Geographically Diverse Organisations – Guidelines for an Online Strategy

Creating an online national web presence can be a daunting and time-consuming task not to mention the costs that are attached to such a project. If not planned out correctly, it can do more harm than good for your organisation in terms of branding and being found on the Internet.

These guidelines are written to save your organisation time, money and stress as well as to provide some best practices and ideas for consideration.

There are a number of well-established community organisations with a main national office and self-autonomous offices scattered all over the country and, in some cases, the world. Some examples include organisations such as churches, Lions, Freemasons, kindergartens, Iwi and the many internationally recognised organisations such as the Red Cross, Greenpeace and the RSPCA.

Why have a national/international online strategy

While an organisation name is generic, often the web presence and naming conventions are not generic. It is common for some local offices to have their own website while others do not. While those that do have a website often have various suffixes such as .org.nz, .net.nz, .co.nz or .com.

Generally, there is no pattern to finding the regional, national or international offices online. This makes it difficult for the stakeholders to find you in various locations or to get regional and local information. It also makes it easy for online fraudsters to commit criminal activities in the name of your organisation.

It is not uncommon for a local office to have a web savy staff member or volunteer who will promote their website to the point that the website is actually ranked higher in search results than the national office, hence creating confusion.

Such organisations lack a national web strategy that is brandable, informative to current members, innovative and will attract their current members to interact and new members to join.

Suggested plans

There are three main types of sites that can be used for national online strategies:

• Portal site where all offices are accessed from the one place
• Individual Sites that follow a branding plan
• Template style sites where offices can modify a site template.

Portal Site

Local, regional and international offices can be represented from the one web site. This is suitable for organisations that have little budget or lack the relevant skill sets throughout their organisation. Perhaps a web presence is not justifiable for many parts of the organisation.

The main benefits include:

1. One area for maintenance and updates
2. One address to manage and renew
3. Lack of confusion as to website address
4. Ability to make local and regional sections editable and fully maintained by the relevant office
5. The look and feel of the site will be consistent
6. One hosting bill of which could save thousands of dollars per month depending on the size of your oprganisation
7. Staffing costs would be reduced to the one person to oversee all the web sites. Typically a Web Manager
8. Ability to share resources such as images, downloads and video
9. Printing of letterheads, cards and other stationery can be consistent without the worry of redundant website and email addresses
10. Easier to maintain a united message
11. A template can be used so the people updating the local sites only need to add content with minimal technical skills
12. Local sites can be trouble-shot and maintained by the web manager.
13. Search engines will find your site and local sites and make your main site a priority.
14. Email addresses can be consistent
15. Offices can still have a web presence even though invidually it wouldn't be financially viable.

There are a number of options to having a portal style website for your regionally diverse organisation. Using a portal site concentrates on methods that require the least technical knowledge and can be done relatively quickly and simply.

Create a parent or main website that will be the first place people will visit to access their office page. The main site should include general information about your organisation.

From the front page there should be a way to access regional and local sections of your site. This can be achieved by a search box, a graphical image of a country or perhaps a list of sub sections to your site where people can access their local offices. The full contact details for each office could be included from the link.

Each local section on the parent website could be a sub-domain, i.e. an organisation called Tari with an office in Porirua could be accessed by http://porirua.tari.org.nz with http://www.tari.org.nz being the parent website.

Using a sub domain will allow a local office to offer a website address to their stakeholders and other interested parties. If the local office wants to use their own domain name, a domain name can be registered and pointed to the sub domain.

Using the correct Domain Name

If your organisation is a New Zealand-only based organisation, there are a number of options available that are New Zealand centric, typically .org.nz, .maori.nz, .iwi.nz or .net.nz .

If your organisation is Asia/Pacific-based or international then there are general options which are not restrictive to a country. Such options include .org, .asia and .com which are all widely regarded as generic domain names that can be associated to anywhere with the first two being recognised in the Asia/Pacific region.

Email with a Portal Site

Using the example address above, everyone can be assigned a standard format for an email address. Some benefits of this include:

1. Knowing a person's name can make it easy to guess an email address or remember it
2. Depending on your community, it can be more personable to have consistency in email addresses
3. If a volunteer or staff member moves to another office their email will stay the same

The first step is to create a format for email. Some suggestions are:

• FirstName.LastName@tari.org.nz
• FirstInitial.LastName@tari.org.nz
• FirstName@tari.org.nz

Using a person's title or regional location as an email can be detrimental and certainly removes the human aspect of your office if the email is intended for a person to respond. But for email such as general enquiries or information, you could use a regional name or have all enquiries go to the central office.

