One federation, thirty houses: how to put the channel in order

In a company, the person writing and the person reading are inside the same house. In a federation, in a professional body with chapters, in a franchise network or in a group with member organisations, they are not: between head office and the person who has to find out there is another organisation, with its own management, its own judgement and its own difficult Monday.

That person in the middle is not bad at their job. They are somebody who gets twenty emails a month from the federation, who has to decide which ones matter to their house, and who forwards them when they can. The message arrives late, arrives cut down, or arrives with a slant that was not in it. And none of those three can be spotted from head office.

• It gets lost in the inbox of whoever received it, who is on leave and told nobody.
• It gets lost in the retelling: the manager boils it down to two lines and takes out exactly the one with the deadline in it.
• It gets lost on the way down: it goes to the four people on the committee and not to the twenty who work there.
• It gets lost in time: it leaves head office on Tuesday and reaches people on Friday, when the deadline was Thursday.

Nearly every federation has a single channel, the email to the managers, and sends all three things down it. That is why the manager ends up filtering: they cannot tell what is theirs to decide from what they were only meant to pass on.

The row that hardly ever exists is the second, and it is the one that solves the problem we started with: head office can talk to the people without asking anybody's permission. It does not replace the first, because what the manager has to decide still gets said to the manager; it takes off them what they were only ever meant to forward.

And the third is the one that decides whether this lives or goes quiet. A channel where only head office talks gets read for three weeks. What makes people open it every day is what is happening in their own house, not at the federation.

This is the conversation to have before you set anything up, and the one nobody has. The members of a federation are not branches of it: they compete with each other for the same grant, the same advertisers or the same members, and they are protective of their own people with every good reason.

If the first screen a member organisation sees is a list of the other twenty-nine's members, it never comes back, and on top of that it has a data protection problem that head office created for it. So the agreement gets written first, in half a page, and signed off by the board.

• Whether one member organisation's list of people is visible to the others. The sensible answer is no.
• Whether head office sees every list. The honest answer is yes, because head office administers and pays; better said out loud than discovered.
• Whether what a member organisation publishes for its own people is visible to head office. There is no halfway house here: either you say yes and live with it, or you look for a different set-up.
• Who can write in the federation's name, by name, and who cannot.
• What happens to a member organisation's content the day it leaves the federation.

What keeps a member organisation alive on the channel is not that it has an account: it is that somebody there publishes. And that somebody has to exist before you start, not be looked for afterwards.

1. 01

   Ask each member organisation in writing, with a deadline

   One name and one deputy per house, in a dated email to the manager. The ones that do not reply within a fortnight are exactly the ones that will sit dark, and it is better to know that before you open than three months after.

2. 02

   Do not let it always be the manager

   The manager has the least time and does the most filtering. It usually works better with whoever runs the day to day: the programming coordinator, the person who runs the unit, the administrator who knows everybody.

3. 03

   Give them authority over their own house only

   Let them sign up their own people, publish for them and organise them, and let them neither see nor manage anybody else's. That is what makes the member organisation treat it as theirs rather than as an obligation from head office.

4. 04

   Get them together once, half an hour, all at the same time

   One session with the thirty of them, showing what they are going to do rather than the whole tool. And record it: half of them will not make it, and the half that does not make it is the half that then does not publish.

5. 05

   Put a date in the diary to check who is publishing

   Two months in, look member by member at who has published anything. With that list in front of you, two phone calls fix what six all-member emails do not.

Ask head office how many people there are in total across the member organisations. The answer will be a spreadsheet from eight months ago, and it is nobody's fault: joiners and leavers happen inside each house, not at head office, and there is no way for head office to find out unless somebody tells them.

The fix is not to ask for the roll every quarter, which has been tried and comes back late and wrong. It is to stop keeping it at head office. If each house signs up its own people as they arrive, the roll is a side effect of the tool being used.

• The sign-up is done by the member organisation, not by head office. A code on the noticeboard in the house, and each person joins on their own phone.
• So is the leaver: whoever knows who has gone is whoever is standing there.
• Head office does not chase the number, it looks at it. And if a member organisation has not moved anybody in a year, that is information too.
• If head office pays, it divides up seats: each house has its own and asks for more when it needs them. It is the simplest way to stop the spend growing without anybody deciding it.

It looks like a matter of form and it decides adoptions. A tool that calls a member organisation's members employees on the first screen, and calls Radio Pendle a site, is telling them by itself that it was built for somebody else, and whoever opens it can tell in four seconds.

• The houses: stations, branches, chapters, head offices, units or clubs. Never sites, which may also be untrue.
• The people: members, registrants, professionals, volunteers or contributors. Employee only for the ones you pay.
• The cross-cutting groups: committees, sections or working groups, not departments.
• What head office sends: circular, bulletin or notice, using the word that already appears in your minutes and not a new one.

Write the four words down on one line before you start and use them everywhere: on the sign-up poster, in the session with the leads, and in the tool itself if it can be changed. It costs nothing and it saves half the questions of the first month.

A federation measures differently from a company, and it is worth being clear about that before the first dashboard goes up in a board meeting. Nobody here is being appraised: what you are looking at is whether the channel arrives, and the difference has to show in what you look at and in how you tell it.

• Look by group, not by person. This group opened it at thirty per cent is a fact about the channel; so-and-so has not opened it is something else, and it is of no use to anybody. And decide early which grouping is the one that matters to you, the house, the committee or the region, because how you build the structure from the start depends on it.
• Look at who publishes, not how much. A house that publishes one thing a week is alive; one that publishes fifteen in March and nothing in April is not.
• Compare each member organisation with itself, not with the others. A league table of houses in a board meeting makes the bottom three disengage.
• And say in advance what gets looked at and who sees it. A dashboard that turns up unannounced in a board meeting reads as surveillance even when it is not.