Teens 4 Planet Earth Moves to Ning

Recently, we relaunched an environmentally focused service learning program for the Wildlife Conservation Society on the Ning community platform. Teens for Planet Earth launched at the beginning of April (ok, I guess that isn’t so recent!) on Ning after beginning its life as a typical minisite some years ago. This project entailed migrating the existing site, enhancing the design and setting up the new community features.

For this client and project, Ning was a perfect choice, offering both the out of the box community features that a teen audience would expect with enough customization to satisfy the needs of the organization. Oh, and the price was right… just a few dollars to remove some ads and customize the domain name.

There have been discussions and comments about Ning’s value, ethics, and change in business model (this is just one of many posts out there). We’ve been monitoring this debate for a while, as we have a few clients on Ning. Ultimately the choice for this client was that Ning’s offering was more consistent with their needs, goals and situational realities. For another of our clients, the risks and impacts of working with Ning during their transition from social network platform provider to social network is more troubling.

Thankfully there are growing numbers of social networking tools sets – many free/open source, some commercial and costly, some good, and some bad. Seems like lately we’ve been asked to highlight the pros/cons of the various options, as more of our clients than ever consider whether to roll out their own social network. Products we’ve already reviewed include (in no particular order): Telligent Community Server, The Port, Higher Logic, Elgg, Grou.ps, KickApps, Collective X, and Pluck. Looks like the number of tools continues to grow and until a leader emerges, I have a feeling we’ll be asked to help clients make smart choices as part of our Software Evaluation service offering.