Putting it all together

A Content Management System (CMS) will need to be used to create a portal website. Which version you chose could depend on several factors such as staff skills and cost. But you should use a free Content Management System such as Drupal, Joomla or WordPress as they are not only free to use but there are many experts and knowledgeable people in the community who can assist with the system. This coupled with the fact that there are many resource websites and tutorials freely available on these systems. Your organisation will also have the freedom to move providers and hosting services with little hassle.

Beware of web hosting companies urging you to use their own Content Management Systems. These are typically expensive and if you ever change to a new provider it may be costly and full of technical issues that will be avoided by using a standard and well-used Content Management System.

A CMS will allow for multiple websites to be created and added to the main site. A CMS can be comprehensive or basic depending on your requirements. The minimum requirements you should have for a portal website are:

1. Ability to have multiple websites with various domains
2. Sub domains
3. User groups and permissions
4. Search Facilities
5. Easy to use for content writers
6. Blog and other Social Media capabilities
7. Open Source and popular

Iwi sites

There is a growing trend for Iwi to have websites to provide both information about their Iwi and to provide a membership and Iwi services to tribal members.

To have an Iwi site with hapu and whānau sub sites the same guidelines as the Portal site should be observed but with some minor differences.

The .iwi.nz domain should be the first preference for a domain name as this clearly identifies you as an Iwi. The full criteria for iwi.nz is available at http://www.register.iwi.nz .

There should be enough allowance to have hapu names registered within the .iwi.nz domain and these can be used to point at sub domains within your iwi site. The alternative to .iwi.nz could be .maori.nz. There are a number of creative ways to use .maori.nz to cater to your Iwi, hapu and whānau should .iwi.nz not be suitable for your Iwi.

Note: All .nz domain names will have macron capability in June 2010. You should carefully consider this when planning your Iwi online presence.

As opposed to regional names being used as email addresses for general information, the hapu name could be used.

Some consideration should also be give to whether all email addresses use the .iwi.nz address or whether you will utilise sub domain names or hapu names.

A sub domain name is a little more work but will put the hapu and whānau name before the Iwi name in your site address. If this is not your preference, then a folder with the hapu or whānau name will perform the same function as a sub domain name but will put the Iwi name first in your site address.

Individual websites

Sometimes it is not practical to have a portal website for your organisation. This could be for structural or even legal reasons.

If this is the case, then some cooperation is needed to have national guidelines in place that ensure local websites can be found easily and can be recognised as a part of the national organisation and not a forged website claiming to be from within your organisation.

The key topics should include domain names, layouts, use of organisation images, inclusion of a web link to and from the national website, email addresses, sub domains, search engine optimisation, ownership of online presence, social media and training.

These guidelines should be drafted by all interested parties, whether technical or not. This is more of a business plan and marketing strategy and will ensure your national organisaion is well represented online and identifiable as your organisation.

Choosing a domain name

A pattern and suffix should be decided on in the early stages of website design.
Patterns could include how to use the organisation name and region in the address such as Name-Region.org.nz or whether just the name is suitable.

All of the websites should at least share the same domain name suffix. Typically a New Zealand organisation will use .org.nz . The domain name will also be used for the website as well as for the email of the organisation.

The national website address could be used as the parent web address. Local and regional offices/groups can then be added to parent address as a sub domain name. Then redirected to other website addresses.

For example, http://chch.tari.net.nz clearly shows that tari.org.nz is the main website, but you are going to the Christchurch site of Tari. At any stage the Christchurch office could register their own domain name that will follow the sub domain. In essence both names can be used at the same time. This option gives the local office the choice.

If you have a good web host, adding the sub domain level name will by default give you email with the same address. Alternatively, you could have the Local/Regional name added to the end of the national address such as http://www.tari.org.nz/chch .

This pattern also makes it easier to find a local office by replacing the regional name with name of another region.

Email

Pattern for email addresses should be followed and utilise the sub domain or the parent web site address Three common examples include:

FirstName@
FirstInitial.Surname@
FistName.LastName@

Depending on your organisation's name, using the sub domain could become far too long. In this case simply using the main address for email could be considered.

Alternatively, a commonly known abbreviation for your organisation could be implemented specifically for email. If you do implement the abbreviation of your organisation as a domain name, ensure that the domain also reaches your website.

For example: karaitiana@chch.tari.org.nz be represented as karaitiana@tari.org.nz

Each regional and local office should have their region or local name prior to the @ in the email address for general enquiries and information.

For offices that have their own domain name, your organisation could apply for an email forward to the account so that the email addressed to the parent or sub domain will automatically be forwarded to the offices own email address. This will allow regional offices who already have their own domain name to be reached on the web and emailed by using the national policy without the end user knowing any different.

For the regional office it is a cheap and hassle-free option to be included within the national strategy.