Balancing Mission and Money:
Building Sustainable Electronic Networks for Civil Society

Case studies from the Association for Progressive Communications (APC)

Written by Mark Surman

Introduction | Blazing the Trail For Online Community| Building Sustainability | When New Technologies Get Old | Walking the Tightrope | From Pioneers to Platforms | Making the Transition from Dial-Up to Portal | Learning from the APC | Works Cited

Making the Transition from Dial-Up to Portal

Of course, experimenting with how to aggregate and how to share has not provided instant revenue for the whole of APC. In fact, the transition away from dial-up and towards content in the mission-driven business models of APC members has involved a complex set of strategies. To ensure a stable income base, many members have relied heavily on developing WWW sites and online databases for NGOs. Others have focused on training and capacity building to help NGOs build their own sites. Others have continued to rely on dial-up to keep them going.

SANGONeT, INTERCOM and Web Networks have all moved heavily into the WWW site development side of things. Starting out with basic WWW sites, this area of work has tended to evolve towards database development and custom programming. In turn, it has also fed naturally into research and development for ‘shared publishing’ and other products. There is definitely a lot of mission related satisfaction in doing this work – each project results in another NGO WWW site getting online. But the real value comes from taking these individual contracts and feeding them into the shared voice that is emerging on APC hub sites. At the revenue level, these services have been key to keeping a number of APC members alive.

Training, capacity building and support services have also been important in the transition away from dial-up. Almost all of the APC members interviewed for this article were engaged in some sort of capacity building activity. For example, Econnect had been working over the years with environmental organizations opposing the construction of the Tamlin nuclear power station in South Bohemia [check location]. This included everything from providing e-mail accounts to training on how to get the message out. When the anti-power plant activists finally decided to blockade the construction site, Econnect was there with a local computer support center, a digital camera and help with getting news onto the Internet. This type of work has a clear impact in terms of helping NGOs get their word out online. While it is often reliant on donor money or subsidization from other services, most APC members remain committed to this type of work as a way to support and stay engaged with their users.

The other key service that has played a role in the transition away from dial-up has been … dial-up. Revenue from Internet account sales has been so essential to most APC members that simply dropping these services overnight would have been impossible. The most common strategy in transitioning away from providing Internet connectivity has been to outsource it to a larger commercial provider. While is not a perfect approach, it has kept cash flow moving as APC members develop new service areas like those described above. Four of the six current APC members interviewed for this article had outsourced some or all of their connectivity services.

Unfortunately, these outsourcing arrangements have not always allowed APC members to have the lowest prices. Dial-up bulk purchase packages from major ISPs tend to be designed for corporations with large sales forces or pools of mobile workers. Accounts are priced lower than retail but aren’t really ‘wholesale’. As a result, APC members like SANGONeT, Web Networks and Econnect who have taken this approach are left with limited margins or high prices. This in turn impacts their ability to provide high-quality NGO support. Also, continuing to offering sales and support for dial-up is a significant distraction from the development of new content services. The distraction was serious enough in the US that IGC sold the connectivity side of its business in mid-1999 in order to focus solely on content work.

A few APC members have remained squarely in the dial-up market and see it as key to their long term strategy. For example, INTERCOM has been able to slowly build a sustainable and profitable connectivity user base. Connectivity prices in Ecuador are still almost twice what they are in North America and Europe, and thus INTERCOM has been able to compete on price and good service. At present, they have 200 users with a plan to grow slowly to a cap of 300 users once more phone lines are put in. ENDA also remains focused on connectivity and is able to compete effectively with other local providers.

There are also one or two APC members who are still able to trade heavily on the conferences as a way to keep users. In Hungary, GreenSpider conferences were central to building the national alliance of environmental NGOs. Quite quickly, the conferences became a place where these groups met and discussed ideas. As a result, there is still a strong connection to conferences amongst Hungarian NGOs. GreenSpider’s content services are able to build from conferences as a base and add other services over time.

Despite a bumpy and confusing period in the mid-1990s, it seems that most APC members have begun to effectively reinvent both their missions and their sustainability models. The focus is clearly on ‘content enabling’ civil society, on making sure the word gets out online. There are still challenges in figuring out how best to do this. And of course, there are the normal challenges of running a technically focussed non-profit enterprise – marketing, bill collection, finding qualified staff and staying relevant to users. But collectively, and sustainably, a good number of APC members seem headed down the right path.