Reach Further

Reach Further works with businesses, educational & membership organisations to adopt & embed web 2.0 technologies to deliver learning & commercial advantage.

For businesses and organisations, we can help you:
- save money;
- save time;
- create new income streams;
- market and manage your own web presence;
- find and retain customers online.

For schools, colleges and universities, we can help you:
- market and manage your own web presence;
- expand your pool of learners;
- find enterprise partners;
- establish your expertise;
- develop staff skills in elearning.

We create online courses that:
- differentiate for different learners;
- encourage collaboration and action learning;
- make the most of your virtual learning environment;
- take your courses to businesses, the community and beyond.

For our latest news and blog posts, see below.

Despite the tremendous value that an online community can bring to a organisation or business, it’s never really true that “if you build it they will come”.
There are all sorts of reasons why online communities may fail. Recently many commentators have been covering the The Wall Street Journal Article by Ben Worthen titled “Why Most Online Communities Fail?” including Mike Gotta and Patrick O’Keefe. Ed Moran comments that “A disturbingly high number of these sites fail”.

While those of us who work in online communities might dispute the “high number” or “most communities fail” statements it nonetheless is useful to look at some of the reasons why online communities fail.

• The biggest reason for failure is relying on technology – whether it’s websites, forums, Web 2.0, social media, social networks or any of the buzzwords. Too many businesses spend massive amounts of money on the technology rather than the plans and processes and people that are what make up a community.
• Lack of proper strategic planning and management typically comes before failure. Community strategising, management and facilitation are key skills, and they don’t come from nowhere. Years of research and experience in community management have gone into Reach Further’s community model for example.
• Getting the wrong people to run it. If you ask a web designer or developer to design a site that’s what they’ll do – design a site – they’re probably not experts in running communities. Many companies then put their communities in the hands of an administrator or marketing officer. Again, these are not necessarily the people to run the communities successfully without the training and mentoring – the kind of training that Reach Further offers in e-moderating, for example.

Of course, an online community is still one of the most potent tools for a business to connect with its customers, employees, partners and other stakeholders.

• Communities can increase revenue per customer dramatically, i.e., 50%.
• Communities will increase product introduction success ratios.
• Communities amplify everything a company does - increasing effectiveness and decreasing costs.
• If done properly, communities will transform the way marketing works (reduced costs, improved effectiveness, new opportunities).
• Communities can revolutionise working practices within and between companies and organisations.

A community can establish and maintain a brand, provide feedback from users and purchasers, generate ideas and save time and money.

But anyone setting up an online community needs to be clearheaded: they will need to focus less on the initial technology and building of the site and much much more on planning and facilitating continuing community engagement.

Jack Schofield asked at the weekend “which women bloggers are worth a look?”

There are of course far too many to mention! But here are some of my favourites:

Lorelle VanFossen writes Lorelle on Wordpress, which is a wonderful source of information not just about Wordpress but about blogging in general and the wider world of Web 2.0 as well.

Danah Boyd researches youth culture on social networks.

Nancy White – online communities maven

Debbie Weil, very influential on business blogging

Eileen Brown Microsoft UK evangelist and a car freak too

Meg Pickard (UK)  I’m loving her recent post on potentially awkward social situations…

The Shiny Shiny gadget girls.

Not in the same league, but our very own Sharon Wood, Dee Grismond and Kay Holdsworth are beginning bloggers worth encouraging.

Central ITV news filmed Reach Further’s Helen Whitehead in a mini workshop at a school in Nottingham. Yesterday the story ran on prime time local news about the search by a group of young French artists to find the artist who drew Fat Gourg in our Kids on the Net project, Monster Motel. Luke has been found and is stunned to be an international celebrity nine years after creating a monster at the age of 7.

What a lovely story this is about how the Internet can be an opportunity for children to write (and draw etc.) for a world audience, and inspire a whole new group of young people! All writing that is submitted to Kids on the Net is fully moderated and published so safely that it took 5 years, a newspaper, a TV station and thousands of French fans to find Luke.

