The Social Change Institute (SCI) is a new initiative aimed at building the capacity of the community and social change sector. The Institute is a project of the Hollyhock Leadership Institute (HLI), which provides training and strategic assistance to the social change sector. SCI’s inaugural event was a four-day retreat to held in May 2006.

As part of its work on SCI, HLI has undertaken a pilot e-learning project that aims at supporting the SCI community while also exploring the potential opportunity for extending HLI’s reach through online community tools. HLI retained Social Signal to advise on its e-learning strategy, and to set up a conference blog as part of its e-learning pilot.

Vancity is Canada’s largest credit union, with over 300,000 members. As a community-based organization with a proven commitment to environmental, social and economic sustainability, its brand is closely tied to both values and relationships.

We've been thrilled to working with Vancity on their ground-breaking project ChangeEverything.ca –  an online community where people in the Lower Mainland and Victoria can find information, tools and connections to inspire and support change in their own lives, their communities, and the world.

Confeederation.ca is a news aggregator that gathered candidate blogs from across the political spectrum during Canada’s 2006 federal election. The Confeederation site provides a single window on candidate blogs, organized both by party and by province. The site garnered widespread blogger attention and became a key source for journalists following the election campaign. The Confeederation web site is now being used as the basis for Confeederation.us, an aggregation of American candidate blogs that is being created by a US web development team.

Social Signal works with public-facing organizations to build online communities that motivate users to participate and contribute. Unlike traditional web sites that focus on pushing information out, online community sites focus on pulling users in with a compelling combination of tools, relationships and content.

Our unique combination of public engagement expertise, communications skills and technological smarts means we can help our clients develop not only the web site to house an online community, but the social structures that support it. Browse the list of our most recent projects to learn how we've helped several public-facing organizations to engage their audiences through online communities. 

NetSquared is a major conference and online community initiative undertaken by CompuMentor, a non-profit organization that provides software and technology assistance to more than 80,000 non-profit organizations across the United States and Canada. NetSquared aims at dramatically expanding the strategic technology capacity of these organizations by engaging them in a series of online community activities, culminating in a May 2006 conference.

Social Signal was retained by CompuMentor to develop an online community strategy that would engage its diverse user base in a process of online learning and discussion about the latest generation of online technologies and technology strategies. The strategy we developed outlined recommended content and activities for the eight months leading up to the NetSquared conference, and specified the technical and staff requirements for a web site that would support those activities. Our involvement was subsequently expanded to include the implementation of many aspects of this online community strategy, including setting up the NetSquared web site, configuring major web site features, managing custom development work and writing and editing site content. We also conceived and created Net2Learn, a companion site that allows NetSquared community members to create resource centers on different topics related to nonprofit technology strategy.

NetSquared has rapidly become one of the web's most visible forums for exploring the social web's significance to nonprofits. The levels of interest generated by the online community has led to the successful launch of NetSquared groups in San Francisco and other U.S. cities, and to an overwhelming demand for conference registration. That success has confirmed hopes that NetSquared would give rise to a durable, vibrant online community, taking a key position at the heart of CompuMentor's future online plans.

Organizations venturing into online community face a challenge that's quite different from the work of creating a traditional web site: the challenge of motivating users to participate in and contribute to a bottom-up, user-driven community. The fastest-growing web sites today offer a compelling combination of relationships, tools and content that offer users a unique reason to participate in this particular community, as opposed to the hundreds of others that have sprung up across the web.

Social Signal has the expertise to help you identify the particular value that you can offer to a user community. Our extensive background in online advocacy and social marketing gives us deep insight into the kinds of features, content and social structures that motivate people to participate actively in online communities. Our work is guided by best practices in public engagement and social web ("web 2.0") development. These best practices have shaped an approach that is:

Participatory: The latest generation of participatory web sites succeed to the extent that they can achieve a critical mass of users who in turn collaboratively build a critical mass of relationships, features and/or content. This tipping point can be reached through the site's content, by offering social opportunities for interacting with other users, or with features that support critical tasks in the user's everyday life or work. We strive to offer content and activities that provide at least two - and ideally all three - of these magnets to potential users.

