Thinking about organisations……
How to survive in the age of free
When the internet came along it changed much for voluntary community organisations. Not always for the better. This story is a thought piece that draws on the ideas of digital culture pioneer Kevin Kelly and calls on my background with community organisations, mostly operating in the permaculture space.
I HAVE BEEN a member of a number of community associations over the years and find they face much the same challenges.
Let’s define the organisations I talk about. They are variously known as ‘community organisations’, ‘community associations’, ‘civil society organisations’, ‘community-based organisations’, ‘voluntary community organisations’, ‘community groups’ or ‘NGOs’. What they are, are volunteer-run organisations.
One thing that many of these organisations have in common is finding the human and financial resources to sustain their work over the longer term. Let’s take a look at a couple of the common challenges.
The struggle for funds
Funding has proven an ongoing challenge to most of the organisations I have participated in. Funds are needed for two primary purposes:
- meeting operating expenses
- starting new projects.
Ongoing expenses can include public liability insurance, software updates and licences, paper/printing/postage if a print publication is produced and, perhaps, meeting space hire. New projects create the need for an infusion of funds to get them started and then ongoing funding to maintain them. It is no wonder that voluntary organisations are constantly on the lookout for grants.
Selling membership is the usual response to fund raising, yet from what I see this seldom generates the capital required to embark on new projects. It also necessitates an unending search for new members to replace those not renewing their membership, and to grow the membership.
The organisations continue to rely on volunteers’ time, energy and personal equipment such as computers, and sometimes do not invest in software to maintain their databases, accounts and other information. An organisation I have had association with demonstrated the risks in relying on member equipment and software. When a member who had made her personal software available to the organisation became alienated from it and left, she took the plugins she had bought for herself but had let the organisation use, reinstalling the free versions. They worked, but not as well as the paid versions.
The challenge of constant recruitment
Membership had been low for years. Incentives to join were introduced. Discounts at supportive businesses were offered. Members could advertise their services on the organisation’s website. Still, recruitment was low. Unlike selling a product and offering member discounts, the organisation had set itself up as a focus for the activity it claimed to represent. It produced no physical product. Its appeal lay in being a national voice for the practice—that is how it saw itself—a function it never fully achieved and one that was too abstract an idea to attract a substantial membership. What it had evolved into was a website and social media presence. The idea of becoming an advocacy remained unrealised because there was no one with the experience and skills in advocacy and no one had time to do the work on a voluntary basis.
The organisation had for years faced a challenge in recruiting members. For organisations like it, recruitment is an ongoing challenge that requires an ongoing solution.
It is one thing to recruit members. It is another to retain them. Tallying up membership trends over the year to see what the trend is would be a worthwhile practice were any shortfall or too-low recruitment numbers to be addressed. Other than the relatively few who continue to renew their membership year after year because they support the mission of the organisation, organisations would also do well to think about what members gain from joining.
Long-running organisations that retain a substantial membership, such as some of Australia’s environmental lobbies that generate the funds to employ staff, retain members because the return they give is political advocacy. Members see them representing their interests and using them for political leverage. They perceive the organisation to be doing something.
An example is an NGO I was a program manager and development educator for, which worked in technology transfer (village microhydroelectric systems), agriculture and food security in the southwest Pacific. It retained a steady membership base by being able to demonstrate that it was active in its region. That involved periodic member events where speakers would talk about the work and report on its progress. The member newsletter that I produced was critical to keeping people informed. Communication with members that includes talking about solutions to problems that arise as well as news about progress being made opened the organisation to member scrutiny and in doing so presented an honest image of its work. Secrecy and misrepresentation are a fast track to loss of credibility and members.
Gaining then retaining members is more challenging for small, voluntary community organisations. An example is an Australian permaculture organisation that at one time offered the chance to win books and a gardening tool as an incentive for would-be members. That was a one-off rather than a sustainable membership solution. It was not repeatable over the short-term because repetition would likely drain the pool of people willing to participate in the scheme and make others tired of the constant marketing message. The books had been available for some time, and because many who visited the organisation’s website would already have them, their lure as an incentive for membership was presumably limited.
Complicating the raising of funds through membership fees is attracting fee-paying members in the first place. There is plenty of competition from other community organisations wanting to attract members and plenty of competition for attention from other ideas. As in any market, this competition restrains how much organisations can ask for membership and raises expectations about what potential members expect from the organisation.
What about goodwill and altruism as membership drivers? People will join organisations they want to support without deriving any direct benefit from their membership. That is good, however I have not seen it significantly raise memberships or generate funds. Likewise, the practice of tithing funds. A few did that, however the practice of tithing is not Australian cultural practice and so has limited potential as a fundraiser.
Getting the work done
I am going to use a couple real organisations in this piece as example of what I talk about in attracting members and raising funds.