It’s wonderful that they were able to find Luke and interview him! Meanwhile, the current crop of children at his old school, Oakthorpe Primary, have submitted their own monsters who reside on the Monster Motel website in Fat Gourg’s Friends annex.

The story about how Luke was found is covered today in the Leicester Mercury newspaper 

Our project Kids on the Net features today in the Leicester Mercury. In one of those strange but heartwarming Internet stories, a monster (”Fat Gourg”) created by a seven-year-old, Luke,  during a writing workshop at a Leicestershire Primary School led by Reach Further’s Helen Whitehead in 1999 has become something of a cult figure for a group of French artists and cartoonists.

“In 2003, the drawing was discovered on the website by famous French online cartoonist Pierre Primen. The 25-year-old raved about Fat Gourg on Primsworld, his website dedicated to funny cartoons and drawings, which gets 50,000 visitors a day, sparking instant adulation.   Every year, thousands of fans gather in groups on August 8 - the “eight” symbolising his fat body - for Fat Gourg Day.

“He has a Friends Reunited profile, where he is listed as single and retired, and there is a Facebook page dedicated to finding Luke.”

Now the hunt is on to find Luke. His French fans “would like to know if Luke remembers drawing this monster. If he does, I guess we have to thank him for all the fun Fat Gourg has brought to us, and we have millions of questions to ask him about this character. We also have to offer him a statue to pay tribute to his oeuvre!”

Fat Gourg can be found in the Monster Motel on the Kids on the Net website.  Children worldwide are invited to contribute their own monsters to this ongoing project.

Our academic colleagues, clients and partners might be interested in the webinar we are running tomorrow, Friday 27th June, in the ELESIG community. ELESIG (the Higher Education Academy’s Special Interest Group for the Learners’ Experience of Elearning)  is a community for researchers and practitioners who are looking at evaluating the learners’ experiences of learning technologies in their courses. The webinar will take place in ELESIG’s Ning social network space, and we will be introducing the event with a live online conference in Elluminate, thanks to Elluminate’s generous donation of an online conference room for ELESIG’s meetings.

Schedule

10 am: ELESIG introduction in Elluminate room
11 am: Discussion of Lee Harvey’s “Researching the Student Experience: An Action Implementation Cycle“
12 noon: Using online diaries and journals to evaluate learning (Debby Cotton, Emma Purnell and Sue Murray)
3.30 pm: A look at the MoleNet Project - m-Learning for m-People - with Richard Brook

More information at ELESIG (Membership is free).

Reach Further’s Liz Cable is profiled in the Independent’s Flexible Working feature today.  Reach Further is very committed to flexible working and as well as providing various solution for its own employees works with others to develop skills in managing remote teams and networking online.  You can see some of our ideas at our flexible working portal Beyond9to5.

It was a privilege to be present last night at the telling of a series of truly inspirational success stories about learner achievement. The Awards dinner for the West Yorkshire Adult Work-Based Learner Awards was a lovely occasion - a genuinely warm celebration of a group of people who started out ordinary but became exceptional in their outstanding commitment and dedication to learning while generally also coping with heavy personal demands and jobs.

After only a year, the West Yorkshire Lifelong Learning Network has set in motion a number of initiatives designed to empower learners, employers and educational institution. Those who won these first Awards are a great example to prove that it is never too late to learn, that learning doesn’t stop when you leave school and that traditional routes of school>sixth form>university are not the only ways to success.

Given that the UK must upskill its workforce substantially to maintain its economic health in the next couple of decades, and that the majority of the people who will need qualifications have already left school, this means that work-based and vocational learning opportunities are absolutely key.

Helen Whitehead, Liz Cable and Sharon Wood of Reach Further attended the dinner, where Sharon received the Award in the Culture, Media, Sports and the Arts; Leisure, Hospitality and Tourism Category. Congratulations to Sharon on her award - the first of many more well-deserved successes we are sure. More pictures soon!

