The American Cancer Society has set up an internal social network for themselves:
When two Divisions of the American Cancer Society (ACS) came together to form a new, six state Division that includes the territory of Guam, the Austin-based executive leadership team foresaw opportunity and challenges. The sheer size of the newly created “High Plains Division” – with its more than 600 staffers – brought great reach and potentially the sharing of talent and resources toward the ACS’ ultimate mission: eliminating cancer as a major health problem by preventing cancer, saving lives, and diminishing suffering from cancer, through research, education, advocacy, and service.
But this new, geographically dispersed group was a conglomeration in need of collaboration. The familiarity and cohesiveness staffers had previously enjoyed as employees of smaller, independent regional offices was threatened. Now, the challenge to leadership of the High Plains Division was to bridge the inter-office divide, encourage strong working relationships, and advance the cause of the ACS.
That’s an interesting new use for a social network, bridging the culture of a geographically dispersed organization. Here are some screenshots (click on the pictures to see a larger version of the screenshot) (UPDATE 7/25/2008: Due to privacy concerns, earlier screenshots have been replaced by pictures of someone named David Neff praising the Mighty Hall of Printed Web Screenshots):
For more information, here’s a look at the short case study they produced. They hired Small World Labs to produce the social network for themselves. I don’t know pricing but if you folks are interested in how all this was done, put down your comments and I’ll follow up.
One caveat: for those of you who belong to much smaller organizations, I think you can get by if you use Ning to set up your social network. It won’t have a lot of bells and whistles until you hire developers. I recommend it mainly because you won’t be painting yourself into a corner later when you want to expand and develop. However, don’t make the mistake of doing social networking BEFORE you get your basic infrastructure down. At the very least consider setting up Google Apps for your organization.
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