Decentralized: The explosion in online communities means that many audience members have existing allegiances to particular social networks, blogging tools or other social web services. Rather than ask participants to replace their community allegiances, we look for ways of integrating diverse web sites and tools. Many of our projects take an ecosystem approach that circulates content and builds relationships across multiple web sites by using RSS and tagging.

Platform agnostic: Achieving your goals drives our choice of technology. Different strategic goals and activities, different audiences and usability requirements, and different budgets and technical constraints can add up to very different preferences about platform features. While we have worked most extensively with Drupal and WordPress (two platforms that offer particular support for community-driven sites), we have worked with a range of other tools and continue to explore new content management options so that we can always offer our clients the tools that are most appropriate to their particular needs.

Context-sensitive: While the Internet provides opportunities for deepening issue awareness and engagement, effective learning requires that we adapt content and messages to the strengths and limitations of the web. We keep text short, use images and multimedia content, and prime for user feedback as ways of facilitating user engagement with even the most complex material.

Consultative and iterative: The needs and goals of community members should guide site features, content and activities, because the most successful communities are those in which members feel like community owners. Consequently, sites should begin with the minimal features and content required to engage participant interest, and expand with features that reflect participant feedback.

Above all, we take an integrated approach. Social Signal is well-versed in the technical architecture and implementation of complex web sites, but we are more than just a web development team: we're a web development team with a built-in understanding of your communications needs, participation goals, and political context. You don't have to worry about site content that reads like a computer manual because we're used to developing messages, articles and help documentation for a wide range of audiences. You won't struggle to translate your goals for citizen engagement into online activities because we approach online communities as places to expand and explore contemporary social citizenship. You don't need to coach us on how to frame complex political issues for the web, because we have years of experience in writing, teaching and social marketing on policy challenges. Our experience gives us valuable insight into which features and content can engage and sustain public involvement, and which just get in the way.

Engage audiences

with an online presence where your users generate the content

At Social Signal, we're experts at turning site visitors into site contributors. Our practice is based on a decade of research into online participation, a decade of experience in online campaigning, and more than twenty-five years of collective wisdom on social marketing, strategy and communications. We put that knowledge to work for you by building online communities with active, engaged audiences – audiences you're conversing with, not lecturing at.

We ensure your success by mapping out a site plan that includes not only the technical architecture of web pages and navigation, but the social structure of activities and incentives for participation. We work to create a snowball effect – where a contribution from one sincere, articulate user sets off a chain reaction where other users are inspired to respond or contribute their own original ideas.

Read more >>

Build trust

with a public whose interests and values are reflected on your site

Social Signal has a proven ability to create online communities that foster a trusted relationship between your organization and your site's users. Through user-created content, a successful online community brings you closer to your audience – because it ties your identity directly to an online presence that intimately reflects your audience's interests and values.

We focus on building your relationship with online participants at every step in the development process. We start by balancing creative brainstorming with careful needs assessment to develop a concept that will uniquely appeal to the audiences you wish to engage. We often build an initial presence with a light feature set, and then solicit user input into how to develop the site further – giving users a meaningful sense of ownership over the community's evolution. We emphasize skilled site animation and moderation, and supply or work with your site moderator, so that users feel encouraged and supported.

Read more >>

Deepen relationships

with a community that cares about your mission as much as you do

At Social Signal we recognize that your online community efforts are tied to real-world goals, and keep all our online efforts focused on your real-world success. An online community isn't an end in itself. Online community matters because it connects real-world people and organizations... helps us to be more effective and satisfied in our real-world work and lives... and, at its most powerful, triggers positive change in the real world.

We emphasize strategies that continually link online community to real-world impact, and that link your expanding online relationships to your offline mission. We work with clients to develop web sites and online activities that support offline events like meetings and conferences. We promote activities and conversations on-site that fuel offline engagement, like campaigns that commit site users to taking action in the real world. We partner with communications teams to integrate traditional media channels with online community efforts, so you engage your publics with a consistent voice.

Read more >>