The hot goss. The buzz. The 411. How do you get it? By signing up to YouthGAS, a daily email that puts you in touch with millions of youth workers and community organisations in Australia. Richard Lenn, the one-man-band behind YouthGAS, walks us through the secrets of his success and offers advice about setting up your own email community.
What does YouthGAS offer community organisiations?
YouthGAS connects people who work with and for young people. A broad cross-section of people contribute news to our email bulletins. You get to hear about trends and opportunities from people with similar jobs and interests to your own, but also from people whose work is very different – people you otherwise would not get to meet.
YouthGAS also helps people to do their jobs better. Often contributors post their work problems and the community posts solutions. People share policies and plans. No matter where in Australia you work, YouthGAS keeps you in the loop.
YouthGAS is one of the largest email communities. What makes it so successful?
It’s open and independent—I started it on my own in the 1990s . I wasn’t based within any community organisation, so I had no direction planned. I didn’t have any preconceived ideas about what would or wouldn’t work. At first I was a major contributor, but now the content is largely driven by the audience, and they write about what they want to hear.
For any user, involvement builds gradually. On an average day we get about 10 contributors, but there are many more who are observers. Eventually, an email that hits their field of interest will trigger them to respond, and an observer becomes a contributor. YouthGAS is a safe space where people feel comfortable building online relationships.
How do you start a community like this on your own—are you a really tech-literate, well-connected guy?
Not really— I can’t code computer languages or anything flash. When I started I had only owned a computer for a couple of years. I just got in and tried things and taught myself. At first it was just simple email, but now we’re going more
web 2.0.
It was actually my lack of connections which inspired me to start YouthGAS. At the time I was a member of a local youth council, but I wasn’t getting a lot out of it. I felt isolated and I figured there would be other people in the same boat, and that’s where the idea of an email community came from. A lot of the news I posted back then came from reading about community organisations—I did a LOT of reading!
What advice do you have for readers who are thinking of starting their own email community?
For an email community to really work, you need to find a niche: a community interest that has been neglected or a service which could be improved. Don’t underestimate the time commitment required—it takes a lot of effort to post and monitor, especially in the start-up stage.
The great thing about working online though, is that if you find that what you’re doing isn’t working, you can always change it.
This work is licenced under an Attribution-ShareAlike licence.
© 2008. First published on actnow.com.au
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