• Creating a mailing list like BPN's
• Creating a website like BPN's
• Background: What is BPN?
• How BPN got started and how we evolved
• Technical details about BPN
• Lessons learned: what works and what doesn't
• Related Page: Networks like BPN in Other Cities

Creating a mailing list like BPN's

• Don't reinvent the wheel! Look for other groups in your area that may already be running a mailing list, and investigate combining resources. Check parent resource centers, childcare referral agencies, school mailing lists, and organized mothers' clubs. Informal parent and neighborhood groups can often be found by looking on craigslist, yahoo groups, and by googling. If you live in the SF Bay area, see Parent Groups in the San Francisco Bay Area.

• Start with people you know who have a common purpose, such as your friends, neighbors, parents at your church or child's school, or other groups.

• Use available software. Try using yahoo groups or other mailing list software. Look for options such as the ability to moderate postings and restrict membership. Most parenting networks currently use yahoo groups, including very large metropolitan groups.

• Timing is all. To keep your subscribers interested and engaged, you'll need to send out a digest at least once a week with a minimum of 5 interesting discussions or messages or announcements. If you don't have enough subscribers yet for this level of participation, plan on creating the newsletter yourself for a while until you can build up a bigger subscriber base. Include local events of interest, reviews of family-friendly places and services, news items of interest to parents, and the like.

• Make sure it's worth reading. The newsletter needs to be worth the time it takes to read it. Some parents get a lot of email, and they don't have a lot of time. Your newsletter needs to contain information they can't get anywhere else or it may not gather many subscribers. Examples of good content include: reviews of local schools, child-friendly restaurants, nearby vacation getaways, how to find a pediatrician in your area, etc. Especially popular for BPN has been the Marketplace newsletter, where parents post kids' items for sale or trade or wanted, and the Childcare newsletter, where parents can connect with other parents sharing nannies, recommending babysitters and etc.

• Start simple and let the list evolve. When you are first starting out, make the list as simple as you can, using available free software and not imposing too many rules. When you get to 300 or so subscribers, you may find that you need to start using a different approach that works for your larger scale. You may need to bring in a programmer or investigate software packages for managing mailing lists.

Creating a website like BPN's

If you want to create a similar website for parents in your community, you'll first need a way for people to submit advice and reviews. One way to do this is to set up a website and then manually archive selected discussions from your mailing list, like BPN does.

An alternate approach would be to first create a website or blog using tools available on the web, making sure that your site contains information that parents in your area can't easily get elsewhere. When parents visit your website, give them a way to sign up for a mailing list, and build up your list that way.

Or, just use the blog format, and accept online postings. WordPress is free and widely used, and doesn't require a lot of techical ability to set up.

Background: What is BPN?

Technical Details about BPN

• Apache webserver running on Unix/Linux
• 10-15 Perl scripts that manage the posting forms & membership lists
• 6,000+ Hand-constructed plain text html pages
• Sendmail for the list itself and for mailing newsletters

How BPN got started and how we evolved

The eecs-parents list becomes moderated
Soon parents started using the list to ask their fellow parents about childcare and summer programs. Word got around, and staff members in EECS who had email (not everyone did, back then) began to join the list. Now, there were more messages more often, and more "mistakes" from email newbies too, such as accidentally replying to the entire list when a personal reply was intended. Some members (especially the busy faculty parents) asked to be removed from the list, complaining of too many emails. It was time to make a moderated list. So, Ginger made the email address of the list private, and told members to send her their messages, which she would compile and mail out to members every week or so.

Keeping the list going in the early years
Most subscribers want to read what someone else has posted, not post a message themselves. If there are only 50 subscribers or so, there may be only one or two among them who are willing to post a new message. Therefore, until the list reached a critical mass of around 300 subscribers, there were just not enough messages coming in to publish a weekly newsletter. Ginger thought that if the newsletter didn't come out at least once a week, people would forget about it and not post items that could benefit other parents. So, she wrote items herself about local family events and campus resources. She interviewed eecs-parents members and published short bios, and even made up "anonymous" questions herself, hoping to spark a discussion that would be interesting enough that members would respond. This is how the list operated for a couple of years as it grew from a handful of EECS students and faculty to several hundred parents all around campus.

