I need some support/ideas/suggestions guys. (Or maybe just a good therapist and a prescription for valium)

I work for a small non-profit (less than 50 employees) in the social services field. (Translation: Not tech people.) Last fall, I launched our XOOPS Intranet with all the bells and whistles. At the launch, I spent the better part of the staff meeting defending why our organization needed an Intranet. (The common complaint being that it's just one more thing they have to check every day. In the past, people got a flurry of emails as to who was going to be where that day). Slowly but surely, the staff began to log on and at the very least, use the calendar to find out who's in/out for the day.

In addition to the basics (pical, links, staff list, smartfaq, headlines, suggestion box, xdirectory, downloads, forums), I've got all our policies and procedures online, and I've even created Camtasia tutorials on how to post news articles, send private messages, post calendar events, all our templates are online, etc etc. I've posted pictures of our holiday parties and different events. I've written articles about how blogging is changing the way non-profits get their message out and articles on how portals can be used. I've tried to get articles posted whenever a new employee is hired.

Fast forward to a year later. The only thing being used by everyone is the calendar. People are still sending mass emails to staff instead of posting their messages on the Intranet. I'm the only one posting news articles. The forums are a ghost town.

In the past year, I was asked to create 4 more XOOPS sites, only one of which has been officially launched. This site is not very interactive, mainly because there is no online facilitation of discussion (which is not my job).

I've been trying to pinpoint the barriers to having a successful XOOPS site, and have come up with the following:

1) The whole notion of online collaboration is new to people -- especially people who aren't techies. It's almost as if people are scared of the technology. I've built these sites with everything they need to collaborate online... how do I entice them to use it?

2) To a non-techie, XOOPS is intimidating. I'm in the process of creating flash tutorials on how to use the news module, calendar, etc. People don't want to spend the time to learn how to use it. (I can't tell you how many times I've had to manually reset a password because people can't or won't follow the instructions on generating a new one!)

Are other people experiencing similar problems? Do you have any suggestions for me?

I could use all the help (and support) I can get right now...

thanks,

Kristine

Just thinking:
You try to modify style of work to XOOPS-site style of presentation and information exchange, maybe better will be analise habits of co-workers, find waek places and suggest some more powerful solution?
I can't write detailed plan, because I know nothing about your field. I only have some successful and some failed attempt toincorporate new techniques in long-enstablished and very conservative structures (education, education management, shops) and got some experience during these games

I don;t have an actual suggestions or solution, but I do recognize this problem.
I have a private but quit large and wellknown dutch adoptionwebsite. People can submit links, news and events. But somehow they prefer to send their links, news and events by using our contact form instead of making use of the 'submit news/links/event' button within the main menu.
Indeed it looks as if they are scared to use those possibilities, leave alone if they have acces to a part of the administration section.
Some while ago I've made a website for a small female organisation. Within this organisation are all kind of members, some of them even work with computers. Nevertheless they managed to F***-up the whole website. (I've never could find out what they exactly did. if you ask they don;t know what they have done) This resulted that I had to make and launche this website again. And now.....nobody is posting news, make use of the forum or whatever. It is a sleeping website.
I gave some ppl limited admin acces so they cannot damage the website again. Nevertheless it looks indeed as if ppl are affraid to use a very simple and easy website system. Regardless the given tuuts and howto's docs.
In Dutch we have a saying: wat de boer niet kent vreet hij niet.
Rough translated: what the farmer doesn't know he's not gonna eat.

If you ask me......ppl are to lazy to put any time and effort in something they actually not want to know. They don't want to learn it either because of a lack of interest. It is a fight against unwilling walls. Unfortunately.

Grtz., Shine

LB and Shine, thank you both for your responses.

I wasn't so much asking for a detailed plan on how to get users to use the XOOPS sites I've created, but rather if other people were having a similar experience in promoting online collaboration to non-technical people and if anyone had any suggestions.

It's one thing to open a XOOPS site to a bunch of developers and have them use it... it's a different story when we're talking about users who have limited internet skills.

And Shine, I agree. People don't want to spend the time to learn how to use the sites. Whether it's laziness or fear, or a mixture of both, I don't know.

Perhaps I should rephrase my original question to: For those of you who have successfully implemented XOOPS sites for non-technical groups, what three things did you do to ensure success?"

I've build a succesfull site for a small community of non-tech people, although it's not a XOOPS one but E-xoops (fork of XOOPS 1).

What I did was rebuild guestbook to coffeecorner where everyone could post nonsens. They were enthousiastic about that, resulting in 3500 posts in one year by only 30 members!

Also I have a picture gallery allowing to send e-cards. That's how I attracted people to the newly made site, sending them e-cards. The old site they were using was a static html site and seeing what features the new site has made them come back.

Also it's wise to use blocks on your site with information about what's on the rest of your site, new links, new pictures, latest post in the coffeecorner. That way when people browse their e-card they might get encouraged to browse the rest of the site and when they get triggered they might even post a message. If they do, you should reply on that, that way they will come back again and talk to others about it...

