People-connector. Loyalty-builder. Inspiration-facilitator. Transparency-bringer. Resource-centralizer. Question-answerer. Feedback-aggregator.
Wait, who are we talking about? Is this some new rockstar employee your company hired? No – it’s your online community.
Welcome to the complete guide to online community. We’ll walk you through all the critical steps to build a thriving online community.
We’ll start with the 101 basics: What’s a branded online community? We’ll cover some essentials, like our favorite tactics to use for online community engagement. Then we’ll work our way up to the most advanced topics, like how to get more funding for your online community program.
No matter where you are in your online community building journey, you’ll find a useful tip or tactic to get you started, fuel your inspiration, or take you to the next level.
Are you ready? It’s time to build your digital destination. We’re glad you’re joining us for the ride.
1
Online Community 101 Discover the basics & benefits for your organization
2
Planning Lay a strong foundation with 4 steps
3
Getting Buy-In Tips to build your business case and overcome common objections
4
Migrating When you have to move your community to a new platform
5
Launching Expert advice for successfully beginning a new online community
6
Engaging Strategy, tips & tactics for creating your thriving community environment
7
Moderating Your playbook for online community moderation
8
Data Leverage community data to become more customer-centric
9
Monetizing Create a new revenue stream from your online community
10
Leveling Up A strategy for growing your online community program
Discover the Basics and Benefits for Your Organization
If the answer is “not often” or “at our annual (virtual) conference” – you’re missing out on a huge opportunity.
Interaction with your existing member or customer base has to happen more than once or twice a year if you want to unlock loyalty, retention, and growth.
When you can create continuous, meaningful interaction with your member or customer base, you open the door to incredible transformation.
Online community platforms are enabling organizations to connect their customers, members, partners, users, and employees all in one place and engage with them – every day.
This ongoing engagement can be the foundation for your shared success. That’s the power of an online community.
If you’re new to the idea of online community for organizations, this eBook is a great place to begin to understand both the basics and the benefits.
Branded online community (n):
a dedicated online space created by an organization where users can connect with each other and with you
At its root, an online community is a group of people with a shared interest or purpose who use the internet to communicate with each other. You’re probably in a few online communities yourself, whether it’s Nextdoor for neighborhoods or a Facebook or LinkedIn group around a common interest or software you use.
But the type of online community we’re talking about here is one that your organization would build to connect your members, customers, employees, partners – whoever the community’s members might be.
Your branded community is a professional network to bring people together around a centralized, shared organization-based experience or purpose for expansive online collaboration and growth.
Once your community members login for the first time (you can make your organization’s community easily accessible from your website), they can participate in a variety of ways, like:
But an online community is not just another piece of software that your organization buys — an online community is about creating a destination for real people. Your community can serve as the virtual town hall for your organization, or provide recognition, support, and connection when your customers or members need it the most.
Online communities take several forms:
Not all communities look and feel the same – they take many shapes and forms to fit the needs of their unique members and organization.
Hear how Imperva's customer community is improving the customer experience
Hear how ASAE's community is their Town Hall for members
Community engagement supports every member’s success by giving them access to the knowledge and value of the entire community. By supporting them in their work, it inspires their loyalty. It exposes people to new ideas, prompts product and service use, and rapidly surfaces shifting needs. – THE 2020 STATE OF COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT REPORT
But like we said earlier, a community can accomplish far more than just one thing. Future-focused organizations invest in online communities because they know that sustained engagement (users coming, going, and returning) creates generative value.
Benefits from a branded community trickle down to increase satisfaction, revenue, and help grow entire organizations, including growing customer loyalty. With a community, you can:
Let’s dive into each one of these benefits and why they matter for your organization:
1
Create real connections
Communities create a link between customers and real people at the organization. Users with questions can tag fellow members in a discussion or post a question and expect a response from someone in the community. But most importantly, they can feel connected to something bigger than themselves.
“We heard a lot that teachers felt alone, like they were on an island, and they couldn’t connect with anyone else. We started an online community because we wanted a place for our members to interact with each other.”
If your customers or members can effectively function, create, and innovate with each other online, imagine the ripple effects throughout their experience – and your organization – everywhere else.
At the end of the day, if your community members know they have a community where their voice is heard, they’ll become invested in the community. And that sense of belonging translates to higher engagement and loyalty toward your organization.
2
Stand out from the competition with a better customer experience
3
Generate leads and acquire new customers/members
“One of my goals is to expand our audience and bring more traffic to our website, and the community is a really critical tool in helping us do that, in a way that no amount of marketing can do.”
