A Tale of Two Hope Machines, 8.3

Redtreehouse.org was created to provide a welcoming and vibrant online community for exploring resources to help children and young adults, prenatal through age 25. To call it an online community, though, may be a little misleading. 

When Gartner and others who are hipper than I am to social media think “online community,” they’re thinking collaborative community; they’re thinking mass collaboration. And in order for mass collaboration to be, three things are indispensable: Social Media. Purpose. Community. 

A few words about each: 

• Social Media: where people collaborate. Redtreehouse.org isn’t technically a social media environment. It doesn’t use mass collaboration-enabling tools such as wikis, blogs, social networking, tagging, etc.

• Community: the people who collaborate. Red Treehouse is essentially a collection of individuals, so you could say it’s a community.

• Purpose: why people collaborate. The organization itself has a purpose, but there’s not a purpose around which user contributions are directed, e.g., other parents like me don’t come to the site to contribute their knowledge, experience, and ideas to address specific challenges or opportunities. 

This isn't to suggest that Red Treehouse doesn’t value collaboration. Or that it isn't successfully facilitating the formation of communities. (maybe even vibrant ones) (maybe even massive ones) What I am saying is that any and all collaboration that may be happening is happening offline*. People are Making Connections, Discovering Answers, and Finding Hope someplace else. Face-to-face. Again, collaborative communities in the Gartner sense use social media to join people together online to address challenges or opportunities.

Thus begging the question: If redtreehouse.org isn’t an online community, what is it? A directory, maybe? One that’s updated regularly. One that allows you to refine your search…

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Like an entertainment directory? 

Hmm. Now that I think of it, I wonder if Red Treehouse is really all that different in its scope than, say, Cleveland Scene, which highlights Cleveland-area arts, music, dining, films, and which brings together the same “three sources for information and support.” Visitors there can search for and find: organizations (restaurants, arts and entertainment venues, shops, etc.) and events. Pickings under the resources category may be a little lean, but they’re there, too.

At least two things set the online Scene apart for me. One: it incorporates social media (blogs, Twitter and Facebook feeds) – including for purposes of community collaboration. For example, you’re able to review events and venues. Two: it looks like a Web 2.0 site. If "vibrant and welcoming" is Red Treehouse’s goal, its management should have a look: www.clevescene.com. 

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There’s nothing wrong with being more like a directory. Tools for Today and Tomorrow, the precursor to the current project, won awards. It made possible the bringing together of “more than 14,000 parents, guardians, professionals, and organizations together through workshops, conferences and the toolsfortoday.org website to inform, learn from, support and inspire one another in order to help children, families and caregivers live for today and plan for tomorrow.” Then in 2011 Ronald McDonald House (RMH) of Cleveland and Ohio Families and Children First (OFCF) pooled their resources so that they might propel a broader, stronger online tool.  

What was tried and true got new and improved.

For me, the questions now become:

Could adding online collaborative communities to the mix make what’s already good even better? Could what Gartner has to offer help Red Treehouse live up to its potential as a hope machine? And, if “yes” to both, how would the former go about helping the latter develop the superior capabilities it’d need?

Gartner actually has a step-by-step plan for building those managerial capabilities. A few of the steps I imagine they’d emphasize with regard to Red Treehouse:

• They’d help it get a better grip, in general, on what the power of using social media to tap into the skills and know-how of lots and lots of people around a common purpose can do. 

• They’d ask management at Red Treehouse about the most important goals or challenges it’s identified as standing between where the organization is and where it wants to be. This is the first place they’d look at applying community collaboration as a way of delivering value. 

• Based on how other organizations are successfully employing social media collaboratively, they’d help Red Treehouse brainstorm: "these are the audiences community collaboration efforts most commonly target; these are the categories of business value (e.g., customer responsiveness, product /service development) most commonly addressed; these are the leading reasons organizations use mass collaboration to gain value; these are the dominant types of mass collaboration being used" -- all in an effort to generate ideas about where community collaboration efforts could help the organization reach its goals. 

• They’d help Red Treehouse develop an organizational strategy for community collaboration. 

• They’d focus on helping Red Treehouse succeed with one or two community collaboration efforts and create momentum around early successes.

This represents, broadly, what Gartner would do and what I also would recommend. I hope to be able to drill down and offer more specific recommendations in time. 


*I’d bet that other parents like me would appreciate hearing about successful connections, discoveries, pursuits, etc.