and community-specific applications and services that utilize the community-specific data structure. Let me give you a personal example. I was working with a health and fitness organization with more than 50,000 members that was trying to manage communications on a number of levels. They wanted to send messages from headquarters to all of their members. That was done easily via blasts using a newsletter management system such as icontact or Constant Contact. However, they also wanted to enable all of the members to communicate with each other both at the organization level and at the sub-group level. The organization was trying to manage the different activities using . It was challenging to say the least. Sure, they were able to send out blasts to the members. However, they could not find a way to enable private communication between members of the different interest groups and sub-groups. How were these people going to communicate with each other? Certainly the members could not use to blast messages to all the other members. Think how unmanageable it would be for a member to hit Reply All and the reply go out to all 50,000 members, especially when the communications were only meant for a portion of the community. Certainly, the group s members could not use a public social networking service such as Facebook. On top of all this, the fitness organization wanted to interact with a number of affiliated organizations. They still have not found an effective solution. Let s quickly identify the different structures of communities. The first community is a simple one-level structure with the community organization (such as a club) at the top and its members as shown in Figure 1. Community Members Figure 1. Simple, One Level Structure Next, we have a two-level community structure that is typical of an organization that has chapters or groups as shown in Figure 2. An example would be a fraternity that has the national organization and then individual chapters which are made up of the individual members. 3

4 Community Chapters Chapters Members Figure 2. Two Level Structure The third structure gets more complex as shown in Figure 3. Here, we have a multi-level organization that is typical of large national organizations that have regions which, in turn, have chapters made of individual members. National Organization Regions Regions Chapters Chapters Examples: Churches Fraternities Sororities Charities/Non-Profits Standards Groups Members Figure 3. Complex, Multi-Level Level Structure The fourth structure shows how affiliate communities are structured. See Figure 4. You can see that one community can have one or more affiliate communities where each one could be a simple community or multi-level. In the end, you have a network of communities that can have links that enable a number of different kinds of interaction. An example of this structure is the Red Cross with affiliates all around the world. 4

5 Network of Communities Community 1 Community 2 Members Members Figure 4. Affiliate Communities Community Support Requirements There are hundreds of thousands of organizations that have this very same problem. And, up until recently, there really was not any effective means by which interaction and sharing within communities, sub-communities and affiliate communities could be managed by digital technology. Most of these organizations are using other systems not designed to solve the community interaction problem and, as a result, the support for such interaction is limited at best. Let s take a look at the different information systems that are used to try to solve the community interaction problem. You can see these in Table 1. Table 1. Most Common Enterprise Communication Software Area Social Networking Collaboration Examples LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Socialcast Lotus Notes, Huddle, Intellum, Asana, Grove Site, Unify, Moon Messaging ( , Text, IM) Instant Messaging Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Enterprise Social Networking Community Sharing Outlook, BlackBerry, Good, Lotus Notes, Novell Groupwise Skype, Yahoo Messenger, Slack, Hipchat, AOL Messenger, OpenMarket Salesforce, Zendesk, Netsuite, Nimble, Goldmine, Bitrix Jive, Lithium, Get Satisfaction, Yammer, IBM Connections, exo, Carii 5

6 Current messaging, social networking and collaboration systems simply are not designed to support communities and sub-group communications. What happens when you try to use these systems, they will typically support one function of community interaction (e.g. blast an to the members of the community ) but will then fail miserably at trying to do another function (e.g. Enable private sharing between affiliated organizations ). Now, take a look at Figure 2. It shows a summary of the basic requirements of communities and the interaction between the members. Table 2. Characteristics of Community Networking Systems Area Community Organization Security Conversations Business models supported Messaging management Explanation Sub-groups (multi-level), affiliates Private, public Stream, news, events, photos, dialog between members & groups Community fund raising, shared advertising Distribution (mulit-levels), limit vertically, horiziontal (affiliates) You can quickly see that the characteristics of community networking are different when taken together than any other existing class of information system. Communities have the following three main requirements to serve their members: A Trusted Environment this means that the members of a community can trust the information systems to provide security and privacy for their interaction. Most of the time, you don t want to have community interaction open to the public. The communications may be set up to be open to search within the community (e.g. Find everyone who s working on the blood bank committees ). But, the important quality of a trusted environment separates community management systems from social networking. Member Communication provide members with the ability to communicate either one-on-one or within groups. The Administrator for the group determines the span of the communication, and there can be different group sessions. Some can be quite narrow (e.g. personal one-on-one instant messaging) while others are much broader (e.g. sharing across a defined group within a community). Administrative Control provide the community with oversight and management of the communication process: the administrator can determine the level of privacy vs. how open the communications can be as well as the span of communication across the community and its affiliates. The Administrative Console defines allowable 6

7 member processing so that the organization s management retains control over its community. With these three main requirements, community-based information systems have to provide the following support activities: Create and link between multiple public and private communities. o While the community may be public such as the Red Cross, the links have to also reach private communities such as the community s law firm. Engage members in a trusted, dedicated and managed environment. o It is critically important that members can engage in a trusted, secure environment in order to maintain community integrity and ensure that the community interaction stays within the community. Create partnering opportunities for businesses & non-profits. o This includes fund raising for non-profit organizations and business alliances between communities. Support management efficiently with consolidated tools. o The Administrative Console enables communities to maintain control over their community: who can use the information tools and the settings for each member s privileges. Target advertising to a pre-qualified audience with shared revenue. o By nature, a community defines a pre-qualified audience and whether advertising sold will be shared only within that community or shared through affiliates. It is easy to see from this discussion that existing information systems such as messaging, social networking, collaboration and CRM do not have the correct underlying architecture to support communities, their members and their affiliates. There are a few times in information system technology that an entirely new paradigm is created. created a new paradigm in information processing to enable person-to-person messaging. Customer relationship management (CRM) enabled structure and support of information about a company s customers (including sales). And collaboration software enabled a ranges of services for people within a company to share documents and files. We see such a case here with the management of communities. Existing systems may, at best, handle a small portion of managing communities or, at worse, make a terrible mess that doesn t serve very well the requirements to support communities. 7

