Your Online Presence > Managing Content

Everyone's Going to the Blogs

By Lasa Information Systems Team

You can hardly have avoided the buzz around blogging that has swept the media over the past couple of years. Blogs are the fastest growing area of web content. Often sidelined as online diaries or political ranting platforms, blogs offer a number of benefits to community and voluntary organisations, ranging from simplifying the management of content to raising your profile. This article describes some ways you can take advantage of the blogging phenomenon and put them to work for your organisation.

What is a blog?

You almost certainly have heard the term blog, but what exactly does it mean?

In the simplest terms, a blog is a regularly updated website, often with a personal voice.  The essential ingredients of a blog are:

• Content is added regularly, at least once a week, sometimes as often as hourly.
• Blogs tend to be written with a distinctive voice that is identified with an individual or group of individuals, rather than having the corporate tone of more traditional “brochure” style websites.
• The content of blogs tends to be organised as a timeline, with the most recent content appearing first.  This lends itself to diary style content, but is also ideal for any news like information.

In order to make this easy, a number of blogging systems have emerged that take away most of the technical hassles of managing your website.  This gives you more time to concentrate on the quality of your content.  Blogging systems also allow people with limited technical skills (but often-excellent writing skills) to contribute to your website.

Modern blogging systems also include many features which add value to content, and draw attention to your site from people who may otherwise have been unaware of it.

Readers can leave public comments on your posts, creating dialogue and further illuminating issues.  Automatically generated RSS feeds keep regular readers up to date and allow syndication on other sites.  Pingback systems automatically publicise new content to other websites.  Trackback allows you to see who is writing about you and linking to your blog.

Most blogging systems have plug-in facilities, allowing you to add new features which further add to the value of your site.  For example, automatically including news feeds from other sites, or photographs from Flickr.com.

How to get a blog

There are two main routes to setting up a blog.

Hosted blog

The simplest is to use one of the many free online blogging services.  You simply sign up, and access your blog through the services web based interface.  You’ll have the basic features of blogging without any hassle of installing the system on your own web host. 

Whilst easy to set up, hosted blogs aren’t very flexible when it comes to the visual identity of your blog – it will be hard to make a hosted blog fit in with your organisations existing website.  Your blog will be hosted at the services domain name rather than your organisation’s.  Some hosted blogs may also be slow to download, and some will require the inclusion of adverts on your blog.

Blogger.com

Blogger was one of the first hosted free blog services.  It is well suited to those new to blogging or publishing to the web, but is not as expandable as other services.

 

Wordpress.com

Wordpress.com is based on the excellent WordPress blogging engine (see below), with which it shares many features.  If you want fine control over the look of your blog, you’ll have to pay $15 for an upgrade.

 

TypePad.com

TypePad is a paid for blogging service, costing $90 a year (about £50).  The benefit of TypePad is that you have more options for customising the look of your blog, and you can use one of their well-designed templates as a starting point.

Host your own

Hosting your own blog on your own web space opens up many more possibilities.  You’ll have full control over the look of your blog, and can add any features you like.  Your blog can live at any domain name you choose.

Hosting your own means installing a blogging system on your web space.  This requires that the web server has a scripting language like PHP, and probably a database such as MySQL.  Both options below require PHP and MySQL.  If you aren’t sure of this, ask your web hosting company.

There are many different blogging systems out there.  A long list can be found at DMOZ

The best options are:

WordPress – www.wordpress.org

This open source blogging system is extremely flexible, and hundreds of plug-ins are available.  Most importantly, it is free.  WordPress boasts a five-minute installation procedure and requires PHP and MySQL.

 

TextPattern – textpattern.com

TextPattern claims to be faster than WordPress for your visitors.  Again, it is open source and free.

Some larger Content Management Systems (CMS), such as Drupal and Typo3 also include blogging modules.  Both WordPress and TextPattern include basic CMS functionality, with TextPattern offering slightly more flexibility in this respect.

Required skills and responsibilities

If you want to use a blog for your organisation, you’ll need to assemble people with the following skills.  Note that the most important skills are not technical!

Writing frequently

The most important thing about a blog is that it is regularly updated.  To be successful you need one or more people who are willing and able to write something at least once a fortnight.  What is written does not need to be lengthy – a paragraph or two is enough – but it does need to be of interest to your audience.  If you can’t commit to this, then a blog perhaps isn’t for you.  One solution to this problem is to divide responsibility – a blog can have a team of writers, writing either under the same name, or separately.  With four budding writers in your organisation, each would only need to write once a month to make your blog visibly active!

Responding to interaction

As a blog includes functions that allow your readers to leave comments you will need someone to commit to replying to comments, removing spam or other unwanted comments.

Template design

How your blog looks is almost as important as the words it contains.  Blog systems use templates to maintain a consistent look throughout the blog.  Lots of templates are available online for all blog systems, but if you are serious about using a blog, get a custom template that fits in with your current design scheme.  This will require some design instincts, and basic HTML and CSS skills.  You won’t need these skills very often, so it might be appropriate to hire a web designer to build a custom template.

Installation skills

If hosting your own blog, you’ll someone who knows how to install files on your web server, and how to set up new databases if your chosen blog system requires it.

Risks of blogging

Blogging comes with a few small risks.  Some organisations find the concept of allowing individual members of staff to directly edit content on the organisations website to be risky.  Obviously, you shouldn’t allow staff members you don’t trust that ability.  What are you doing employing people you don’t trust anyway?  Generally, the people writing content for a blog should be responsible for what they write.

A greater risk is abuse of the comments system on blogs.  These are open to vandalism and spam messages, and to a lesser extent, inappropriate debate.  The easiest way to mitigate the risks inherent to comments is to turn them off altogether.  A less drastic solution is moderation – approving messages before they are displayed.  Most blogging systems include functions to automate the moderation process, making it less of a burden to manage this issue.

Some examples of interesting organisational blogs

interplast.blogs.com

Interplast is a charity that provides plastic surgery in the developing world.  They use their TypePad blog ‘So No Child Must Wait’ to tell stories about their organisation and its beneficiaries.  The blog is updated frequently, keeping readers updated about interesting patients’ progress, as well as giving an insight into how the organisation is run, and how donated money is spent.  Most posts include a photograph, making the blog visually interesting and adding impact to the stories. 

 

 

 

 

 

ictconsortiumni.org

Northern Ireland’s ICT Consortium used a WordPress blog for communication and to document a single project, illustrating the flexibility of the blogging format.

 

 

zoomers.blogspot.com

Chorlton Workshop, a community based independent Adult Education Centre in Manchester created a BlogSpot based blog for Henshaws Society for Blind People.  The blog allows members of the group to communicate outside of the regular Monday meetings, and takes good advantage of web accessibility features. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you have examples of great Community and Voluntary Organisation blogs, please add links and descriptions to the comments for this article. 

Finding Out More

A lot of blogs seem to have blogs as their main subject.  Where better to find out about the latest trends and get ideas on how to take advantage of this enabling technology?

Sarah Hughes blog at ukfundraising discusses using new media to “revitalise charities and inspire their supporters.”  Read her post listing some UK charity blogs.

David Wilcox’s blog Designing for Civil Society also discusses using blogs and other new media developments for charities and voluntary organisations.  His post on why official blogs and wikis needn’t be boring is a good starting point.