Going condo: the American Hospital Association has a new concept for association Web sites.

WHAT DO YOUR MEMBERS want your nonprofit organization to be? A trusted source of information? A community-builder and standard-setter? A strong, effective advocate? Quite likely, the answer is yes to at least one of those choices.

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Now ask yourself: How many members want your association to be the home for lots of expensive Internet equipment? Quite likely, that answer is none.

The American Hospital Association, Chicago, and its 15 affiliated organizations faced these questions in 1999. The Web building boom was going full blast; demands to invest big bucks were rising. Our groups were pursuing their individual Web projects, unaware that they were erecting information silos sure to frustrate our shared members as they began turning to the Internet to help solve their problems.

Eventually we figured a way out of our Web construction dilemma thanks to an award-winning concept that combines centralized hardware and software with decentralized control of the sites' content, look, and feel. We built a condo.

You'll find the most visible sign of our innovation at www.hospitalconnect.com. That's the center of a network of roughly 50 hospital association online communities owned by more than 20 organizations. The site went live in July 2002 with AHA-related groups at its core, was formally launched in February 2003, and has since been adding communities and registering visitors at a steady pace.

In a normal condo, you have your own address but also can identify yourself by the complex's name. You own the space inside your condominium and share ownership of common areas. You furnish your condo with your own furniture, but you can borrow chairs from the common room for a party and use the swimming pool when you'd like. And you control who can come into your home.

Inside the HospitalConnect condo, individual sites retain their Web address, look and feel, content, and branding. At the same time, they share a common content management system, search engine, and operating system as well as common servers, core development tools, and bandwidth.

What makes HospitalConnect special is that it provides an association-friendly alternative to other site-construction models. Most Web sites are either stand-alone structures in which you cannot easily find and display relevant content from other sites, or they are part of portals, where it's difficult for a community to express its own identity. The HospitalConnect Web condo emphasizes individuality on the issues that matter most to association members and commonality on those services where being distinct is less important than being effective--and affordable.

The result is that each individual site can do more with less. Voluntarily sharing content means a community can attract readers to its site by posting articles written by other HospitalConnect communities. (Conversely, a community can retain exclusive control of content by marking it as being usable for its site alone or even limiting its use to association members only.) In addition, site owners can create channels that post shared content onto their sites automatically, as soon as the material is generated. A group's site can look fresh even if its owners don't post original content for weeks.

It takes a bit of time to get used to this system, just as condo life requires its own adjustments. But considering the benefits, we're glad that we did it.

The goal: Unite 60-plus sites

As with many associations, AHA isn't so much a monolith as it is a hive made up of smaller, often independent-minded units. AHA at its core is a trade association spread across three major offices; it also encompasses two for-profit subsidiaries, two charitable nonprofit organizations, and 12 nonprofit individual membership groups. Additionally, roughly 90 state and metropolitan hospital associations, which are independent of AHA, work extremely closely with us, as do dozens of other health-related organizations.

As an extended family of organizations, we probably aren't that unusual. Even if your group doesn't have a lot of internal units, your association is likely to have relationships that stretch far beyond your headquarters.

Our organizational structure has had both good and not-so-good effects on AHA's Internet activities. Because we didn't agree to central controls over our Web operations, by early 2001 we had 60-plus poorly connected sites; roughly a dozen Web hosts; more than 40 unlinked databases; scant content sharing; and inefficiencies in management, maintenance, and development.

On the other hand, this lack of central control helped create pockets of Web expertise in several parts of the association. The publications and data division began to create its own content management system, while the individual membership groups explored areas such as conference promotion and membership management. Soon, groups began to see the benefit of working together, and in March 2001, we created our first truly AHA-wide Web venture: an online store.

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Money also proved to be a powerful motivator. Our members had been hurt by the 1998 reductions in federal support for hospital-based health care, and they were expecting their association to show the same efficiencies that they were putting into their own operations. In addition, some CEOs were asking why they should write dues checks to national, state, and local hospital associations--plus various specialty groups--just so those groups could spend big bucks on Internet systems that didn't talk to each other.

