Lately I’ve been thinking about the ways that a scholarly society can serve the needs of its members through a well-designed web site and the use of social media. What follows are a few specific ideas, and I welcome any feedback or additional suggestions.
1. Give your organization an easy-to-remember domain name
If, for example, your organization is known by the acronym “YHF,” then make sure that your organization’s domain name looks like this:
http://www.YHF.orgDo not use a domain name that looks like this:
http://mycollege.edu/jsmith/yankeehotelfoxtrot/index2.htmlPractically no one is going to be able to remember that epic address, but just about everyone is going to remember http://www.YHF.org.
A domain name should only cost you about $10 a year, so what are you waiting for? (I’ve been happy with using Namecheap for domain name registration–and I receive no compensation for saying so–but you’ll find there are many options.)
2. Put the calls for papers online in one place
Don’t make your members hunt all over the web (or search through various listserv subscriptions): create a page or a directory on your web site that lists all the CFPs for a given conference.
3. Make the conference schedule available online in a customizable, dynamic format
Make sure that the conference schedule allows users to create their own schedule for the conference. If there are five panels running at the same time in every session, for example, it would be nice to be able to go to the site, click a check box for the panels one plans to go to, click a button that says submit, and then have the website generate a customized schedule that only includes those particular panels. (An example of a conference that already does this is the Conference on College Composition and Communication.)
4. Establish a blog
Why? Because it allows you to make announcements in a permanent way that is archived. If you distribute an email announcement and for whatever reason it doesn’t make it into somebody’s inbox, members can always check the blog for the latest news. There are simple software solutions that allow you to send out an email announcement and update your blog simultaneously, without having to take separate steps for each task.
5. Social media is your friend
Different people are going to prefer different venues for receiving information. The age of “email only” communication is coming to a close (if it’s not over already). You shouldn’t rely solely on an email listserv to make announcements. Create a Facebook page for your organization, and create a Facebook page for each year’s conference. Get an official Twitter account for your organization. This might sound like a lot of work, but as with announcements made via your blog, you can automate this process so that with one click of the mouse your organization’s communications are distributed via multiple venues.
You might also consider getting an account on a photo sharing site like Flickr so that you can share photos from events.
6. Provide an online discussion forum
Make room on your site for panelists, roundtable participants, and audience members to leave comments or ask questions related to the individual sessions they’re most interested in. Doing so will embed the face-to-face scholarly conversation of your conference in a larger conversation taking place online before during and after the meeting itself.
7. Archive conference materials online
My final suggestion is that you archive each year’s conference materials, so that everything related to this year’s conference will still be available in the future for people to refer to. You can just create a directory on your server with that particular year as part of the name. So if my hypothetical conference is the annual meeting of “YHF,” the directory would be something like for this year, for next year, and so on.
And you might consider allowing panelists to upload materials related to their presentations to the directory associated with that year’s conference: a PowerPoint file, a screencast, the full text of their paper, an outline, or an audio recording of their session.
How about you?
What do you think, ProfHacker readers? Are these the kinds of features you’d like to see? Are there additional features you’re longing for?
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7 Responses to If I had my own scholarly society…
Dorothea Salo - March 23, 2010 at 8:32 pm
This is a bit of a hobbyhorse of mine, so apply all due sodium-chloride prophylactic…
Unless a scholarly society has a serious commitment to digital preservation, that goes WELL beyond “we’ll keep it until we feel like redesigning our website,” it should strongly consider working with an academic library to collect and preserve digital conference proceedings.
It may take some networking to find the right library (as a rule of thumb, the larger the institution, the greater the chances of a library that can help), but once that’s done, whyever not outsource the frustration to someone else?
richard - March 24, 2010 at 12:54 am
I’m totally doing this! Well, as much as I can influence things, anyway, which isn’t all that much. But I’m curious about the numbering. In your scholarly society, four shall come after five, but before six, because otherwise all would be madness?
dance - March 24, 2010 at 1:12 am
As someone who runs the website for a small scholarly society, I’m just going to note that these things take a lot of time and a fair bit of expertise, for some of them. That’s quite an investment into professional service you are picturing. So you might want to clarify—what is to be expected from a society with professional staff, what from one run by volunteers? How many members does it take to generate an active online presence—I’m pretty sure most of my membership is not going to engage on FB, and certainly not twitter, and probably not in discussion forums.