Educational Theatre Association
4
Crowdsource feedback and new ideas
If you want users to engage with you and each other, you need to show them that they’re being heard and you’re taking their feedback and thoughts into account. Organizations use online communities to build meaningful relationships with customers or members, which translates into greater brand loyalty and upsell opportunities.
“When we started aggregating data [in our community], GDPR was strongly searched and frequently discussed in the community. So, we created a group and started pushing more GDPR content and resources based on the data we had collected. This was well before the regulation went into effect – we knew we had to be proactive. We put together a GDPR program much faster because we saw it growing early.”
American Society of Association Executives
Branded online communities are designed to start conversations about your organization and its offerings. Take full advantage of that by tracking the most common complaints, sources of confusion, and new feature ideas. All of these are areas where you can improve your product to make it more efficient and appealing to your market.
“As the director of community management, I’m the voice of the customer. I’m the instigator – the person who collects the ideas and pokes product management. Being able to source ideas directly from the community has been pivotal to supporting customer success.”
When you do make a change based on community member feedback, let the community know. Communities help you close the feedback loop and scale this level of communication. You may even win more loyal users because of it.
5
Decrease support costs
6
Drive revenue growth
7
Drive referrals and create loyalty
Learn how Delphix uses community to create a movement around their brand
8
Grow your organization
In order to bring everyone to your online community, you need to think broadly about everyone involved – how will both your organization and your future community members benefit from the space?
Communities should look different at different organizations – and you’ll see many organizations accomplish multiple use cases within one community’s walls (for example, providing peer-to-peer support alongside a community of practice).
It’s About the People: Your Community Members Drive Community Value
Communities don’t thrive just because of lists or products or processes. A community is multi-dimensional and vibrant. And it thrives because of the people that are a part of it. People are unpredictable, creative, and diverse, and bringing them together in a place where they can interact and engage can only benefit your organization.
By breaking down the traditional one-way exchange of information and opening up your communication, your community will deliver value far beyond expectations.
When you’re able to tap into your community members’ unique perspectives and invite them to share their expertise and knowledge with others, you inspire engagement and connections that are relevant and meaningful.
In the end, you will likely discover that people who feel like a critical part of the community because of their distinctive contributions are also those people who remain most loyal and lasting.
This cycle of distinctiveness – tapping into the unique qualities of people and allowing them to influence others – is just one way a community can enhance an organization’s ability to communicate, grow, and remain relevant.
| Type of Community |
Definition | Example |
| User Groups |
Connect users to share strategies and best practices around a given product, often software.
User groups connect people from different companies that all use your product in different ways to unlock new skills, address support issues, and problem-solve or troubleshoot. They aren’t always associated with an organization itself; they can be formed by the users independently of the organization. |
Higher Logic Users Group |
| Communities of Practice | Unite likeminded people with common problems to solve. These drive adoption and encourage conversation. These can be further broken down into special interest groups, which would address niche groups looking to find one another, from birders to stargazers to HR professionals in a specific vertical. |
The Pragmatic Institute’s Alumni Community
Gain Grow Retain American Society of Association Executives (ASAE) |
| Learning and Networking | Dedicated around the study of a specific topic, whether that’s connecting a cohort of students in an official program, giving event attendees a virtual way to meet, or offering up knowledge around a specific topic. | CFP Board |
| Advisory Boards or Customer Councils | Brings hand-picked customers together who are interested in giving an organization feedback about their product. They may share their perspective as a software user or share thoughts on the direction you could take your company. | |
| Task-Focused Communities | Includes association chapter communities (similar idea to user groups), board communities (private area for an association’s board to connect and discuss things instead of having to send emails), or committee communities (where committees meet to discuss and accomplish tasks). | ASM International |
| Support Communities | Connects customers to each other to get peer-to-peer technical and strategic support, whether that’s about your product, services, or accessing your systems. | Jama Software |
| Event Communities | Engages attendees (and experts and your staff) of an event, whether virtual or in-person, to meet and network before, during, and after the event. | Super Forum |
Maybe you came to this with your company’s goals in mind, maybe you came to it with your members’, customers’, or employees’ goals in mind. We’ll walk through both.
You want to provide a platform for your users, but you should understand your own goals, as well. Communities can be useful for all levels of an organization and for many different teams. How will the community be useful to your organization, and what do you want to accomplish?
Perhaps you want to use it as an opportunity to gather feedback from users. Maybe a community is a large part of your offering. There are many different reasons to start a community, but you have to find yours.