AHA Executive Vice President Neil J. Jesuele, based in the Washington, D.C., office, responded by creating the team that eventually built Hospital-Connect. (Editor's note: The authors led this team.) Jesuele's executive support helped us draw resources from across the organization. For example, Brian Lane of one of our for-profit subsidiaries, AHA Financial Services, Inc., played a key role in negotiating with our vendors. And ultimately scores of people spent time helping build the condo. But even though HospitalConnect was an AHA-wide project, we didn't enjoy automatic consensus across the organization regarding how to unite our Internet operations. We spent about 14 months talking with management and staff so that we could understand their challenges and aspirations and then work out issues regarding individual control, incentives, resources, and operations.

We quickly learned that our systems had to promote the most individual liberty possible while still reaping the benefits of a common infrastructure. Unfortunately, most of the vendors that we talked with couldn't envision such a system. They were accustomed to big companies acquiring Internet technology to impose conformity. These vendors also tended to start their planning by setting up one home page or one site as dominant, because that's what their other clients wanted.

We didn't. And that's why the condominium concept was born.

Lots of pros and a few cons

One of the major pros of the Hospital-Connect system for the communities that participate is that they can draw on the system's core infrastructure:

* Content management system. Content for pages is placed in a database and templates are created to govern how that content is displayed. We use the TeamSite software system from Interwoven.

* Search engine software. Building upon the content management system's tags, the search software helps people find content quickly--and gives us vital info on what people are looking for. Verity provides our search software.

* Servers and database software. A suite of servers with a common operating system (from Sun) and database software (largely from Oracle) deliver content, store members' names, run the online store, and so forth.

* Secure hosted environment. This helps protect us from power failures, hacker attacks, and the like. We are located in a Qwest Cyber-Center that provides monitoring and maintenance 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.

Several of our vendors are more accustomed to dealing with Fortune 500-type companies than they are with associations. And individually, few of the HospitalConnect communities could afford the hardware and software we're using. In the end, this was a multimillion-dollar project that took three years to launch. But by joining the network and sharing in the economies of scale, communities get robust capabilities at an affordable price.

Those economies of scale were one major advantage of our collaboration. But communities in the HospitalConnect condo enjoy several other benefits as well.

* Special initiatives developed jointly or individually. The common calendar database, which was developed jointly, makes it possible for communities to advertise their events to people who might never visit their sites. (It also means that when event details change or something important needs updating, you can simply adjust the database and have the changes show up on all the sites that were promoting the event--no more asking individual webmasters to post updates.)

Sometimes, though, one particular group decides that a project is so important that it foots the bill for developing the innovation. In a stand-alone world, that innovation stays with the group. But for HospitalConnect communities, innovations are shared even if the cost isn't. And because of the initial group's strong interest, the resulting service often turns out to be better than what a more indifferent group might have created. This happened with the e-learning suite and chat rooms developed by AHA's Health Forum unit.

A similar innovation is under way with regard to advertising. Motivated at first by its own sites, the Health Forum set up a network by which it sells banner ad space on behalf of any community within the HospitalConnect system that wants to carry the ads. The forum then collects a small commission for ads that it places. The Health Forum wins because it has more potential ad space and Web visitors to sell to advertisers, and the other communities win because they get a new revenue stream.

* The creation of pages and services that couldn't have existed previously. Before, content about a particular subject was hidden in individual sites and couldn't be teased out without lots of work. For instance, items regarding community health were scattered. But thanks to the common content management system, the Association for Community Health Improvement was able to set aside sufficient space on its home page for a feature containing all the latest headlines of news articles that listed community health as a keyword.

