Freeconomy Blog
Wed
17 Jun
I think I need help
Given the title of this blog, you are probably saying to yourself - "well I could have told you that about eighteen months ago" right now. But no, contrary to popular advice, I am not looking to lay myself bare on the psychiatrists couch. I'm just asking for some help with this website.
As most of you will have noticed we completely refurbished the site last week. We got rid of stuff that wasn't working, added in some great new functionality and made it much easier and quicker to use. And we think we made it a bit prettier, but with beauty being in the eye of the beholder and all that, who knows? Yes we know you loved that damn tree on the banner of the old homepage - but I bet you had also forgotten about it already! The feedback has been great so far and keep it coming, especially if it can improve things.
One of the main reasons we completely changed the site was to bring Freeconomy to another level and to get loads more people involved. We guessed that the more you like it and the more you use it then the more people you will tell about it and therefore the more people that would be touched by it.
Doing all the work that this project demands - replying to enquiries and questions from almost 10,000 members, developing the site, promoting it and getting it 'out there', erasing horrid spam from the forum, fixing it when it inevitably malfunctions, writing the blog - however, is pretty time consuming to be totally honest. In fact, it could be a full-time job. Which is great - I'm really delighted it is so busy!
There is one area where we do need help however - making more people aware of it. My passion in life is to get more people using the website, giving freely, sharing stuff, and making great new like-mined friends, coming up with local solutions to the big issues, without a penny ever changing hands. Life is pretty hectic though and I could really do with help from all of you to make more people aware of it. Promoting it to the world is a big job for a few people. Divide that job by 10,000 and it's easy.
The good news is that in the new design we made helping us, in this respect, really easy. There are a number of ways you can lighten our load, and most will only take a minute or so of your time.
The easiest way of getting more people involved is by inviting your friends from your Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail or AOL accounts (if you have one) that you think may be interested in Freeconomy. You simply type in your username and password for that account and then select which friends you'd like to contact (we obviously DO NOT store these details anywhere), then just click 'Invite'. Easy, huh. If you don't like putting in your password then you can just email a friend one by one, though this way you need to know their email addresses and is more time consuming for you. Alternatively again, just email the link to the site to your mates using your normal email service.
That is the modern, easy way of doing it. But there are also the more traditional ways! The first of these is one of the ways it has spread so far - word of mouth, literally. Just tell your friends about it. Most people are interested in joining when they hear about it, and why wouldn't they be - they get to learn new skills, get help with things for free, get to share tools and in the process meet loads of really great people who are into the things they are into. Its WIN-WIN-WIN situation.
As part of the new look, we also got a couple of new posters and leaflets for you to choose from, depending on your taste. With the posters you can stick them up on your local noticeboards, whether they be in a shop, cafe or community centre. With the leafelts, why not print of a few handfuls and put them in your neighbour's letterboxes with a nice little note saying who you are and what number you live in.
As much as I don't like Facebook and Twitter, they are exceptionally good and diseminating information. With one touch of a button you can now share this website on both of the above, plus a whole plethora of things like Delicious, Reddit, Bebo etc. Again, in takes only a minute to do it and would help massively.
And thanks to Brian, a freeconomist in Ireland who has given a lot of his valuable time to making it happen, we now also have a downloadable Booklet that you can read or give to friends. It outlines the why, what, how and where next for the freeconomy community, and it is visually very impressive also.
Now please go and help the community grow - if we all do it, we'll have lots more people in each of our local areas to benefit from and share with!
Do any of you have any ideas on how we all could get more people involved in this? Or anyone know any organisations who would be interested in it?
THE FREECONOMY BLOG is written by Mark Boyle, founding member of the Freeconomy Community
Comment on this Post:
LyssaM comments ...
The media attention you got when you started the year got alot of attention, the bbc news and that.. I remember that's when I learnt about it and spread the word on the frugal club I'm on... I posted up the site adress and everyone thought it was brilliant what you do but I think people then forget or something. So maybe a bit more media?
I'm not sure what else to suggest... but I'll definetely post up on the forums I use and tell everyone, yet again, lol!
btw.. did your mate get round to showing you how to make paper and ink from mushrooms? I remember you saying he was going to ages ago.
Mark comments ...
Lyssa M - thanks for that! If you know of any forums to post on that would be a really good help. Regarding the media, i still do bits and pieces most weeks but you got to choose the right time to do the bigger stuff. Yes my friend Fergus Drennan did show us how to make paper from mushrooms a few months ago as part of our weekly freeskilling evenings here in Bristol (UK). Where are you based by the way?
Jonas comments ...
Hi Mark, well as to get more people, i believe we need more content that makes people come back.
One idea i have for this is something like a Ask a Question / How to section. Example:
When you are living without money, how do you wash your hair?
and stuff like that. I know the forums are for that, but maybe a request section and then a wiki page where everyone can give ideas, recipes etc...
and one more thing. i live in Spain, and i know there are a lot of people that don't speak English that well, so they might feel like there is nothing for them here. Anyway, thats just some thoughts i came up with wile in bed and could not sleep.
Lyssa M comments ...
I'm in Hertfordshire. I would have loved coming to your freeskilling evenings.... There's so much I'd love to learn, lol.
phoenix69 comments ...
I was excited to see an email from you to say you had revamped the site.. what iwas dissapointed to see was that it still has the same problem; your 10 mile radius rule is useless to me as a live in a rural area; only have 5 people in my zone none of whom have skills I need; if I could see who was registered in Swansea that would make life a lot easier; I was lucky to meet Rob in Skewen who somehow found me when I joined even tho I'm not in his area and I understand he has highlighted this issue and I would like to join him in asking for the area to be widened; we dont all live in cities you know!
Mark comments ...
Phoenix69 - You can actually change your radius to 25 miles now, it doesn't seem you are aware of that change. Also, if that still isn't enough why not just move your marker to wherever it is you want to see the members in as a temporary fix. I hope you understand our reasons for keeping it within 25 miles - anymore than that and it certainly wouldn't be local anymore.
phoenix69 comments ...
mark; you are a star; sorry to have sounded off, but I really loved the concept and wanted to make it work; I can now access all the folks in Swansea and the number of people on my list has increased x4!!!
We have a very active Freecycle network in the Swansea area; there is a link to here from their home site; but maybe you could talk to the Freecycle admins about posting a message every month advertising Freeeconomy? I am sure a lot of people on Freecycle arent necessarly that environmentally driven, but a lot of people would be interested in swapping skills if they knew this was out there. Also, how about a free ad in Gumtrees or Friday Ads in different areas?