Other than attracting and retaining members there is another limiting factor affecting the viability of voluntary, community-based organisations. The Permaculture Sydney association of the late 1990s provides an example.
Permaculture Sydney was founded in the mid-1980s by the noted permaculture educator, Robyn Francis, who teaches from her Djanbung Gardens education centre in Nimbin, NSW. Like any organisation it went through pits and surges in membership and in the closing years of the century was going well, producing a print newsletter and organising events. Then, suddenly, it disappeared.
The cause will be familiar to those of us who have been active in keeping organisations going. It was activist burnout. Permaculture Sydney came to rely on a small number of committed people to do the work of keeping it going. In the end it became too much and they started to leave. Recruitment of new members was low. There was no one to replace those leaving through burnout or because of other life demands. Permaculture Sydney slowly wound down until it was clear that it was no longer viable. It closed.
Avoiding this is a challenge for community organisations and it is exacerbated when conflict occurs within the management team. I have seen this happen and have seen egregious behaviour by people on management teams, including one public display at an event of a national permaculture organisation. This, despite the permaculture admonishment to cooperate, not compete.
Conflict in community organisations occurs over structural organisational matters, through clashes over approaches to doing something and due to ego. Skilled leadership will have systems in reserve that are capable of turning clash into problem solving, however this is not always possible. Ego issues can arise when a new office holder full of enthusiasm clashes with established members who have been doing the work for some time. This, too, I have seen, and it undermines the ongoing work of those who have stayed with the organisation for some time. The risk is that they are driven away, taking their knowledge, skills and experience with them. It happens. In my experience, the ego-driven has a relatively short stay in their role before moving on. The organisation is the long term loser.
Organisations in the age of free
Here’s the problem for many voluntary community organisations as well as permaculture educators: information they sell as workshops and courses is now freely available online and in books. If I can refer again to organisations I know, the permaculrture design system offers examples.
I’m talking about two types of community organisation or permaculture education business:
- one offers courses and workshops on a fee-for-service basis to raise funds, attract members and popularise what it is that they are about
- the other offers informal ways to learn by participating in activities.
Now, in an age of free, the market for that information is being largely fulfilled through free online resources.
There is now so much free information about permaculture online, including free design courses, that you no longer have to attend a Permaculture Design Course to fully practice it. Once you did, but that was before the internet and the flood of free. People still do enrol in courses but that is for something we call ‘embodiment’ which we will get to shortly. Nor do you have to join to learn via informal workshops and participation. YouTube is now the teacher.
Although there is no readily available information about this trend, logic suggests that it would reduce the need to join organisations to acquire the skills. However, permaculture design courses continue to attract students. The lack of data about the internal dynamics of the movement gives us little idea of whether course numbers are increasing, decreasing or are steady across the movement. One of the reasons people enrol in permaculture courses is because they offer the structured learning of a curriculum.
In the age of free, an age when comprehensive information about practicing something like the permaculture design system is readily available, what can permaculture community organisations do to attract members?
If they continue to do what they have always done then they should expect the same results. Second thoughts: they should expect diminishing returns if other organisations offer much the same or better opportunities. The reason is something called competition, even though it might not be intended. When you have two or more organisations with similar offerings within range of the same potential customer base, you have competition. We have seen this with Permaculture Design Course providers.
Some years ago I watched and participated in the conversation around the question of attracting membership as a team member of Permaculture Australia, the only NGO with a national reach within the permaculture milieu in Australia. At that time the organisation had not found the hook to catch the thousands who had done a Permaculture Design Course. No one knew how many had done a course. They still don’t. There were guestimates that sometimes came across as gross overestimations. Over 18 years of on-and-off association in official roles with Permaculture Australia I saw this dilemma surface time after time. Permaculture Australia was not alone. Community Gardens Australia (CGA) faced a similar dilemma in attracting community garden members although, proportionally, they were more successful than Permaculture Australia. I think it comes down, again, to being seen to be doing something. CGA at the time could demonstrate member initiatives in their gardens and also provided advocacy with local government and other organisations.
Permaculture Australia at the time attracted a certain level of membership for altruistic reasons and a low level of funds through tithes, especially for their Permafund tax-deductible small grants scheme. Altruism, though, is a small pool soon emptied. There is no guarantee of it growing substantially.
Searching for new members, the organisation adopted a membership structure for business. Business were listed as key supporters in what it intended to be a win-win arrangement. There was potential here so long as returns to businesses exceed the cost of membership.
Unlike local permaculture associations that offer participation in workshops and projects and attract membership with their offer of learning new skills, learning about permaculture and meeting like-minded people, Permaculture Australia and Community Gardens Australian offer nothing of the kind. They have no physical product to offer. How large the pool of potential members willing to become members on this basis is, remains unknown but is certainly limited.