When you involve users, members, or customers
at the beginning of the process, you’re building
advocates by giving them buy-in. Communicate
with them as a special group as you move
forward. You can lean on this group to be beta
testers and early adopters.
When someone joins a community, what are they looking for? Maybe it’s insider knowledge, an answer to a question, or a sense of camaraderie. Although some online communities have unlocked the secret of an engaging community, others struggle to create a community that’s truly valuable.
If you want to build a successful online community for your organization, the first step is why – let’s get really introspective here.
Why do you want to create a community, and how can it help your organization and your members?
You’ll need to understand goals that various stakeholder groups are striving for. That’s not only among users– it’s also among your internal team and leadership.
Overall, the community’s goals should be driven by both your organization’s and your users’ goals.
Sometimes, people think of communities as a siloed offering, relegated to one team, like marketing or support, rather than part of the organization as a whole. However, different teams at your organization can overlap your goals so that strategies are working in tandem. And getting this figured out at the beginning will help you make sure your community effort succeeds in the long run.
Here’s what you’ll need to do:
IDENTIFY YOUR ORGANIZATION’S BIG PICTURE GOALS
Find out your company’s goals and priorities. This will help you understand how community fits in, and how your online community can serve those goals.
INTERVIEW DEPARTMENTS TO UNDERSTAND GOALS AND PRIORITIES
Community can easily support the goals of multiple departments. For example, if you pick an online community platform or software that offers resource libraries (education), volunteering and advocacy tools (membership, customer success, marketing), product ideation (product and customer success), discussion threads (enablement, success); you can provide tools to address multiple use cases in one platform.
GET BUY-IN BY WEAVING IN OTHERS’ IDEAS
Make your community indispensable to your organization by getting buy-in and weaving it into your priorities too.
Not only should you consider why your organization needs an online community, but you should also make sure you’re providing a community that appeals to your users. Why would these users join? What will they get out of it?
Delivering an indispensable, engaging branded community that people want to come to again and again begins with determining the “jobs” that will motivate your users to come to the online community.
We’ve found that people typically join communities because they want to continuously learn, develop a sense of belonging, and gain exposure.
To build your community, you can think about how they’ll access the community, what content they’ll engage with, and how they’ll communicate:
The community you create needs to feel like it belongs to your users, not to you. You’ll benefit from it, of course, but your users – and their needs – have to come first, if you want it to be a success. But you can marry your organizational goals with what will be valuable to your users.
For example: Your organizational goal might be to “become a resource for users in the industry.” Your users might be craving support and connection with other customers or members. To solve both of these in one, you’d use the online community to provide a private, members-only area including exclusive content like blogs, discussions, and file libraries.
Fortunately, figuring all this out doesn’t have to be guesswork. Use a strategic process to interview key stakeholders across your organization to understand what you need to accomplish, using the Jobs-to-be-Done Framework. Determine the “jobs” that motivate you to build an online community
The Jobs-to-be-Done Framework in 5 Steps
You should do this process with both your internal staff and your community end users (whether they’re members, customers, employees, or other users).
Use the following interview questions as a template. These aren’t community-specific, but that’s okay. If you currently have a community and you’re trying to migrate or re-launch the community, you could customize these to get at current issues or problems they’re facing with the community. For example, an adapted question might be, “Tell me about a challenge you have with the community.”
Source: Community Impact Framework, Leader Networks
Engagement metrics will tell you how successful your community is by helping you understand how many people create, respond, and interact with content.
THERE ARE TWO KEYS TO MEASURING ENGAGEMENT:
KEY #1: MEASURE ON A REGULAR BASIS
You’ll need to measure engagement on a regular basis in order to see how your community is doing over time. While you can measure engagement on a monthly basis, we recommend measuring quarterly. This is because a user’s engagement may vary a lot month-to-month, but much less if you look at it on a quarterly basis.
KEY #2: MEASURE THE RIGHT THINGS
You won’t be able to gain insights unless you measure the right metrics. What do we mean by the “right” metrics? It’s the metrics that map to your goals – if one of your goals is to provide a resource hub, see how often those resources are being downloaded. Either way, these measurements will help you evaluate whether the community’s actually being used and relied on.
Again, your organization’s goals should drive the business goals you’d like the community to achieve. For example, if one of your organization’s “jobs” is to increase retention, you’ll need to figure out a way in advance how you’re planning to calculate that.
The same principles apply here: measure on a regular basis, and measure the right things.
Review these ideas for business metrics you might use, by use case:
Satisfaction and Advocacy:
Retention:
Before you can build your online community, you’ll have to decide which platform will be the right fit.
