One of the major benefits of working for City of Sanctuary is the range of things you get to be involved in. We aim to make towns and cities more welcoming towards people seeking sanctuary, and (within reason) there’s no limits on how we do it. Local groups are given complete freedom to decide what methods they want to use to further the cause in their locality, which has resulted in a number of creative and innovative ideas.

However, there is one big restriction on all our groups, and that’s resources. City of Sanctuary will never have boundless funds, so we need to utilise the best value methods we can, and take advantage of low cost or free options to the full.

Internet and communications technology has changed a lot in the last few years, with a steady stream of new innovations with differing uses and characteristics. What they have in common is that they tend to be cheap or free, and they tend to be social, and this makes them potentially vital tools for an organisation like ours.

Now there are clearly a lot of different types of social interaction, as there are lots of different types of people, so inevitably there are many different types of social media, each of which allows people to interact in a different way. The design of each particular site is optimised to allow and encourage the type of interaction which characterises it as a particular form. The resulting structure of these sites makes them far more suitable for some uses than others. I’ll try and explain this through the example of a problem we faced recently.

When I joined, City of Sanctuary already had a Facebook group. The movement had started just as the whole social media phenomenon was itself starting to gather pace, and the decentralised, open nature of the site seemed suited to the movement’s ethos and likely to prove a useful tool in expanding our reach and recruitment.

As the number of members of the group quickly increased to about 300, there was little doubting this, and as other cities outside Sheffield made ever more substantial steps towards becoming Cities, they began to start their own groups on the site.

Just as City of Sanctuary was developing, so was Facebook, adding new tools and applications for organisations and individuals to use to promote and publicise themselves and their causes. When I joined, one of the more recent of these was the ‘Page’ (bear with me). As opposed to the ‘Group’, which people can join but offers a fairly rigid and inflexible structure for communicating with and between members, the ‘Page’ is a more modern construction. Those who click to ‘become a fan’ of a Page are presented with a slicker looking more intuitive interface, with a news-feed style wall well suited to posting news, images and video.

Given the increasing number of new city based groups, it seemed the logical step to use this new tool to create a new national Page for the City of Sanctuary movement as a whole, which would act as an umbrella for all the specific city Groups. The old City of Sanctuary Group would be changed into a specific one for Sheffield, and people encouraged to be both a fan of the national Page and a member of their cities Group (if there was one). This would mean we could communicate with the right people when we needed to and leave space for further expansion.

So far, so simple (or so it seemed to me). However, this plan found a first hurdle in what I had thought was a sprint race, and in some ways is still struggling to get it over it.

Firstly, the new page was created, populated with some attractive content, and a message sent to all the members of the groups. The name of the old group was changed to Sheffield City of Sanctuary, a message sent to the members of the group explaining what we were doing, and a notice posted on the wall. All anyone had to do was click once in the message or wall post, then click on the ‘become a fan’ link on the new page. That was it.

At first, it seemed to be working. Most of the members of the Sheffield group clicked to become a fan of the new page, and as expected a few left the now Sheffield specific group. But then the transferring stopped. Of the 300 or so group members, 200 had become fans, but the rest seemed happy to stay in just the Sheffield group (despite many of them being clearly from elsewhere). No big problem you may think, they just need reminding. And they were, a couple of times, but with no discernible effect. As of today, the total national fans remain well below the numbers of members of the Sheffield group. As there are many members of the other city groups not in the Sheffield one, this makes little sense.

Now clearly there are a number of explanations for this. Firstly, many people who are members of Facebook don’t use it that much, logging in every now and then to do something specific like look at some photos or get back in contact with someone who’s number they’ve lost. Some people don’t check their private messages, preferring the strangely public method of wall posts for their communication. And City of Sanctuary is hardly the only member who’ll be sending them messages.

While these are all likely contributing factors, I believe this problem, while relatively minor in impact, is a good example of the structural limitations of such media, something which is often overlooked when considering the subject.

The fact is, essentially Facebook is a totally superficial medium. People log onto Facebook to look at photos of themselves and their friends, to tell other people what they are doing, and other such activities. What all these actions have in common is they are always fairly simple and effort free, and they tend to be for public consumption.

This is not a problem when you are collecting new members for their group. People who like to be seen as supporting your cause will not have a problem with clicking on a link that will show all the friends or anyone looking at their profile that they are a fan or member of your cause. But to get people to do anything less public (and easy) in support of your cause through Facebook is a whole other matter.

The whole structure of Facebook , from the profile where you define your self by your chosen profile picture and what books/films or music you like, to the newsfeed that informs all your friends of your every action, is fundamentally constructed in a way that makes every user acutely aware that their every action and presence on the site will be immediately reported to all their ‘friends’. The most distinct example of this is of course writing on someone’s wall, the only method of communication I know of where you don’t just want to tell someone something, but you want everyone you know and they know to know that you’ve told them it. It’s fair to say not every wall post is intentionally so exhibitionist, but it remains the case this is a uniquely and overtly public way of communicating.

The result of this structure is that engaging people/fans/members to take any action beyond the small, easy, and self-publicising can be difficult. When it came to joining our new Facebook page, the action may fulfil the first two of these qualities, but for people who had already joined a group (and thereby told everyone they had done so), joining another similar page was hardly going to be a priority. This is borne out by the relatively large number of people from outside Sheffield who remain a member of the Sheffield group – leaving a group being a slightly more difficult process that produces nothing in the way of positive self-publicity.

So does this mean that Facebook as a medium is useless as method for helping attract support to good causes? The answer is clearly not, but if it is to be useful we must start to be more aware of the inherent nature of it and other such media, and thereby how they can be used effectively to contribute to social movements and causes.

Basically the way Facebook is set up is not ‘for’ ongoing open-ended social causes. The most successful groups and pages are a collection of trends, fads and pop culture, membership of which is intended to demonstrate whatever characteristic is particularly prized in your social group, whether that be ironic detachment, taste in a particular type of music, or wanting a pickle to have more fans than Cheryl Cole. It appears to be helpful if your page or group has a specific time limited goal, as demonstrated recently by the success of a group getting Rage Against the Machine to Christmas number one.

This sort of easy, relatively meaningless activity does not match up well though with the requirements of most social causes, which are more often about asking for relatively difficult actions such as volunteering or donating money.

So how can social causes use social media successfully? Well I’m not going to attempt to answer that fully here, partly as this already a long blog, but mainly because I don’t know the answer. What I do know though is that to be successful, any organisation trying to use social media needs to first consider its particular nature, and adapt their approach and message to fit it.

As far as Facebook goes, that might mean adopting a more ‘fun’, popular image on your Facebook page to encourage people to sign up, then drawing them into your website where you can present the options for helping your cause in a more serious environment. We recently had a lot of success from posting a video about the movement on YouTube, which allowed it to be easily shared on Facebook and elsewhere.

It’s important though not to think you have to use every Social media tool just because it’s new and it’s there. I still find the most useful tool we have for encouraging people to take concrete actions is through the old-fashioned email newsletter. If you think about the different mode in which people look at their emails and browse Facebook it’s a good example of how the medium can affect people’s reaction to your requests.

With the sheer pace of developments in this field, it’s quite hard to keep track of the latest thing, let alone whether its suited to your particular cause, so I’d say a good rule is to concentrate on doing what you know works well, while keeping an eye on what new things seems to be working for similar organisations, and seeking out advice when you’re not sure. In that spirit, if anyone can tell me the point of Google Buzz it would be much appreciated.