Dealing with exponential growth
Soon we had the opposite problem. The growth of the list mirrored what was happening out in the world in the mid-1990s: everyone was starting to use email, not just students and faculty in EECS. The world wide web had come into existence, and non-technical people were starting to understand and enjoy the benefits of these new ways to communicate. As parents all around campus heard about the mailing list for parents, and signed up, they discovered that working parents now had a way to network with other parents besides the traditional over-the-fence chats and schoolyard banter that happened while they were at work. So, the list grew fast.

By 1997, the list was called "UCB Parents" and was open to the entire campus community. It had reached 500 subscribers, and was growing at a tremendous rate, doubling in size every year. We had finally reached the point where there was plenty of participation, so Ginger no longer had to write "filler" herself to keep subscribers active and interested. The types of postings became more varied - people no longer limited themselves to advice about parenting - there were "for sale" items, news about classes and activities, advice about a wider range of topics. The weekly digest was getting longer and longer, and had to be re-organized into separate sections to make it more readable.

In 1998 we opened up the list to the surrounding community, as part of a collaboration with a local parenting organization called Neighborhood Moms. Ginger could no longer manage the list by herself because of the volume of email coming in every week. Several members volunteered to help, and in 1999 we split the weekly digest into four different newsletters, each with its own volunteer, and we also added a new newsletter with a separate list of email addresses for parents of teenagers.

How we used to do it, and why that stopped working
Here is how the newsletter operated during the period 1997-2001: each newsletter, such as "Advice Line" or "Marketplace" or "Teens", had its own email address. Subscribers who wanted to post to the newsletter could either "Reply" back to the appropriate newsletter or send an email to the appropriate address. These addresses were set up to forward messages to the home email of the moderator. The moderator reviewed all the emails for her newsletter, copy-pasted each posting into the appropriate section of her newsletter, and then sent the digest to Ginger to be mailed out to the list. Some moderators would prepare a new digest once or twice a week, others would compile theirs every two weeks or so.

As the membership grew (we reached 2,000 members in the year 2000), some moderators were receiving as many as a hundred emails in a single day. Many of the messages required time-consuming correspondence -- the subscriber had sent their post to the wrong moderator, or they didn't give enough information, or they didn't specify whether they wanted to post anonymously. To make matters worse, the emails came in no particular order and could not be organized very quickly. For example, the Advice Line received dozens of responses to each of a dozen or more questions each week. The moderator had to read each email to figure out which topic they were replying to, so she could group all the responses together by topic. It became almost a full-time job to keep up with the more popular newsletters. Moderator burn-out reached an all-time high as the volunteers, most of them working moms with young children, struggled to keep up with the time committment.

How we do it now
The mechanism for posting needed to be automated. So, in 2002 Ginger wrote some programs that required subscribers to post messages via the web site instead of sending an email to the moderator. The programs automatically check for required information, such as a name and email for postings about daycare openings. They check to make sure the person posting is actually a subscriber. They format the messages and give the poster the opportunity to specify how they want to sign their messages, including "Anonymous". They present a list of topics to choose from so that replies can be standardized and easily sorted by topic. A draft of the next newsletter can be automatically prepared and emailed to the moderator, thus eliminating the time-consuming task of copy-pasting each message into the digest. The moderators continue to receive individual emails so that they can review them as they come in and return any that need to be returned. The time it takes to moderate a weekly newsletter has thus been reduced to less than an hour or so. When a newsletter becomes so popular that it's too long to be reasonable as a weekly mailing, we split it in two and find another moderator. In this way, we've been able to keep sending out moderated digests to nearly 20,000 subscribers.

Lessons learned: what works and what doesn't

• It's all about the content
  People really don't mind a homely-looking plain text newsletter as long as it contains something of value. The BPN newsletters have a value that is hard to find anywhere else: the collective wisdom of a lot of smart parents who together can offer a range of different approaches to almost any parenting question, no matter how obscure or embarrassing. Subscribers know that if they can't find what they need from their circle of friends and family, they can find it on the BPN.

• No commercial or institutional bias
  The BPN is a grass-roots, community effort run entirely by volunteers. We do not accept advertising, and we do not have any expenses that require us to seek grants or funding from institutions. Therefore there is no motivation other than to help parents support each other, and our members contribute their advice altruistically, without any expectation of profit. We believe that the high rate of participation, and the unselfish contributions of time that participation represents, are due to the "nobody profits" basis of the Berkeley Parents network. This is a big part of what motivates our members to respond to a stranger's request.