But before you start making a list of potential solutions, you should know what you need the platform to do. This is where the work you did to determine the goals comes in handy.
Once you have well-defined organizational requirements, you’ll be in a good position to jump into research. Based on your organization’s needs, research the different features and functions included in each potential platform to make sure it has everything you want.
For platform ideas, try reviewing industry sites like G2 and asking your network for community platform recommendations.
Once you have your needs outlined, adapt our vendor checklist based on these needs.
Community retention and use 
Logins
Agreed to terms
Consumption 
Pageviews
Contributor vs. consumer vs. inactive
Engagement 
Discussion posts
Library uploads
Perception 
Quotes/comments from members
Emails to you
You might be considering using an open source solution or a social media platform to create your community. However, we recommend using a proprietary community platform, for several reasons:
More control: If you create your community on social media or open source solution, you’re subject to any and all of their changes, with no say, effectively building your house on rented land.
More security: Community vendors place privacy as top priority – it’s their job. With a Facebook or LinkedIn Group, you have a limited ability to protect your members’ privacy and your own information.
More data: On a social media platform, they gain invaluable data that your community will inevitably generate about your members and customers – you don’t. If you create your own online community, you’ll have access to all that data, helping you understand your users and create an enriching experiencing for your users.
More community management tools: With a community platform like Higher Logic’s, engagement tools are built in, specifically designed to help you create an engaging experience.
Once you’ve set your goals, defined your KPIs, and chosen a platform, you’ll need to assemble your team for a community launch. To do this, decide on the size of your team, choose roles and responsibility, and determine where the community-building resources will come from.
Decide on the size of your team
Don’t be overwhelmed if the task seems daunting. Many successful communities have been launched with one community manager. The key is to figure out what you need. You may be able to start with a small and nimble team, but you should be prepared to hire more people or dedicate more resources as the work increases. Identify your gaps and the skills you already have among the team available to you, and then fill them.
Some community vendors will offer this as a service – for example, Higher Logic has a team of community consultants available at a variety of service tiers to help you launch yours.
Decide on roles and responsibilities
Although you may have many people involved, divvy up roles and responsibilities so that everyone is clear on what they’re supposed to do. You might want an entire department to be involved in your community, but that doesn’t mean that department needs to own it.
If there is a problem, you’ll know who to turn to. No matter what, make sure the community is owned by someone or a department – you’ll need a final decision-maker leading the team through the process.
Determine where resources will come from
This is the tricky part – who’s paying for it, and who will own it?
Ideally, you’ll have gotten a good sense of who will be most involved, internally, during your research process.
For example, if the marketing team will use the community the most, it might make sense for it to come from their budget. If it’s an even split between departments, see if the budget can be split as well.
Figuring this out will take some discussion, but relying on the research you did will help you make your case.
Every organization needs at least some dedicated management. That being said, most small organizations do not need a full-time community manager. But a large organization with a lot of customers, members, or users most likely will. Community management can be a part-time position that could be taken on by someone at their organization.The bottom line is it’s less about the number of hours as it is about the experience level of the person who’s managing the community. For example, a person with more experience will need fewer hours to
be highly effective, while someone with less experience will have to spend more time learning and executing effectively.
For more insight, check out The Community Roundtable’s research on their eBook,
Community Management: Understanding Roles and Responsibilities in 2020.
You don’t have to be a hypnotist or a master of persuasion to build support for a branded online community among other departments, your board, and executive team.
Instead, you need to align your new online community and its strategy with the mission and priorities of your organization and each department.
It’s easy to say, harder to do – but we’ll walk you through what you need to get there, including aligning with your organization’s priorities and overcoming common objectives.
Section 1
To get buy-in on building an online community for your organization, your choice of community platform vendor, and online community strategy, start with research. Coming across as informed and well-researched will help your case.
Start by thinking through these two questions:
If you don’t have solid answers to these, it’s the first place to start.
The biggest thing to know is this: Communities can solve a lot of different problems for your organization.
Sometimes, people think of communities as a siloed offering, relegated to one team, like marketing or support, rather than a benefit to the organization as a whole.
Online communities are cross-functional, complex solutions for organization-wide problems.
One organization could tackle multiple use cases with their community – answering support questions, building a mentoring program, housing customer-facing resources, attracting potential customers or members, identifying advocates, and more.
At the buy-in stage, their Swiss-army knife capabilities can be both a curse and a blessing.
Why? Because communities are so cross-functional, you’ll likely need buy-in and support from multiple departments to move it forward successfully.
