Posted March 1998
by Michael Thompson
Assistant Project Director
FRIENDS (Farming and Rural Information Expertise and Dissemination Services)
e-mail: thompson@theseus.fr
Web page: http://ellada.ena.gr/home-uk.htm
from a presentation to the Communication for Development Group, FAO Extension, Education and Communication Service, and other FAO staff, 27 February 1998
In January 1996, five European partners began FRIENDS (Farming and Rural Information Expertise and Dissemination Services) -- an EU-funded project providing an "information and expertise" system for remote Greek agriculture communities. The partners included: Theseus Institute, an international management institute in Sophia Antipolis, France; Union of Young Farmers in Greece; American Farm School, a non-profit agricultural school in Greece; CrossOver, an IT consulting and research company in Italy; and OTE, the Greek national telecommunications operator.
The partners' objective was not only to create a dedicated electronic information system for Greek agricultural communities, but also to include a range of services connecting rural organizations and local cooperatives throughout Greece and the rest of Europe. After several rounds of rapid-prototyping and scenario-building techniques involving many different users, FRIENDS identified services which try to meet the evolving needs of the Greek agricultural market. In August, 1997, FRIENDS began trial operations of these information services.
FRIENDS consists of two sets of users:
The UYF members, with over 1000 members, access the services through workstations set up and maintained at 13 access points located throughout mainland Greece. The use of access points, which consist of one or two workstations manned by site managers, helps to overcome the problem that the majority of Greek farmers lack basic computer skills, let alone access to the internet. Site managers help these visiting farmers get the information they want to retrieve from the system.
The second set of users are those who access FRIENDS services via the internet -- those who have a computer connected to the internet either at home or work. Internet users fall into two segments: individual clients (farmers, students) and corporate clients (agribusinesses, institutions, government organisations, other farming co-ops, etc.). Both segments are potential subscribers and potential purchasers of other FRIENDS services.
FRIENDS' headquarters in Argos, Greece oversees the collection, maintenance and distribution of a wide variety of agricultural information services. These services range from national weather, EU legislation and daily agricultural market prices in Athens to online-consulting and on-line transactions such as book and article ordering. FRIENDS acts as the information channeler -- aggregating, filtering, packaging then disseminating it to the farmers and other consumers of agricultural information. The following diagram summarises the role of FRIENDS in connecting the Greek agricultural market with information. Note that information providers are typically clients of FRIENDS, and vice versa.
Since we have reached the milestone of becoming fully operational, there were two remaining project goals
We believe both goals will be interesting to other endeavours in agricultural or even in the introduction of information services in general.
FRIENDS will rely on a tiered model for access to the services, allowing any user free access to any service except a set of premium services restricted to subscribers. This tiered-access model will allow users to still acquire useful information through other services, but also will expose them to the value of premium services, hopefully enticing them to subscribe.
There are two segments FRIENDS will target for subscriptions: Individual Subscribers (farmers and students) and Corporate Subscribers (agrobusinesses, farming co-operatives, institutes, government organisations, etc.). Each of these groups will be charged a monthly subscription fee, which will provide them unlimited access to both regular and premium services. Because it is essential that FRIENDS maintains a high number of active users, the pricing of the subscription fee will be quite nominal.
Besides subscriptions, FRIENDS will also earn income by providing complementary web-based services: web-hosting and webpage design. These services are targeted primarily towards agrobusiness clients, the vast majority (90%) of which have no web-presence in the Greek language. At face value, this puts FRIENDS in a very competitive arena. For example, both internet service providers, which provide web-hosting services, and webpage design companies are quite common in Greece at national and regional levels. The advantage FRIENDS has over such web-focused companies is that it provides a complete solution the others cannot provide: not only building and hosting a company's webpage, but connecting that company's web-presence with a large, focused market of potential customers.