• Helpful and supportive tone
  We don't allow whining, venting, preaching, complaining, gossiping, name-calling, or criticising other parents and we try to apply this policy fairly. This means that newsletters have a friendly tone and provide a supportive environment for all sorts of discussions. Of course we do see the full spectrum of opinions on most topics. Our subscribers often have strong opinions and we have such a diverse group of parents that opinions rarely converge. But we aim to accept differences with tolerance rather than confrontation. Most subscribers are surprised how much they learn about parenting from others on the list who have a different approach. This is the value of BPN.

• Be flexible but stick to the goal
  BPN has changed over the years in response to problems as they have come up. What worked for BPN with 2,000 subscribers does not work for 20,000 subscribers, and vice versa. We have tried to stick to our original goal of giving parents an easy way to network with each other, while accommodating an ever-growing list of subscribers. When a problem comes up that creates extra work for moderators, or results in complaints from subscribers, we make changes!

• Clear policies and rules
  Policies are developed by the volunteers with input from the membership, and we try our best to enforce them fairly. All our policies are on the website in the Help/FAQ section. Clearly stating the policies and making them available online has been essential in making sure that the BPN stays helpful and supportive. It also saves time for moderators. Sending the link to a web page is a lot faster than typing an explanation to the questions that arrive daily from subscribers.

• Easy-to-read format
  We've found that a "passive" delivery of information works best for what we do. In other words, members don't need to visit a website or type in a password to get the discussions. Instead, newsletters arrive in their mailbox. We try to make the newsletters as fast and easy to read as possible. Since we publish digests rather than post replies as they come in, all the responses to each question appear grouped together. Topics are summarized in a Table of Contents, so parents can scan the Contents section first to see if the newsletter has any postings of interest, and easily delete newsletters that don't. This feature seems important for busy parents. Entire newsletters are easy to read and also easy to *not* read. For example, parents who are not looking for childcare can delete the Childcare newsletter without reading it. The BPN website is intentionally very simple in appearance, with plain text, and without advertising or graphics. We believe that the content on our website is where the value lies.

• Discussions are moderated by humans
  Every posting that appears in a BPN newsletter has been reviewed by one of the volunteer moderators. Every posting that appears on the website has been reviewed a second time by the website administrator. This means we can filter out flames, gossip, and rants, return inappropriate posts, and weed out self-promoting postings that are mixed in with legitimate reviews.

• Parents can post anonymously
  We allow anonymous postings on all of our newsletters, except where contact info is essential, such as an item for sale or a nanny share. Many parents who would not otherwise give advice will do it if they don't have to give their names. Because our list is so large, nearly everyone has neighbors and co-workers on the list, and there are often topics parents want to discuss that they'd just rather not share with the people they work with! Sensitive topics come up - bedwetting, or teen depression, or marital discord, and almost no one wants to be public about comments on these topics. Some people are just naturally shy or private and don't ever want to sign their names no matter what the topic. We've even had anonymous recommendations for house paint. Whatever the reason for wanting to be anonymous, allowing people to post anonymously means that a much wider group of people will participate in discussions, and it also means that people are more willing to express minority opinions. More public parent networking forums, such as PTA meetings and playgroups, cannot offer these features. Anonymity has been very important to our network.

• A few bad apples
  In a group as large as ours, there are going to be a few difficult people who consume a disproportionate amount of the volunteers' time. We have found this to be about 1% of the subscriber list, so currently that's about 200 people for us. There are subscribers who just don't get how email works, who need a lot of hand-holding in order to post. There are business owners who want to know why their great review wasn't immediatey added to the website. There are people who don't agree with a policy and want to argue about it, or who are angry with the moderator because they believe a policy has not been enforced fairly. There are people who misuse the list, soliciting free baby items from well-meaning fellow subscribers so they can sell them at a profit someplace else. There are people who pose as a client of their own business and post glowing reviews of themselves. Moderators have to be somewhat suspicious so they can watch out for these kinds of things, and they need to have a thick skin. We do unsubscribe people who deliberately misuse the list, and we do have to make decisions about how much time to spend engaging in drawn-out discussions with people who need extra help, or those who want to argue about policies.