But once you get key stakeholders involved, aware, and convinced of community’s value for their department, it’s not just you by yourself, asking anymore – you’ve created a powerful, broad support base to help you make your case. You have advocates from across your company who can help you move it forward and into the budget.
Here are just a few of the use cases where you could rely on your organization’s branded online community:
Understanding how multiple teams can benefit from this initiative will help you get buy-in.
Section 2
Before you get deep into the community planning process, begin with a soft launch of your idea. This should be an informal, research-gathering process where you float the idea of a community and locate where you can find support for your initiative.
Taking this phased approach will help you plan your approach to getting buy-in strategically and ensure you identify potential roadblocks in advance.
You’ll want background on these three areas: organization and departmental goals, community history, and budget.
Identify company-wide and departmental goals
Start by finding your organization’s big picture goals. You may already know these goals or you may have to dig for them, but you want to identify company-wide goals, like “increase in retention by X%.” This will help you understand where community needs to fit in, and how your online community can serve those goals.
Next, interview departments to understand goals and priorities. Hold a series of informal research meetings to talk to department leaders, where you discuss challenges they’re facing and goals they want to accomplish for the year and beyond.
Tell them you’re interested in building a branded community and you’re doing research to see how you can help meet their goals with the project. This is where you’ll get ideas about who to involve as a stakeholder and identify potential objections and barriers.
Emily Doyle and Meghan Cornwell built buy-in for their online community strategy at Teachstone. They did this informal interview process and shared some tips for success:
Has your company or organization ever tried to build a community, or do you have one now? Knowing any issues or leftover good or bad feelings about past community efforts will inform the way you build your strategy. If everyone hated the platform, or nobody engaged in the community, or people felt ignored, you’ll have to strategize for how to overcome these barriers.
Can your organization make room in the budget for an online community platform? This one might be hard to assess – you may not want to ask outright at the beginning, because you haven’t had a chance to build or prove your business case to earn the budget. But it will be helpful to know where your organization stands financially and if there are any key deadlines you need to be aware of when suggesting the purchase of new software.
Ask questions to get a sense of where you stand. Your accounting or finance team might be able to help you understand where the budget for new technology comes from or how you could work across departments to fund the initiative.
Section 3
Once you’ve done your initial research, it’s time to do your prep work, so that you’re ready to recruit your team from other departments.
Take the findings you learned from your research. Let’s say a department identified three big priorities: How can you match community’s value or solution to those pain points? What kind of benefit can community offer to this department?
Next, lay it out in a digestible and understandable way. What’s in it for the key stakeholders? How will it save their department money, or grow loyalty?
Your goal should be to demonstrate how the community aligns with and leads to achieving each department’s goals. This is how you can prove your new community will be a valuable technology investment.
You’re ready to go back to the stakeholders you identified and walk each of them individually through how community might be a potential solution. This is a great time to seek their feedback and ask if they have any concerns.
Invite them to be a part of your core team and buying committee, where they would help strategize for the community, join community product demos, and present to leadership with you.
| DEPARTMENTAL PAIN POINT | COMMUNITY SOLUTION |
| Sales and Marketing: We need more references to convince potential new members or buyers. | With a community, we can create a network of our users in one place. Through their activity in the community, we can identify the most active members and the ones who are likely candidates for references. |
Section 4
Once you have your core team, collaborate on creating a community vision and goals. For example, maybe you want it to support customers, but you also want to build advocates. You want to give members a place to find resources, but you also want to encourage more volunteering. Working together with your stakeholders to establish top goals and priorities will help you find the right community vendor and present a unified pitch.
To establish your community goals, look back to your research in the planning phase. Specific challenges and solutions brought you to the table, so re-examine those and codify them. Do some prep work to compile the ideas before the meeting so everyone has something to react to. You should be able to answer these questions:
A vision statement or a goal statement is a good way to anchor your community initiative in your research. Make it specific and keep it succinct (this will probably take a couple of drafts).
Example community vision statements:
Hammer out the features, resources, or integrations needed in your community platform, and then categorize them by must-have and nice-to-have.
Example
| MUST-HAVES | NICE-TO-HAVES |
|
|
Look to review sites, like G2, word-of-mouth recommendations, online research, or communities you’ve participated in for ideas on which vendors to add to your list.
During the demos, consider providing your team of stakeholders with a scoring sheet or template so they can share feedback based on your goals and feature checklist.
As you get closer to choosing your community platform, rely
on the vendor for support. They’ve helped many organizations
move through the buying process and likely will have
documentation and resources to help you build your case.