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Likewise, we had lots of content that would appeal to hospital trustees, but we never could spare the staff time needed to maintain a page devoted to this constituency. Our content management system made it possible to create such a page. Similar results were achieved recently with a page devoted to the health care workforce. And although HospitalConnect began with only AHA-related sites, we have started reaching out to other hospital-related associations. The National Alliance for Health Information Technology joined us last year, and in September, the Michigan Health and Hospital Association became part of our network.

* Improvements and new features inspired by new members and existing communities. To name a few: We're pushing to improve the quality of our search results. We're making our content management system easier to use and exploit. We're upgrading the system's architecture to eliminate some annoying technical problems. We're learning more all the time about how to set up channels that automatically yield only the content that a specific site wants. And we're introducing commercial innovations, such as selling search results and creating a new area that will help vendors reach our market.

Our success with HospitalConnect has also led us to address some historical technical problems. AHA is now working to unify dozens of disparate databases--moving toward a common membership database, for instance. And we are building a customer relationship management system. We're working to improve both of them in such a way that the Internet will become a natural conduit to access and update the systems. We also foresee tighter links between the Web and our e-mail communication and the development of new analytical tools to help us better understand our members and their desires.

Not everything has gone perfectly, of course. For example, we kicked up a lot of dust with our decision to migrate virtually all sites to the HospitalConnect system at the same time. We also underestimated the time we should have spent on staff training, technical implementation, and general communication. It sounds crazy when people say that it takes a couple of years to get used to changes of this magnitude, but it's true.

A strong indication of our success is not only the awards that we have won for our efforts, but also the acceptance of our members. Through the first half of 2004, site registrations have more than doubled over the previous year and page views are up more than 30 percent. We don't yet have year-over-year numbers for visits, but in 2004 we are averaging more than 350,000 visits per month.

Today, two years after its launch, contributing to HospitalConnect is an integral part of scores of jobs. The AHA information systems and technology development team is still deeply engaged in making the system work. But increasingly, IT staffers are spending their time building tools that content managers use to manipulate the system. With each passing day, people, such as AHA.org's content manager, are updating their sites without asking IT for help.

Should you go condo?

Picking the right Internet home isn't much different from selecting how you want to live in the real world. Issues such as independence, control, and cost all figure in, as do the general questions of how you plan to use your home and what represents the best use of your resources. Rent or own? Freestanding house, condo, co-op, or apartment? You have probably gone through the drill.

What types of associations might not want to take part in a project like this? It might not be right for you if your organization has one or more of these qualities:

* You don't like to, or don't want to, work in cooperation with other associations.

* You have content so unique that nobody else could use what you produce and nobody else produces anything your group would want.

* You prefer to control all technical aspects of your Web site, such as the exact types of software used, the style in which code is written, and the relationships that are drawn up with vendors.

* You use the Internet so little that you can't gain from economies of scale.

Those factors aside, we believe the condo approach provides a viable option for associations, such as national groups with local affiliates or independent associations that operate in a common profession, such as banking, construction, or health care. Such groups might find that the condo model provides independence and control combined with the opportunity to share in economies of scale.

Further, the condo model enables associations to do what they do best: serve their members. With others handling the technical issues such as negotiating software licenses, buying equipment, and maintaining a technical infrastructure, associations are free to concentrate on how best to meet members' needs. The condo model also helps associations keep up with future technology trends by sharing the cost of new developments.

For the hospital association community, we decided that the benefits were worth the effort required to build the condo and then invite other hospital-related associations to join us. In your own circle, you might find that it makes sense to do the same.

Want more information on this topic? Check out the "Outtakes and Exclusives" and "Link to Learn" areas at www.amonline.org.

Craig Webb, principal, Webbvision, Washington, D.C., previously was executive editor of AHA.org and content manager of HospitalConnect.com. Herman Baumann is the American Hospital Association's executive director of strategic development in Chicago. E-mails: [e-mail] and [e-mail].

ILLUSTRATION BY RICHARD DOWNS