Even #1 is not as simple as you make it sound….the $10 option means either that yhf.org is frozen in the address bar for all pages as one surfs, or that it redirects to http://www.mycollege.edu/jsmith/yankeehotelfoxtrot/index2.html and people who do not understand the internet circulate that address and link it places despite being told not to.
George H. Williams - March 24, 2010 at 8:12 am
That’s a great idea! Are there any examples of this sort of partnership to which you might draw our attention?
George H. Williams - March 24, 2010 at 8:13 am
D’oh! Actually, your last sentence should be “numbering shall come before adequate sleep…”
George H. Williams - March 24, 2010 at 8:29 am
Good points.
First, I’d say that if an organization doesn’t want to do any of these things, then they shouldn’t.
Second, if they do, however, they should look first among their own membership for expertise in such matters and consider creating a position like “Director of Electronic Resources” on the executive committee. Avoid, at all costs, the “webmaster” model where one person alone must be the bottleneck for any and all changes or additions to the website. Instead, create the kinds of interfaces that allow members to contribute, perhaps with moderation but without a great deal of work on the part of the aforementioned Director. If that digital expertise/proficiency is not already present, then it might not be the kind of organization that needs to do these sorts of things for its members, since this suggest that these things would not serve the members’ needs (see my first point).
Third, an organization’s membership is not static but is (or should be) constantly changing over time, adding new members as they enter the profession or become interested in the subject to which the organization is devoted. As a result, if an organization doesn’t have an FB or Twitter presence, then it is unlikely to attract members who use FB or Twitter for professional communication: self-fulfilling prophecy. If, however, it starts to make information available via those media (announcements that include links to information on the org’s web site, for example) then it’s more likely to involve potential members for whom those media are important.
And fourth, getting the right domain name really is as simple as I make it sound and does not require freezing the short address (through the use of frames) or redirecting to a longer URL: if an organization doesn’t want to pay a commercial hosting service* to host the site, then they should try to find an institution (library or college or university or digital humanities center) that will host the site on their servers and adjust their domain name servers appropriately. That’s what I’ve always done. (*It’s worth noting that Dreamhost provides free hosting for nonprofit organizations, a status which many scholarly societies have.)
Your overall point, however, is well taken: these kinds of developments take time and effort. Of course, the print- based model of communication which many societies continue to use exclusively also take time and effort, so in my mind it’s a question of which direction the society wants to go more than whether or not the society actually wants to go anywhere.
Derek Bruff - March 26, 2010 at 10:56 pm
Let’s see, how about the Mathematical Association of America? I’m a member, so let’s see how they do relative to George’s list. [I was informed my original comment was too spammy, likely because of the links I included to examples of the ideas in George's post. I've deleted a few links below that you'll just have to track down on your own. Sorry.]
http://www.maa.org. Check.
Call for papers for a conference all in one place? Check. (It’s mostly in the humanities where these CFPs are scattered all over, I think.)
Conference schedule online in a customizable form? Nope, no luck there. You’ll have to join a seriously tech-savvy society, like EDUCAUSE, for that kind of thing.
An MAA blog? There’s not one of those that I know of.
Social media? The MAA is on Facebook and on Twitter (as @maanow). Perhaps George had #4 and #5 in the right order to begin with.
An online discussion forum with areas set aside for individual sessions at conferences? Nope, the MAA doesn’t have that. However, the POD Network does. (Google “WikiPODia” to see what they provide.)
Archiving conference materials online? Again, the MAA doesn’t provide a tool for this, but EDUCAUSE and the POD Network do.
You’ve really outlined two separate (but related) areas of activity for scholarly and professional societies–online support for conferences and ongoing social media use not tied to particular conferences. I’m not aware of a society that handles both of these areas extremely well, but there are some, as noted above, that excel in one or the other.