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How to Use a Blog for Your Start-up Meeting
Two hosts of start-up meetings in Chicago gave us some insights into how they used their Chicago Idealist Network blog to share information and engage participants before the meeting. See their suggested instructions below for ideas on becoming part of the ever-growing blogging community.
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What is a blog?
According to Wikipedia, a blog is "a user-generated website where entries are made in journal style and displayed in a reverse chronological order.
Meeting hosted by Southwest Youth Collaborative in Chicago
"Blogs often provide commentary or news on a particular subject, such as food, politics, or local news; some function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of most early blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual although some focus on photographs (photoblog), sketchblog, videos (vlog), or audio (podcasting), and are part of a wider network of social media."
What are the benefits of setting up a blog?
Because the blog creation process is simpler than website creation, blogs enable people to easily publish a stream of constantly updated, linked content. What's great about a blog is its ability to serve multiple purposes for multiple people. While someone may only use the site as an information center to find local volunteer opportunities and information about meetings, another may use the blog as an online forum to express their ideas and network with others.
Other benefits include the ability to provide a more immediate form of communication than e-news (even if it's weekly), to inform a large amount of readers, and to save money and time. Blogs are cheap and easy to produce.
Are there any potential problems or disadvantages to using a blog?
A blog may be limited because it is less participatory for readers if they're not so technically inclined. A difficulty that we faced when using the blog was getting people to visit the site and post comments. Some people simply hadn't heard of blogs and were unsure of its uses. It also takes a small amount of technical savvy to set up. Depending on your blog settings, it can be public and unmoderated, which may cause troubles down the line with spamming and unwanted malicious visitors.
How did you encourage people to participate in the blog?
From the day the site went live, both meetings had the blog's site on their sign-up page. We briefly explained what registrants could find there and encouraged them to go to the blog for further communication. In every email that we sent out, we made sure to include a link to the blog and suggested how volunteers could use the blog, where to post, and why they should visit. Overall, I think it was successful, but there's a certain degree of human apathy that even witty rhetoric and simple-to-follow directions couldn't overcome.
How did you maintain the blog and keep up momentum?
The blog is maintained by three of the main meeting facilitators who have access. We simply sign in through the webpage and have complete control over adding and editing content through the simple user interface. If you wished, you could set up a blog so that all you have to do to add a posting is send an email to a specified address.
Keeping the momentum is entirely dependent on quality of content and updating it regularly. If the information is not useful, not presented in an interesting way, or not updated often, people will find less reason to check it out.
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Multiple uses for the blog
Throughout the course of our first start-up meeting experience we found the blog useful for disseminating information and facilitating dialogue amongst people interested in the Imagine initiative. During our start-up meeting, we displayed the blog on a digital projector and talked with people about its possible uses for the group. Below are uses we created both intentionally and organically based on need:
Information center: Meeting places and times, directions with Mapquest links, ways to volunteer in Chicago, a resource section with links to relevant websites, notes and updates from the facilitators on the latest news about Idealist, our meetings, opportunities, etc.
Communication tool: The latest status of the meetings, recaps, pictures, a forum with predefined topics (what should we discuss?), a place to sign up for email updates when someone posts a comment or whenever the blog is updated
A resource: Both to provide information and to provide a place to list other resources specifically relevant to those using our blog (Chicago-based organizations)
A place for collaboration
Uniting factor for multiple Chicago meetings: Even though everyone couldn't be in the same place at the same time, the blog was a virtual meeting point for those who couldn't make it to one or both meetings. It served as an easy way for them to keep in touch.
Credibility and permanence: I think the creation of the blog was also reassuring for participants. They could see that the facilitators were dedicated to the cause and were organized enough to create structure around the loosely defined idea of meeting with 50 complete strangers.
Preparation tool for facilitators: What is everyone talking (or not talking) about? We could also gauge level of interest based on activity.
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Instructions
If you would like to use Blogger as your blog hosting service, you can follow these excellent step-by-step instructions by RedMonk.
For a list of websites where you can set up a blog, take a look at this resource from Susannah Gardner in Online Journalism Review.
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