It's a Ning thing

A few months ago I attended a training session organised by the Arts Council on all things digital and the arts. It was a good session and something I'll probably refer to again in the future because I got a lot out of it. Alongside the training, which happened across the country, there were a series of social networks set up in order to facilitate continued conversation. The South East network can be found here. I'm not sure that the conversation has really continued as yet but I'm hopeful it will. (Actually since I started writing this there's been a move to create a nationwide network with the regions represented in groups within it. I think that's a really good thing.) The social network is hosted by Ning, it was the first time that I'd heard about it though it's been around for a few years. Ning.com allows anyone to sign up and create a network.

In the lead up to the current show at Fabrica I had a conversation with Natasha Ba-Abdullah who jobshares the Front of House Manager role and has responsibility for volunteer development, about her need for something, a blog she thought, that could be a focus for the volunteers, a place for them to go for information. Like most small arts organisations, Fabrica is heavily reliant on volunteers, at any one time we have 60-odd signed up. One of the big challenges of Tasha's role is email management, there are a huge number of emails going backwards and forwards with the volunteers, which is both time-consuming and frustrating for everybody and she wanted a solution for that. Then as often happens in small organisations like this we both got very busy doing other things. (Insert montage here to show time passing). Because it had been knocking around in the back of my mind, I sent out a request to our followers on Twitter for examples of Nings they used, good or bad experiences in setting them up etc because I thought it might be a good solution for Tasha. People were, as always, generous with their thoughts and experiences and that, along with my own research, started to give me a good picture of what a Ning could do and what it could be. Last week I sat down with Tasha and asked her what she needed from this volunteer 'hub'. Her answers were-

• A place for Fabrica to post information that the volunteers need
• A place for Fabrica to post opportunities the volunteers may be interested in
  
• A social space for the volunteers to meet
• A place to promote themselves and what they're doing
• A space in which they can offer and ask for help
• A way of reducing the number of emails sent to and from volunteers
  

A Ning seemed to answer all those needs and so we set up 'Fabrica Volunteers', unimaginative I know but keeping it simple and descriptive seemed right. Tasha and I are currently the only members and we are populating the site with some content so the small group of volunteers we invite to test it out won't be faced with emptiness. I'll blog again about the Ning I'm sure because ultimately we hope the volunteers will drive its development and make it a useful tool for themselves. I have some thoughts on my perception of its value for Fabrica which I'll blog about soon, maybe with some feedback from the early test volunteers.