Section 5
You’ve done the groundwork, you’ve built your case. You’ve researched your vendors, you’ve prepared a strategy. Chances are, you have to get final approval from someone, whether it’s your CEO, department head, board, legal, or IT team. These tips will help you put together a convincing presentation.
Your presentation should summarize the process you just went through:
Find answers to these questions from your vendor before going into your executive presentation.
Courtney Howell, former Community Manager at the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, pitched community to her leadership and succeeded. She shares her tips for communicating confidently with executives. From her experience, she’s learned that you need to bring three things to the table: proof, persuasion, and passion.
Here’s her advice:
Most of us hate moving. It means hassle, stress, PACKING, money, time. But it’s one of those things you just have to do sometimes. And in the end, it’s usually worth it for a bigger space, a better yard, a quicker commute, more bathrooms.
It’s the same way when you’re considering a system migration, especially when it’s software you’ve invested a lot into, like your online community. But because of the value of a successful online community, it’s worth it to get your online community right. According to Aberdeen Research, firms with online communities:
Because of the commitment and upheaval of migrating your online community, you should do some careful analysis before making this decision. That said, the project is often completely worth it. But if you’re going to spearhead the project, you have to be able to prove it.
To help you out, we’re sharing a few signs to help you know when winter is approaching and it’s time to migrate.
10 SIGNS it’s time to MIGRATE
1. You can’t accomplish your critical use case
If there’s a critical use case you’re trying to accomplish with your community, but the platform’s limits are holding you back and the vendor can’t work with you, it’s time to move.
2. Your goals have outgrown the platform
If you’ve had your current community platform for a while, your goals and use case may have changed since you first signed the contract. Before it comes time to renew, re-evaluate if the features and functionality your vendor provides are still meeting your goals for your community.
3. Platform lacks key functionality
Every platform won’t have everything, and you might get off-and-on complaints about functionality. When should you take it seriously? When you’re hearing consistently that the lack of a certain feature or functionality is affecting staff’s productivity or preventing adoption by staff or users. Otherwise, don’t worry about it until it becomes a bigger deal.
4. Vendor charges extra for engagement
Do you have to allot unexpected dollars in your budget when your community engagement goes up? Engagement shouldn’t cost extra, and costs should be discussed upfront. Save your budget and cut ties with this vendor.
5. Platform customization is a money pit
If you’ve invested a lot of money into your platform in order to customize it, you might feel trapped into staying with the platform. But if you’re not meeting your goals, it’s not worth it to stay. You’ll save more by switching now than you will
pouring more money into a platform that’s not meeting your goals. Plus, with today’s SaaS advancements, customizing a platform shouldn’t require more than basic HTML and CSS skills.
6. Engagement doesn’t come naturally
Communities should be designed for engagement across the customer lifecycle. If engagement requires a lot of manual attention, it might be time to think about a platform with automated engagement capabilities.
7. Platform adds to your tech stack
If your community platform doesn’t integrate with the major players in your tech stack, then it’s much harder (almost impossible) to solve the problems you set out to solve with a community. Plus, you’re missing out on essential customer data, or pulling it manually (not fun).
8. Platform doesn’t provide a personalized experience
Today’s customers expect personalization from every experience, and you aren’t exempt. If your vendor isn’t providing the tools you need to make your users’ experience relevant and personal, it’s time to move on.
9. Vendor is not innovative/forward-thinking
You need to adapt to new trends to last in tech, and you need a vendor who not only adapts to trends but is forward-thinking and even setting trends themselves.
10. Vendor does not have services or resources to ensure you’re getting the most out of your current platform
You may have found that your problems are caused because you don’t have enough in-house expertise to manage your community. Great vendors will provide services to help with this.
So you made the big decision, huh? Good for you. Assuming you’ve gotten the necessary approvals to make this switch, let’s get into how to prepare for the move.
1. Think big
Getting a new community platform is a good time to think big – since people are expecting change, you can use it as a chance to make broad changes. For example, maybe you wish your customer success department was more involved (or vice versa), or maybe you’d like to redesign the community. Perhaps your use case has grown from what it once was, i.e. you want to focus on engagement across the customer lifecycle, rather than one limited use case. Use this time to plan for changes, and adjust your overall engagement strategy to leverage the greater flexibility of the new platform.
2. Get buy-in from your internal stakeholders
You’ll need internal support from other departments at your company for ultimate success. You’ll need their input on community goals, how they want to use the platform, integrations, and so on, but more on that below.