When it comes to attracting members, the question asked by Permaculture Australia team members as well as by Community Gardens Australia is this: what can we offer as incentive for membership?
There are answers to that but those with real potential require a lot of work by volunteers. That is not to say they cannot be done. They can. But that would take unpaid volunteer time and energy. I know that because I and others attempted it.
Where are the answers?
I went in search for answers to the question of what voluntary organisations can offer that would attract more members, greater participation and produce something saleable as a fundraiser in the age of free. I ended up with a book I read some time ago by online systems pioneer, Kevin Kelly.
In his book, The Inevitable, Kevin describes a number of properties he says are saleable in the age of free. I reread the relevant chapter and realised there could be something here for poorly funded community organisations. The contradiction is that designing and implementing them would make further calls on volunteer time, and that could limit their potential.
Let’s take a look at a strategy for organisations based on Kevin Kelly’s book.
Kelly’s generatives
In the age of free, in an age when things can easily be copied, what is it that attracts people in return for membership fees or as sales? What cannot be copied and duplicated? What can organisations offer that is more than what anyone can copy and download free? These are Kevin Kelly’s ‘generatives’.
Immediacy
In the pre-internet days when crowdfunding hadn’t been heard of, Australia’s Permaculture Institute, the first permaculture organisation in the country with a truly national reach, paid for the printing of its books by offering presales. Those members paying in advance would be the first to receive the book. This enacted immediacy—pre-publication buyers were promised immediate access on publication and before the books appeared in bookshops. Combined with goodwill in helping fund publication, immediacy was saleable.
Today, organisations might offer some product, deal or opportunity before it is released on its website or before it is distributed free. Some organisations already do this.
The challenge for voluntary community organisations is to have something so compelling to offer that it would attract memberships.
Personalisation
The internet distributes things by copying. The same things can be value-added to attract memberships and perhaps income by personalising them.
This is done by adding something intangible to the free copy. It might be adding material that adapts the free product to specific locations, application or circumstance. Some software companies offer advanced features for a fee. The basic, free product is fit for purpose, however the paid version offers additional features.
The question is how membership could be further personalised. Could, for example, those living in distant parts or in difficult environments such as drylands be offered a book or information package on strategies for those environments in return for membership, or some other offer? The same incentive could be offered as a sale item, but at a higher price than provided as part of the membership package.
The challenge here is, once people join and have that package, what incentives will encourage them to renew membership? This is an important question because it is a challenge to attract members and it is often a greater challenge to retain them.
Interpretation
Interpretation adds meaning to something. It has to be produced by someone with specialist knowledge because it must be credible.
Interpretation could take the form of a subscribers or members’ newsletter analysing trends, policy, practices of other stuff of interest to members. It would provide insight and offer opinion and informed speculation on how things could develop and what that would mean for those engaged in the practice. The publication would have to go beyond reporting news just about what people are doing and offer insight relating the practice to the big picture outside the organisation.
Producing interpretation requires not only expertise in the topic but having the time to produce material on a regular basis. That is why the producer would have to be paid for their time. Interpretation is the sort of thing any organisation aiming to be an industry body would do.
Authenticity
Authenticity is to do with originality and assurance that something really is authentic and not a cheap knock-off or copy.
David Holmgren’s signing copies of Retrosuburbia at the 2018 permaculture convergence offered authenticity as a first edition. To distinguish an online product as authentic, a watermark can be added. This is a practice among photographers. Numbered and signed prints of photographs or art works certifies authenticity.
How would an organisation use authenticity as an incentive for membership? One way would be to offer a limited, physical edition of artwork, a photograph numbered and signed by its creator, or a book signed by its author. That could come free with membership or could be offered as a saleable item on its own at higher price.
Accessibility
As an incentive for membership, accessibility offers early access limited to a specific period as a reward for joining.
In software development the availability of beta versions attracts those interested in software or in the functions new software offers, even though it comes incomplete and with bugs. Having early access is the reward. In return for reports coming back to the developer, the first fully-working commercial edition might be offered free to beta testers. How could this be reiterated for something an organisation could offer?
Offering in-depth access could be a way. A free publication could be supplemented by selling a guide for reading circles, short courses or workshops on the topics it covers. When he released his 2018 book Retrosuburbia, author David Holmgren could have had a study guide for readers’s groups ready to go as an additional sale or as a free incentive for buying the book immediately following release. The demand for this was demonstrated by the appearance of a study circle in Bendigo within months of the book’s publication and comments about replicating the idea elsewhere. A permaculture association where the right skills were present could produce a study guide and sell it as a publication or offer it in the form of a short course based on the book.
This publication, Medium, offers the free layer such as that you are reading, as well as a paid subscription layer where extra benefits are offered to writers and readers.