Once you posted new news, pictures or made new features you could send your members an email every week with links to new stuff on the site.

Hope these tips will help you.... sccs!

I run ten different State Law Enforcement Agency sites. To keep them coming back and to keep them interested in coming back I kept the website (Forum, News, RSS Feeds, and Video) material specific to their agencies theme.

Going back a year or so, when I started the website. I had one large site combining everyone on this site. There was a lot of arguing (my agency can beat-up your agency) (my car looks better and runs faster than your's) etc. This didn't work as the news, feeds, etc. did not always apply to them so no one replied....it became a ghost town also.

Moving forwarded to today. I have a homepage for everyone to communicate and talk about their agency, then I have individual websites specific to their agency. Everything in those Agency sites are agency specific right down to the RSS feeds, news headlines, downloads, and recently, the photo gallery so they can show pictures of helping those unfortunate people devasted by hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Mississippi, etc.

They keep coming back to see and read about what is happening with there job (Union News), (Agency News), (Policy & Procedures), (Agency Announcements) and watch videos and view photos related to their specific job.

I also make sure not to list or show in their specific website any thing related to another agency. I believe this makes them feel like it is their site and they want to contribute as much as they can to its success. I have also notice it seems to be a competition of sorts.

Each SLEO (State Law Enforcement Officer) member can register in the other's website, so they see what the other agency has posted and sure enough, you start seeing the trend spread to the other agency websites.

Hope that helps!

I feel your pain! I can emphasize with everything you said. Implementing a content management system within an organization isn't as easy as it might seem. We moved our work site to XOOPS about 2 years ago, and have been trying to get our program managers to take on the role of 'section editor', for their particular areas. They said they wanted more control so dammit, we gave it to them!

Two *years* down the track and I'd say about one third of our professional staff are actually using the system to post their own stuff. The rest either do nothing, or email material to those few that do use it and ask *them* to put it up! I guess I would call the site a partial success, but I do feel frustrated, because it could be an outstanding site if everyone contributed.

I would agree fully with the two points you listed at the bottom of your post, particularly #2. While using XOOPS is pretty simple, getting people to change the way they work even in simple ways is very difficult. People really can't be bothered unless they see something in it for themselves.

My general conclusions from our own site and in building a few sites for other organizations is:
* The number one killer of websites is lack of management support. The boss has got to get behind the site and encourage/mandate people to use it, or they just won't. For new sites, we now devote most of our initial efforts into pitching the concept at management trying to get them to understand and support it. If we can't get that, we don't build it.

* We try to get staff involved in planning and then building the site themselves, rather than handing it to them as a finished product. Despite being slower, if they've had a hand in designing the thing and in helping to set it up we find they are a lot more confident about using it, and also sort of proud of it too.

* To get staff involvement you also have to find a way to make the site an essential part of their core activities, ie. integrate it into their workflow. One of the more successful things we did was to routinely collect important documents and publications from across the organization. This has turned into a sort of digital reference library, which is the most popular part of the site. That's the one thing that they all contribute to without fail (even if its just emailing the documents for me to post, at least they're giving us the information!).

A summary email newsletter with links to stories/events etc is a good way to get people to link people to the site. Everyone reads their email :)

Bit of a rant, sorry :)

Getting people to use a new resource - even if it is internally in a company - is not easy. Especially not if they have no real need to use it.

The area is called Change Management and the points, Madfish listed, are all mentioned in many places:
- Management support
- User participation/ownership
- Build the need for the users to use it

There is tons of literature on the subject, here's a little selection, I used some three years ago:
http://www.pfdf.org/leaderbooks/l2l/spring2000/bridges.html
http://www.sba.gov/managing/leadership/changemanagement.html
http://www.managementfirst.com/change_management/articles/communications.php

All agree that without the three listed points, you won't get far.

Thank you everyone, I appreciate your well thought out answers. I know how busy everyone is and I appreciate the time you took to respond to my post.

Reintjan - the coffee corner and e-cards are a great idea. Thanks for suggesting this.

Sleo577 - I imagine you're using the multisite hack? I am in the process of building yet another XOOPS site, which will have very disparate groups. Your idea of ensuring each group views the site as their own is definitely something I need to keep in mind.

Madfish - your three points are right on the money. Having the entire management team support the site is so important. Defending the reasons why our organization needed an intranet at the launch/staff meeting should've been my first clue that this was going to be an uphill battle! As the one year anniversary is coming up, perhaps this is a good time to put out a survey/get feedback from staff as to what's working and not working on the site. I've also decided that with each new employee, I'll create their account and set notifications so they get an email when content is added to certain modules. (It's too bad we can't do this as an admin.) In addition, I'm going to do a little overview demo for new employees to acquaint them with the site.

Mith - thanks for providing those resources. I certainly have some reading to do! You know what they say, "The only people who like change are wet babies."

I just gotta say... I really appreciate the XOOPS community. You guys rock!

Thanks again,

Kristine