Create a features and functionality wish list | Each department using the community should compile a wish list of must-haves and nice-to-haves for features and functionality, mapped back to goals and use cases. Whoever has final say in the community migration project should be able to cut or add to the list, so that you can make sure it’s doable with whatever vendor you choose. This list will also help you as you decide which vendor to use.
Map your content | Your vendor will need to know which content needs to be migrated. Keep in mind that the more content you want to move, the bigger lift your migration will be. Follow the same process and create a wish list with must-haves and nice-to-haves, by department. At this stage you’ll need to start gathering internal bandwidth to help you identify and tag the resources you want to move over.
Outline your tech stack | Again, involve each department. Any vendor will need to know what your tech stack looks like across departments, and you’ll want to know if they integrate with key software, like your CRM.
Create a launch plan with dates and milestones | You’ll ultimately need to work with your vendor on this, but if you can give them idea of important dates (like an annual conference), you’ll be able to create a more realistic plan.
3. Set KPIs for your migration
These Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) should help you measure the before and after of your migration. They could cover things like number of unique logins, discussion posts, or resource downloads.
4. Log your current activity data/metrics/users
This will be your starting point when you measure your KPIs, so make note of it before you lose access to your former community platform.
5. Draft your communication plan for community users
You’re at the stage when you need to think about bringing users in. Communicating with them early and often about your plans will help increase buy-in and get them used to the idea. Like all people, they might be naturally resistant to change. Overcommunicate about dates and important milestones, and be as transparent as you can.
6. Choose your vendor
Now that you know what you’re looking for and have your lists ready to go, it’s time to start requesting demos. Bring in your internal stakeholders. Ask lots of questions and document what you learn. The better prepared you are by completing the above steps, the better your next choice will be.
7. Finalize your launch plan
Once you’ve chosen your vendor, work together to finalize your launch plan, working around the important dates you outlined in your launch plan.
Your input and involvement during the actual migration stage is imperative. You’re the spokesperson and link to your company, and you’re key to helping your vendor make decisions and stay on track. Most importantly, you should be prepared to manage the transfer of your content and users, do heavy quality assurance after your data has been migrated (to ensure accuracy), and work with internal or external partners on design and the user interface.
1. Check in regularly with the vendor
Your vendor will probably want to set up regular meetings, but if not, make sure you ask for (and attend) regular check-ins. Other important projects may come up for you during the migration, but this is a crucial stage where you need to be present to guide the project.
2. Allow time to review
After the initial migration, you’ll have an opportunity to check and verify that the data has been migrated properly.
3. Think long-term
If your vendor offers an integration that you don’t need now, but you could foresee using in the future, it’s always best to set that up at the beginning. That way, you don’t have to go back and re-do anything if you realize you needed it.
4. Build excitement
Get buy-in from your staff and users by involving them in the process. For example, if you want to rename your community, you could run a naming contest with your staff or users, or have them vote on a few options for the new site design.
5. Beta test with super users
If you have a group of community ambassadors, engaged volunteers, customer advocates, or a product advisory board, recruit them to test the initial stages of your new community. Insight from everyday users of your community will help you uncover things staff may not notice when testing.
6. Train staff and internal stakeholders
Use the time during beta testing to bring your staff up to speed on new functionality. Plus, the more you can frame the functionality in how it will make their job easier, the better!
7. Work ahead
Although this stage requires your attention, you do have a bit of down-time compared to the other stages. Once you launch, you’ll be facing a lot of questions, so help your future self out by creating content in advance. Put together some email templates and gather links that you can use to answer questions or proactively communicate with staff and users.
8. Make sure your documentation is up to date
Create an updated FAQ | If you didn’t have a community technical FAQ before, now’s your chance to create one. If you did, update it based on the new platform. You’ll probably need to work closely with your vendor on this, or they may have something pre-written you can adapt.
Translate feature names/terms | Think through language changes from your old community platform to your new community platform. Often, you will find that features on one community platform are called something different or work a little differently on your new platform. Take some time to map old features and functions to new ones and make it part of your publicly-available documentation for users.
When you’re working to meet a certain deadline, keep your eye on your goals. Is something about the migration not working like you hoped? Is migrating certain files more difficult than you planned? If these items are essential to meeting your goals, stop and fix them. If not, move on. Don’t sweat the stuff that doesn’t map to your goals, and you’ll find it much easier to meet timelines.
No two platforms are exactly alike, so don’t put too much pressure on duplicating look, feel, and functionality. Keep in mind which functionality is crucial to achieving your goals (like automating engagement), and don’t sweat the rest (e.g. the navigation is different).