The Australian educational business, ProBlogger, offered a free online course for beginner bloggers. This served as a taster to its longer, in-depth, paid course on blogging. When the paid course was first released, to test it ProBlogger offered it at half its retail price to the first batch of people registering their interest. Cheap early access provided feedback that enabled the course to be offered at full price. Win-win.
Another form of access, especially for any organisation wanting to grow into an industry body or to represent some practice, would be to provide access to grants, deals, jobs and useful links. Again, searching these out would be a time-consuming task for which someone should be paid.
Embodiment
Embodiment is meeting in person, usually around some event.
The Eastern Suburbs Sustainable Schools Network in Sydney provided an example. Rather than trying to attract sustainability educators to a meeting, the meetup provided a tour of a site in the city and instruction on engaging school children on biodiversity. Again, it was a win-win set-up, a reward for attending.
The study circle mentioned in Accessibility is an example of embodiment. So were the regional get-togethers organised by the Sydney Community Gardens Australia network for member gardens. Important to embodiment is conviviality — it must be fun — collaboration and sharing, learning and affordability.
Embodiment is a great complement to online connection. It will attract only those in the region unless it is a more ambitious national conference. Voluntary organisations do plan national events, however they are exhausting for volunteers to organise.
The biannual Australian permaculture convergences are examples of embodiment, however they seldom result in any follow-on action or ongling project. Perhaps if they were organised to focus on developing some project or building something they would achieve more than good memories and acquaintances and friendships renewed, valuable as those things are.
Patronage
Patreon is an online service that simplifies the channelling of funds to bloggers and others from those appreciating their work and who want to contribute something so they can continue. We can think of Patreon as code for altruism.
The usual way organisations tap into altruism is through asking for donations. This works but it is something that can only be done periodically otherwise members could well tire of the constant ask. Patreon simplifies one-off as well as continuing altruism.
Rather than mounting a campaign to raise donations, Petreon appears as an option on web page footers, so it is always there, quietly and unobtrusively, as a constant request. It may be something worth adapting for community-based organisations.
Findability
Findability navigates the plethora of information we swim in. It has to do with access and intermediation.
An example comes from bloggers who do the research and publish a story that links to other articles on a topic. It might take the form of The Ten Best Guides to Getting started in Permaculture, for example (no, it does not exist… but that might be an opportunity for you) . What it does is to do the work of searching out information of value so that others do not have to, and making it available by distributing a link to the blog story on social media channels. The organisation intermediates between information and member.
Making information findable has the potential to add value for members. To retain that value, the information would not be available to non-members or would become available after only some time.
Additional ideas
In addition to Kelly’s eight points of saleability, there are others.
Exclusivity
What would a community organisation offer that is available only to members?
This has to be something that is more or less unique, not something that exists elsewhere and can be copied and downloaded.
An example from the community gardens network was the idea of offering cheap public liability insurance for members gardens. An insurance broker was consulted and said it would be possible to do this, however the value to the organisation fell when other sources of cheap insurance cover became available. That demonstrated how first-movers seize opportunity in an idea that is copyable. Insurance was not something that could be made exclusive.
The network effect
Social networks provide value through the network effect. The Network Effect describes how the value of a network is proportional to the number of active nodes — members in our example.
The permaculture conversation continues to take place predominately on Facebook because of preferential attachment—permaculture practitioners go to there because their colleagues are there, not necessarily because they support the platform. In 2023 we saw the same thing with Twitter/X. People left the platform after Musk took it over and opened the gates to dubious political entities. Although critical of Musk, many stayed with the platform because people reporting there, who they follow, have a long presence and migrating to a different platform would risk losing their followers.
There are online permaculture communities on other social media such as Reddit, however Facebook gained first-mover advantage in attracting permaculture practitioners because when it started it was almost all that there was on offer. Once established and despite the controversies over Facebook, permaculture social media presences attracted visitation through prefeerential attachment. As per the Network Effect they became nodes adding to the value of the network for those accessing it, which in turn attracted and retains people in a kind-of positive feedback loop that continues to build on itself.
The Network Effect has potential to create bonds between organisational members and, were an online conversation space for members to be set up and its use stimulated by an organisation, there would be the possibility of creating greater cohesion within the organisation and, perhaps, generating ideas to boost membership.
Imagination
Competition for attention, for membership and for funding is an ongoing challenge for voluntary organisations. That is no more so than now at a time when the internet makes it possible for people to often-freely access those things once available only through organisations and their courses and workshops.
The question for organisational leadership is this: in five years time, will your organisation be involved in innovative new projects or will it still be struggling to do what it is already doing?
The answer is contingent on the availability of imagination and know-how. Kevin Kelly’s generatives might just provide that edge needed to push the organisation from idling to movement.
