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NICA ONLINE: Vision Scope (Introduction)Objective: Enhance Virtual Community of NW Communitarians
Objective: Increase NW IC Web Site Traffic
Objective: Improve NW IC Exposure
Objective: Increase NICA Membership
Conclusion
Project Ideas
Board of Advisors
Program Manager
Objective: Improve NW IC Exposure
Note: The content below was written prior to the addition of the Objective: Enhance Virtual Community of NW Communitarians was added to the NICA ONLINE project. This is an ambitious objective, which is expected to decrease the level of investment made on the Improve NW IC Exposure objective.
Most people don't know what an intentional community is. What exposure we do get is often strangely colored, since media producers use ICs as interesting oddities for entertainment purposes. Unsurprisingly, media coverage of ICs is sometimes less than positive. In extreme cases, ICs have been depicted as freak shows, where drug-addled cult members commit mass suicide. In contrast, cohousing projects, with their relatively well-funded, mainstream approaches, have worked hard to develop positive press coverage.
This project will increase the exposure of positive NW IC contributions on the web. It will help "mainstream" visitors see the many positive ways that the IC movement has influenced our broader culture.
One goal is to more closely associate ICs with positive values held more broadly throughout our culture. Many ICs value individual and group empowerment, living more natural lives, use of consensus decision-making, living lightly on the earth, organic gardening, etc. This project will develop web pages which are "traffic magnets" to attract people interested in a number of related topics. These visitors will come to the NICA site because of their interest in specific IC-related topics, but as a result will also be exposed to ICs more broadly.
IC Movement-generated, Rather than Media-generated Coverage
Recently, more people have been exposed to ICs from episodes of two different “reality” television shows than from all issues of Communities magazine and the Communities Directory combined. The two shows featured one cohousing and one ecovillage IC. A future show by ABC has also been seeking an IC to feature in another "reality" show (see letter written in response). The TV spins presented in these entertainments were extremely distorted. Another recent National Geographic article (online supplement) on a commune presented it unfavorably – in a nutshell, the message was “naked hippies that have sold out to capitalism.” For an explanation of the distortions by another show, see the editorial on the Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage web site.
The NICA web site will reach out to a broader base of people and present messages more consistent with IC values and points of view. One requirement is for the NICA web site to be more accessible and attractive. The existing NICA web site was created on an extreme budget by people with limited web design skills. It is significantly less attractive and inviting than many NW IC web sites, e.g., Trillium Hollow Cohousing Emma Goldman Finishing Society, Woodard Lane Cohousing. In the industry, it is well established that strong design -- aesthetics and usability (navigation, information design, layout, etc.) -- increase site use by those visitors that reach the site. A redesign of the NICA site will lead more visitors to explore and learn -- and to come back.
The current site presents ICs and related content only through the written word. While writing is critical, it is much less accessible than other forms of media. Even worse, the NICA web site makes extensive use of long articles – sometimes 10-20 pages long (when printed). On commercial networks, heavily used pages are never more than 1-2 print pages long and they almost always include photographs – and increasingly, audio or video clips. Except for academics and the most seriously motivated, people read content on the web in paragraph-sized chunks and not articles or papers or book chapters. Even the successful commercial web sites with longer articles, e.g. MSNBC and Salon, have shifted to multiple pages, rather than single, long pages. (Note: these long, heavily cross-linked pages in this Vision Scope illustrate this problem).
One very cost effective way to engage a larger number of users is to weave an attractive web -- chop up the existing content from some of our existing long articles, add photos and video where available, and then encourage heavy linking to and from these pages. This project will include a full site redesign; the details of which will be specified during the analysis phase.
Associate ICs with related core competencies
An exciting opportunity exists for NW ICs to acknowledge and share broadly the many "core competencies" that have developed over the years of NW IC development -- some of which are now in the culture at large. These include use of consensus decision-making, facilitation skills, conflict-resolution, various forms of organic gardening, green construction, forms of alternative energy, community development (outside of the IC context), and many more.
Content on IC-related topics is much more popular than IC-specific content. One metric for this is the number of times people search on particular phrases using major search engines, e.g. Google, Yahoo, MSN. The following table shows frequency of searches for a number of different search phrases:
Search Queries |
Google Search Phrase |
360669 |
|
297586 |
|
165857 |
|
154655 |
|
133904 |
|
121381 |
|
100941 |
|
100624 |
|
90240 |
|
75088 |
|
70245 |
|
66113 |
|
63529 |
|
63230 |
|
53070 |
|
47912 |
|
44138 |
|
43094 |
|
42723 |
|
996 |
|
467 |
Number of searches for each search phrase.
Click on a search phrase to view the Google search results.The total number of search queries on the four top IC-specific phrases (community, communities, cohousing, and intentional community) was 201,480. The total for the four top IC-related phrases (earth, utopia, lifestyle, and homestead) was almost five times as much. Especially when we include the other phrases on this list, it can be seen that IC-related phrases claim much greater public attention.
In order for mainstream users to connect with IC web sites, they must be able to find them. Search engines are the dominant way that people seek information on the web. Accordingly, IC web pages must appear prominently in the search results of the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, and MSN) for a targeted set of popular search phrases. Today, inspection of Google search results for each of the phrases above reveals that IC web sites are only prominent for the phrases farm, communities, cohousing, and intentional community (click on any phrase in the above table to view Google's result for that phrase). It is noteworthy that IC web sites do not appear prominently for the phrase community -- this needs to be remedied.
This project will use existing and new content to develop “traffic magnets” for a number of IC-related phrases. Not only will this attract visitors with interest in those areas, but they will associate the topics with NW ICs and the IC Movement. It may also be appropriate to weave this idea together with a virtual network of NW IC web sites.
Contact: Craig Ragland
Updated: 9/6/05