Web governance for charity & voluntary sector websites

I have been working with several charities lately and am collecting insights on governance for such organisations.
In Ireland the state of online development in the charitable sector is mixed. It ranges from the very sophisticated to the quite basic.
In terms of governance support, the best setup I have seen consisted of a Web manager + 2 developers + 1 designer + 1 editor + 2 content writers. Not bad if you can get it (& if you resource it properly)!
However, my research also shows that many sites are managed by 1 person with a broad range of responsibilities. Inevitably, such people are badly overstretched. The result is that online potential is not maximised.
This is especially so given the emergence of extra online assets that also require management, e.g. Facebook, Twitter.
In the UK, I am aware of charities such as Oxfam with a web team of +/-30 people. Indeed, I believe the cancer charity Macmillan has 4 people solely responsible for social media.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Dave said...

Interested to read your findings. Having worked with charities in the past and also having recently tendered for some work for charities I have found the biggest obstacle to be lack of governance as you so rightly identify.

Unsure of how to mitigate for this. Education springs to mind as a possible course of action, but my experience has been that while trying to be professional and educate those involved, my proposals are passed over in favour of those who stick to the tender and ultimately deliver a solution that fails to deliver because of lack of resources.

In other words while trying to educate and ultimately deliver a better solution I seem to alienate those involved by making things complicated as I try and explain why there standard Request for Tender itself is not suited to their needs.

Monday, January 17, 2011  

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