8 What s clearly needed is a new information architecture and applications that are designed from the ground up to support communities, their members and their affiliates. A new system called Carii ( Kerry ) has been created to support all the requirements of communities. Let s take a look at Carii and how it meets the needs of communities. Carii Meeting the Community Support Requirements Carii has been developed to serve the needs of communities. It supports simple, complex and affiliated organizations. It works in a trusted manner so only the information that the organization allows can be shared across sub-groups and affiliates. And, the user s information is maintained in a secure manner. Thus, Carii s customers can dynamically set up communities with any of the structures shown above from simple to complex to affiliates. Once set up, then Carii s platform allows members to use Carii Chat to conduct private conversations with other members in the community, to interact among its members and to post information across multiple sub-groups (if allowed by the Community Administrator). Carii uses a carousel system where any number of images, video, audio and other miscellaneous files can be embedded in a post. This means rich media can play a significant role in enhancing engagement and quality of the inter-member communication and fewer posts are required to get information out. Users can search through accessible posts and messages to find information about a topic of interest. This could, for example, find all the conversations and posts about a project underway in the community. Creating a New Community Carii has developed a number of services that enable users to have a lot of power when operating within a community and, where appropriate, through affiliate communities. Carii enables a simple process to create a new community. This is typically managed by the Community Administrator and a Co-Administrator can be assigned as well. However, in small communities, this could be managed by the user. Figure 5 shows the way in which a new community is created in Carii. 8

9 Name & web link for new community New community logo. Background information on new community. Community details. New community category and settings. Carii has a unique feature to support non-profits: managing donations. If the Community Administrator sets up a donate capability, then the members (and, where appropriate) the public can easily donate to the Community and pay for it by credit card. Payments for member dues and events are also included. Member Dashboard Figure 5. Add a new community. All of the user s community interaction is managed through the Member Dashboard (see Figure 6). It shows the information being posted by the user and others and consolidates the posts across all communities the member belongs to. The icons at the top indicate how to make a post to share or how to initiate a Carii Chat with another member or group of members. Gamification elements by user and by community have also been implemented to reward users for a long list of activities and to provide the Community Administrator with metrics for which members are the most active and which posts generate the most interest. 9

10 Member s communities Data entry elements in for types of posting Invite people to a community; create a new community Summary stream of most recent posts. Contents of member s recent posts Optional fundraising for non-profits Advertising. Figure 6. Member Dashboard: where interactions are created, shared and visualized from users & others. When you select one of the options to create a post, Figure 7 shows the screen shot of the post creation and entry option. 10

11 Figure 7. Add a new post can be news, personal sharing, events or photos. It s important to note that sharing in Carii is only allowed between community members and most typically is done privately which is the exact opposite of social networking sites in which sharing is most often public. The user can create a new community within their sphere of interaction while the Community Administrator defines the attributes of the user s community. A good example would be a non-profit in which the Community Administrator sets up the attributes and the member can then interact with other members of the non-profit as well as affiliates. The member can also create their own private community as well. A sample of the Community Administrator Console is shown in Figure 7. 11

12 Figure 8. Draft of the Carii Administrator Console: where member privileges and options are setup and managed. And, if the organization wants to conduct a fund raising, the administrator can easily set that up using the following screen shot shown in Figure 9. 12

13 Figure 9. Add a new fund raising campaign for non-profit organizations. Center of the Member s Day Once Carii is created for an organization, members will spend a good bit of time interacting with the Member Dashboard. Up until recently, was center of an employee s day. However, in today s paradigm, employees spend more time interacting with social media such as Facebook and Twitter. Before long, members of communities will spend a lot of time each day interacting with their Member Dashboard because it will provide the single point of communication for most of the work being done each day by the community member. To be sure, will still be used for communication with people outside the member s organization. Target Markets Carii has been initially designed to address the needs of a number of target markets, including: 13

14 Non-profits such as church organizations, foundations and cause-related communities. Small business owners who have a community to manage networking among their customers, partners, suppliers and employees. Larger organizations including businesses, sports clubs, user groups, radio stations using Carii to build a relationship with customers on a private, exclusive basis. Carii Business Models Carii is bringing the community management system to market and using three innovative business models: Basic, Non-Custom Use. This provides the existing base system using the Carii system as is with all the existing functionality and in the global environment. The customer gets the standard functionality and allows Carii to place advertising. If the community identifies the advertising they will share in the revenue. Pricing is per member with additional fees for premium modules such as the Administrator Console which consolidates all the organization s communities into one "dashboard" or collaboration tool. Pro/Private Label - Incorporating branding/logo, unique look for a particular group/business/non-profit. Unique URL and segregated data will create an environment just for the customer. This could have some degree of customization but no extra functionality. Pricing is per member plus hosting fee. Custom/Private Label - Custom development work "powered by Carii" but with a completely unique UI plus additional application functionality. Pricing builds from #1 and #2 above to include the custom development plus hosting, maintenance and per member fees. In Summary Carii solves a huge unmet need in information processing. It allows communities all over the world to more easily enable their members to interact in a trusted manner. No other system has the ability to serve communities like Carii does. 14