[About NICA] [Resources] [Communities] [Communities Seeking Members]
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: Increase NW IC Web Site Traffic
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 Increase NW IC Web Site Traffic objective.
Web sites have become the least expensive way to communicate with large audiences. NW Intentional Communities (ICs) have created more than 100 web sites. Since these web sites are independently hosted and traffic information is generally not shared, the number of people visiting these web sites is unknown.
Larger numbers of visitors to an IC web site increases the site's potential for helping the community meet its needs. For communities in formation, more visitors leads to more members. More visitors also enables greater impact as ICs share their values and activities with the broader, mainstream culture. Three aspects of increasing traffic to NW IC web sites are considered below:
Grow Traffic to NICA Web Site
In conjunction with traffic-building activities, a full NICA web site re-design is required (as described under the objective Improve IC Exposure). There are several modifications required to make the web site more professional and attractive to visitors, but the most important tasks from a traffic flow perspective are to improve navigation and to remove dead links and dead ends. First, before any redesign work, we will modify the most heavily used NICA web pages - letting visitors to those pages reach the "main" NICA pages.
Several web metrics and analytical methods will be used to learn how best to increase the number of relevant visitors to NICA and NW Community web sites. New traffic will consist of people specifically looking for ICs and people interested in related topics, e.g. group process, organic gardening, etc.
The existing NICA web site consists of a few "Main NICA Pages"and the Resources section (largely created by Rob Sandelin, and originally designed for print distribution). Because of the print-focus, the Resources section is filled with dead end pages -- that is, if you get to one of its pages, there is no way to link elsewhere. For example, the page Interpersonal Relationships and Conflict Resolution has no links on it. Visitors who find this page using search engines or links from other web sites will not even know they are on the NICA web site -- and they cannot navigate to other NICA pages. This is particularly problematic since that page was the most heavily viewed "NICA" page in June, 2005 -- it was actually viewed more often than the NICA homepage! As shown in the chart below, pages in the Resources section receive more views, almost 3 times as many, as the main NICA pages.
The main NICA pages are viewed
less than the Resource Pages
We will leverage the Resource pages to introduce visitors to NICA. One low-cost way to do this is by simply adding NICA navigation links to the most heavily used Resource pages. The NICA header with links to the main NICA pages has been added to this Resource page on Finding Land.
Another issue with Resource articles is the lack of association with ICs. While ICs are the context within which the pages exist, any connections to ICs are often hidden or obscure -- once again, see the page on Finding Land, for which the NICA header provides the only connection to ICs. Even in the deeper articles, IC references often use the phrasing "communities" or "groups," which would generally be interpreted as business, church, or educational organizations. Part of NICA's mission is to promote intentional communities aims and values -- which is harder if our content does not associate the values with ICs. We want people to apply the IC methods and techniques, understanding explicitly where they came from.
Several other methods will be employed to grow NICA traffic, as well. These include increasing the number and quality of links to the NICA web site from other web sites -- we can generate much more traffic by simply asking the web masters of relevant sites to add links to the NICA site. The project will also improve the positioning of NICA web pages within the search results in the major engines, by means of a variety of methods collectively known as Search Engine Optimization.
Move Traffic to Where it is Most Valuable
The need for web site traffic differs across the life cycle of each IC. For new ICs, additional members are often critical to the community's ability to survive and/or thrive. Web sites are extremely efficient marketing tools for helping people understand an IC and potentially join.
For example, out of Songaia Cohousing Community's 13 original member families, 4 discovered the community via the Songaia web site. Because of our active traffic-building efforts (mostly done prior to construction in 2000), the Songaia web site home page has now had more than 37,000 visitors. Today, Songaia has no openings, yet the web site continues to have daily visitors. The chart below shows the average daily visits for the NICA Community List page compared to the Songaia home page:
Traffic on the NICA Community List page (in Yellow) is similar
to that for the Songaia homepage (Red line).As you can see, with traffic at similar levels, the NICA Community List page is not likely to send many new visitors to the Songaia page. In order for the NICA Community List page to have much impact in sending visitors to individual community sites, its own traffic needs to increase substantially.
Communities in formation can be desperate for new members, yet their web sites are often quite new and tend to have little traffic. Once a community is established, its need for new members often drops sharply. Cohousing communities, for example, need members prior to selling (or building) the new units, but may have few memberships available afterwards. In almost five years since construction, Songaia has only had one unit turn over, yet the Songaia web site continues to attract visitors... while other NW ICs actively seek new members. Other types of ICs similarly have membership needs which ebb and flow with the balance of members and available housing.
NICA can make it easier for its web site visitors to reach ICs with openings by making them more visible -- on the NICA web site, as well as at many other web locations. National IC organizations and the 100+ web sites operated by the NW ICs themselves provide a rich potential for coordinated managment of traffic across like-minded groups.