More photos soon.

Recently I’ve been finding that a lot of emails promoting events and conferences, and even company newsletters, are arriving in my inbox just in image form - or PDF - with an email saying no more than “see attachment”. I find these very frustrating and here’s why.

Am I the only one who sees this as really bad practice? Maybe I’m old fashioned - I am still very cautious about using HTML emails! - but there are several reasons as a community manager and blogger that I find this very frustrating.

• Many people can’t see images in email or have them stripped out - that includes small businesses, educational institutions and large companies! I haven’t allowed images in my email since I started to get offensive images in spam emails many years ago. And if you’re reading email on a Blackberry or other mobile - you haven’t a hope!
• Many of these attachments are too large for small email quotas.
• It’s quicker to see the text (in my email software for example I have to click to see an image or a PDF then open a program to see it in - but text is there to glance at straightaway)
• It’s quicker to scan a few lines of text in a small Email window than to have to scroll round a large coloured image or page on the screen to glean the details of the event.
• With text I can easily cut and paste the event info into my calendar and am much more likely to do so.
• With text I can easily cut and paste the event or information into forums and news in any of the many communities I run (for a recent advert for an education event I could have quickly advertised it to 1000 teachers!). I don’t want to have to retype from an image or open a PDF where the layout often precludes cutting and pasting.
• With text I can easily cut and paste into any one of several blogs and create a post about the event that’s more than an advert and thus even better promotion in the blogosphere and on Google. I haven’t time to retype information - and remember - I’m usually doing this as a favour.
• Images and PDFs are designed for print purposes - as flyers or posters - and aren’t appropriate for digital delivery.

I’m not saying don’t send attractive flyers or adverts (although please check the size before clogging up our inboxes). Just let us have the text AS WELL!

With so many of these image-only attachments arriving I’m beginning to think I’m the only person who feels this way. Apart from the adverts looking good if you print them out and post them on a wall or leave them on a table - what good reason is there for delivering email marketing like this? Please let me know.

Stephanie Booth recently posted an argument against threaded conversations on blogs. I have to say that I disagree to a large extent with what she says as well as the people she quotes, although I don’t deny some of her points. I believe that there is a very good case for threaded discussion - that is, discussions in which replies are indented below the post to which they refer so that a conversation can look like a “tree” with branches, each a different but related conversation. I have used and encouraged threaded discussions in a variety of places and spaces - including communities of practice and online learning groups.

In a community you often WANT to start a lot of conversations and encourage community members to explore the issues in their own way. If such a community is built around a blog then threaded blog comments may be one way to encourage interaction.

If I’m exploring a subject for research or other reasons and want as much feedback as possible on all aspects, then threaded discussions/comments are good. In a learning context - if I’m using a blog to stimulate my students’ learning, it can be easier for them to respond to the stimulus in my post if they are able to continue to reply to one another in distinct branches of the thread.

An asynchronous online discussion is NOT like a pub (as Stephanie quotes ” five fresh fish” as saying): asynchronous online discussion allows time for reflection, editing, and measured response carefully framed rather than the off the cuff rapid-fire of a pub or synchronous online conversation - yes some discussion threads are like that - but it’s one of the great strengths of asynchronous interaction that it has these new features.

Therefore chronological and linear is NOT always - or even principally - the best format for such interactions - threaded online discussions have very particular affordances for interaction, sharing and learning that - skilfully managed and e-moderated - are not available in any form of live or synchronous discussion. We shouldn’t try to make online conversations replicate the methods of interaction already available - of course it is unlikely to replicate such interactions well - it’s a whole new way of interacting and we should explore the possibilities. I have seen some fabulously creative uses of threaded discussions (e.g., on the old trAce community Webboard) as well as spectacular examples of deep collaborative learning - some in my own classes.