Context
The Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) is the leading professional body for librarians and information specialists; its intake includes new professions such as information architecture and knowledge management. CILIP aims to enable its members to achieve and maintain the highest professional standards in all aspects of delivering an information service.
Challenge
CILIP wanted to reach a higher percentage of its members and promote its offering to a wider audience. Given CILIP’s membership of information professionals it was important that any communications initiative demonstrated best practice.
Solution
User generated content
The concept of an online community emerged as the ideal way for a 21st century organisation to communicate – applying social media tools to facilitate communication and the exchange of expertise.
Developing a mandate
We ran interactive workshops with CILIP staff and members to find out what people wanted, such as discussion forums and blogs. The central debate revolved around the extent to which non-members could participate. Communities of Practice was intended as a benefit for CILIP members, and would be funded by them, but opening access to the online community would raise awareness of CILIP’s offering and demonstrate its value to the wider public.
Shaping a community
CILIP settled on a community for members to discuss issues, complemented by a publicly accessible blog drawing out interesting themes from the discussion threads to demonstrate the level of intellectual discourse among members. We implemented Community Server software, which we integrated with CILIP’s CARE membership database to ensure security.
Outcome
Our workshops demonstrated the need for monitoring and facilitating of discussions. On our recommendation CILIP employed a moderation specialist; Sift had vital input into the social architecture development. The scheme has already been welcomed by CILIP members. A call for participants in the pilot was so heavily oversubscribed that CILIP web teams had to shut the list at 500 people. The pilot ran for two months, offering members a chance to input content and foster discussions before the official launch on Members Day 2006.
According to Jill Martin, director of knowledge and information at CILIP, "cScape’s Customer Engagement Unit is helping us to make full use of our web platform, working with us to apply interactive tools that will enable us to deepen relationships with our members, to further understand their needs – and to communicate our values as an organisation."