Create a Virtual Network of NW IC Web SitesNote: This topic requires more research and active collaboration across NW communities. Creating a virtual network requires the participation of NW IC members.
Many organizations have IC web sites relevant to NICA:
Many organization web sites are relevant to NICA, including national organizations and NW ICs.Linking from the national organizations to the NICA web site is minimal; what does exist is so buried that traffic contributions to NICA are negligible. None of these national web sites include regional organizations within their basic framework -- each has centralized, national databases and each seeks direct relationships with all ICs within their scope:
Fellowship for Intentional Communities All Intentional Communities, world wide Coho/US = Cohousing Association of the US All Cohousing developments/projects in US Canadian Cohousing Network All Cohousing developments/projects in Canada Federation of Egalitarian Communities Egalitarian communities making specific commitments, including dues Ecovillage Network of the Americas All Ecovillages in North, Central, and South America Some NW ICs fall within the scope of each of these national organizations (at least some of which receive relatively high traffic), so more prominent links to NICA would strongly improve NICA's ability to coordinate traffic to NW ICs.
The role that NICA plays relative to the national organizations must be clarified. NICA is in a strong position to build and maintain more meaningful relationships with NW ICs (more frequent communications, local collaboration around events, marketing, community fairs, face-to-face meetings, etc.). National organizations have generally focused on larger scale projects -- general topical information, national databases, print publications, and selling product.
The NICA web site provides links to all NW ICs listed in the FIC Communities Directory. (Until recently, NICA maintained a separate NW IC database, focused on regional views and maps. It was, however, time-consuming to maintain, so NICA chose to reallocate the web resource and to better collaborate with FIC.) NICA also provides links to those NW ICs which request inclusion on the Communities Seeking Members page. This page is partially redundant with content on the FIC web site, and may be another candidate for "outsourcing" to national partner(s).
One online role for NICA is to help NW ICs take advantage of the resources provided by national organizations. To a limited degree, NICA already does this. For example, SheFarm's listing in the FIC Directory resulted from their emailed request for listing on the NICA Communities Seeking Members page. SheFarm learned of NICA from its regional activities, but was unfamiliar with the FIC -- with its lower NW visibility. This example suggests that NICA can improve in helping NW ICs take advantage of broader online resources, as well as helping national organizations better serve and connect with NW ICs.
Careful inspection of the web sites of FIC, Coho/US, NICA and a number of NW ICs indicates there is great potential to improve in helping site visitors meet their needs. Today, these sites -- created in isolation -- do not combine to make an effective network with deep linking. While the FIC, Coho/US, and NICA sites all provide links to individual community sites, they are in the context of isolated database records and are solely to site homepages, with few links to the content within IC web sites.
Based on previous experience with other, highly-instrumented web sites, after a visitor finishes with a specific NW IC web site, most press the Back button. They leave the NW IC site and return to the Search Engine or national IC organization site they were last on. Today, they simply cannot move directly to another NW IC web site. This is unfortunate for the visitor and the other NW ICs, as the most relevant destination for the visitor will usually be other NW IC sites.To illustrate this, let's suppose Joan wants to live in cohousing in the area north of Seattle. Using the FIC Directory, she conducts a search for Washington Cohousing Communities. Because she's heard of Songaia, she navigates to its web site and is disappointed to learn that Songaia has no openings. From the Songaia web site, there is no way that Joan can discover that Sharingwood, a nearby cohousing community, currently has units available. While the Songaia web master could easily embed links on their site, maintaining them presents some difficulties -- besides, nobody asked them to do so. Note: Since Songaia's FIC Directory listing is kept current, Joan could have seen that it has no openings; this is not possible from Sharingwood's FIC Directory Listing, as it was last updated in Oct. 2004.
This project will explore working with NW IC site webmasters to create a virtual network of web sites. This would enable some of the participating web sites' traffic to be “managed” -- to invite visitors to travel from one site to the next. To succeed, this traffic management must be accomplished with little effort by NW IC site managers. Some existing models for centrally managing cross-site traffic include WebRings (IC WebRing) and Google Ads (see the text ads on the right side of the IC WebRing page).
Large commercial web sites, e.g. Yahoo or MSN, have learned to attract users to different web sites within their network, by providing invitations to explore related content. For example, an article on exploring wine country might include links to purchase wine or cookbooks using wine. It might present links to BnBs or articles on wine's relationship with health. Within most commercial networks, many pages present related links -- and increasingly, web advertising is taking on this form. These related links draw users into browsing other parts of the network, learning about other opportunities. This also has the effect of retaining visitors within a network of web sites and gives all web sites within the network greater potential to reach more people.
Creating a virtual network of NW IC web sites will better serve the needs of all participating NW ICs -- helping them attract members, sell homes, and provide other goods and services. NICA could also directly benefit from management of such a network by increassing its support base (Increase NICA Membership).
Contact: Craig Ragland
Updated: 8/18/05