Acronym

Our final interview in this month’s “community” series on Acronym is with Jennifer Ragan-Fore, director of new media and member communities for ISTE, the International Society for Technology in Education. Jennifer has spent several years working with volunteers and other ISTE staff to develop member communities in Second Life and elsewhere online. I had the opportunity to talk to her about that experience and what she’s learned from it—and she gave me so many good answers I’m splitting it into two posts.

What were some of your goals when you first set out to build up ISTE’s member communities?

Initially, one of our big goals was to reach out to a younger demographic. I think this is generally a goal for most associations right now, but it’s especially true for our association—our core base of members are the first-mover technologists from the late 1970s and early 1980s who are now starting to retire. We have a big directive to infuse the association with younger generations of members as more and more of our members retire.

We thought, as we were starting these initiatives, that we would be reaching the under-35 crowd. We were sort of surprised to find that we weren’t necessarily doing that. The people who were embracing tools like Second Life and Facebook were a little bit younger than our general demographic, but not significantly younger—people in their 40s and 50s. We were a little surprised by that, but we ran with it, and it’s been a great value-add to our existing member benefits. And we continue to use other strategies to reach out to that younger demographic now.

Were there other things that surprised you as you started and continued the effort to build member communities at ISTE?

So much of our activity, like a lot of associations, is centered around the single face-to-face opportunity at our annual meeting. We were pleasantly surprised that there really was an interest and a need out there in the membership to contribute throughout the year—not just show up and help with events, but actually to be able to engage in a deep way and do it on a regular basis throughout the year.

Are there any new challenges that you’re facing now that these communities are maturing?

I think a challenge with any virtual community like these is that once you get to a certain point, the community becomes a lot more mainstream. And with an influx of new members, the initial core group of people can feel a little lost in the shuffle, where once they were a small, cohesive group.

When you start out with a smaller group—maybe a few dozen growing into a few hundred—it’s a very insular kind of community. And it’s really desirable to that group, I think, to know everyone there. As it grows, it’s not necessarily the same faces every time. There’s sort of a rebalancing at that point, and you try to figure out how to gain equilibrium as a community, because not everyone is known in the same way. It also means that you have to set up more structure with community rules, and you may not know every single personality at play. It does take it out of the grassroots level. You just have to make it a little more structured, but at the same time, also figure out how to retain the grassroots feel even while you’re setting up these structures.