FRIENDS will also provide advertising space on its pages. This will be targeted towards, but not restricted to, agricultural companies promoting their products and services. Because of the narrowly focused segment of clients using FRIENDS services, we are confident that agricultural advertisers will be attracted to FRIENDS as a very cost-effective way to reach an audience which previously had been difficult and expensive to reach.
The three types of revenue streams -- subscriptions, web-based services and advertising --will provide the cashflow necessary to keep the system going and even reach break even point within a few years. Still, FRIENDS must maintain a flexibility to the system so that new services and extensions to existing services may be introduced as needed. The key is therefore to continually monitor the ever evolving needs of the FRIENDS clients through market research and usability studies.
Also, FRIENDS offers access to several information services which FRIENDS itself subscribes to -- but at a price considerably lower than if individuals subscribed to these other services themselves. Also, a majority of information for the existing Greek agricultural market is delivered via the traditional postal system. Despite the best efforts of the postal service, weeks may pass before information from a source reaches the intended recipient -- often dramatically reducing the value of such information (e.g., requests for tenders). FRIENDS' electronic distribution via the internet allows up-to-the-day or even up-to-the-minute delivery of information, ensuring the value of the information is not lost during transit time.
Another aspect of providing complete information services is to give a voice to those who haven't had a voice before. There are many experts scattered throughout Greece which have never had the capability to contribute their expertise to others. Through online chat groups, email and online feedback mechanisms, FRIENDS gives these experts a voice and raises the overall flow and value of information within the system.
The second level of value-added comes in terms of complementary and peripheral services. For example, one of the most popular services FRIENDS offers concerns EU legislation. Interviews with clients indicated that even when the legislation has been translated to Greek and delivered in a timely manner, clients were still unsure how to interpret it. FRIENDS plans to introduce complementary services which will interpret such confusing information into practical terms: Who does the legislation affect? What are the requirements for subsidies? Who can help fill-out forms and process the paperwork?
There are many other complementary and peripheral services which FRIENDS can integrate into its offering, including the aforementioned web-based services. Each new service strengthens the value of the overall system and creates "solutions" where only isolated information existed before.
There is a tremendous interdependency between these two groups -- the more information providers, the more attractive the system is for end-users. Similarly, the more end-users, the more attractive the system is for information providers to promote their products and services. This "chicken and egg" problem makes it difficult to start such an information service from scratch. FRIENDS was able to overcome this obstacle by running the system for eight months without charging either side of the information value-chain. Free information access has been very attractive to all users.
Free access, however, introduces another problem. As evidenced by many failed internet information services, it is very difficult to suddenly charge consumers for something which they had been receiving for free. Creating tiered-access helps soften this change in that clients may continue to access most services for free. This, however, is not enough. The best way to accomplish this change is to actively market the benefits of the subscription part of the system in the most practical terms possible. The goal is to convince potential subscribers that paying for information will ultimately pay for itself. If the value of the information is clear enough, the users will pay for it.
Finally, the services must be bundled in ways that introduce new services and thereby add value not previously available. For example, FRIENDS' web-based services, communicated in practical terms, has allowed corporate subscribers to envision concrete benefits to becoming part of the system. They can promote their company's products and services through the internet to a well-targeted client base. Bundling a corporate subscription with these web-service prices helps to create a perception of FRIENDS as a provider of solutions, and not just a provider of a collection of information.
Consider extending the content within FRIENDS to other services such as agrotourism. In a broad sense, agrotourism "fits" within the other services offered in that it focuses on supporting life in rural areas. Yet, the users of agrotourism services consist primarily of potential tourists and tourist agencies from outside Greece. Such users are completely different than the Greek agricultural community; the intended users of the other FRIENDS services. Introducing services such catering to other user groups will ultimately harm the original offering because it will water down the usefulness of the information for any individual user of agricultural information. By keeping a well-targeted focus on its users needs and by deepening the value of its service offerings, FRIENDS will ensure that its information keeps its high level of usefulness. (Aside: This is not to say that services targeting other users cannot be "spun off" into completely different information systems.)
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