You’re ready for it: Launch day. Your vendor will guide you through this process, so the only tip we have is to advocate for as little downtime as possible during the actual migration.
OnIine communities bring people together, providing a hub where users can go to get support, ask tough questions, and find inspiration. Once you’ve decided that you’re ready to create a community and have spent some time planning what that community will look like, you have to figure out how to launch.
Successfully launching a branded online community for your users isn’t easy. It requires managing a lot of moving pieces, all in the hopes that you’ll reach your big picture goals. But getting your launch right is one of the most important parts of securing long term success for your community.
Thankfully, launching a vibrant online community is within your grasp. As long as you plan ahead, communicate internally and externally, and market your community in the right way, you’ll be well on your way.
At Higher Logic, we’ve helped many people in your shoes launch online communities for their organizations. We’ve seen firsthand what works and what doesn’t, which is why we’ve created this guide. The guide will help you make sure you’re ready to launch by providing a community launch checklist, a communications plan, and answers to FAQs.
COMPLETE YOUR TASKS
Ready to launch? Start with a community launch checklist. This checklist will ensure that you don’t miss any of the essential tasks as you share your community with your users. Here’s what needs to happen as you go into a launch:
When you’re launching your community, decide who will be responsible internally. The two most important roles to fill are the community owner and the community approver.
Community Owner – Designate one staff member as a community owner– this person owns the project and ultimately takes responsibility for the success of the community. The designated owner ensures that work gets done and that others are involved appropriately. Even if this person has other responsibilities, the community should have one dedicated owner.
Community Approver – You’ll want a community approver who can review the work of the community owner. This individual will assign responsibilities and hold the community manager accountable. They’ll make suggestions, ask questions, review progress, serve as a resource, and intervene if the work falls off track.
During launch, your vendor is an incredible asset. Not only can they help ensure that the launch goes smoothly, but they’ve also helped orchestrate community launches before.
The first order of business is to create a launch plan with dates and milestones so that you can work with your vendor on the implementation timeline for your community platform. You’ll ultimately need to work with your vendor on this, but if you can give them important dates, you’ll be able to create a realistic plan.
A vendor can help with:
All communities need some element of moderation. This is to prevent users from joining your community and doing something that will damage your community culture, like using offensive language or promoting their own product or publication. Before you launch, you’ll need to have a moderation plan.
To do this, create a community code of conduct. Let people know upfront what is and isn’t appropriate, as well as what the consequences will be if they don’t follow the rules. If you don’t allow people to promote their businesses, but someone begins asking people to buy their book, how will you react?
Creating a code of conduct allows you to back up your decisions down the road. You can’t anticipate everything and you’ll likely have to update the code of conduct as you go, but it’s essential to have one at the start.
Your goal is to create a community that can run itself, but when you first open your community, you’ll want to post seed content to get things up and running. After all, when you first open your community, users might not participate right away. Creating seed content is an insurance policy to make sure there’s something for visitors to engage in.
Collect this seed content before your community launches. For example, you can reach out to 100 community members (assuming not all of them will respond), and ask them to submit some seed content before your launch. Then, when the community opens, you can post this content on users’ behalf, generating conversation and discussion.
WAIT...WHAT IS SEED CONTENT?
Seed content is your secret weapon: It’s user-created content that you can strategically post when your community launches. An empty community – one without questions or ideas – isn’t particularly welcoming. Seed content allows you to instantly engage users when your community opens.
HOW DO I GET SEED CONTENT?
Many of our customers have successfully gathered seed content by sending an email prior to launch that includes a short survey for users to complete. In this survey, you can ask users what they want to ask the community, and if they’re comfortable with you posting on their behalf. For example, ask them to answer: “What’s one question you’d ask if you were in a room with five of your peers?” You can also take a more direct approach: Create a list of your most engaged or active users and ask them to submit a question they’d like to ask the community.
Getting questions straight from your users will ensure seed content is natural and seems organic, rather than something you’ve just made up.
WHAT MAKES SEED CONTENT ENGAGING?
Questions are best because they give an opportunity for users to engage with their answers. The seed content that works best has ample background context and has to do with a relevant topic that other users are also interested in. These seed questions should come from real users and be tailored to the interest of your users.
Before launch, recruit users to help you beta test. If you have a group of community ambassadors, engaged volunteers, customer advocates, or a product advisory board, they’re great options for your beta test group. Choose a small group of 25 people (ask about 100 as many may not get back to you) to help you test the community.
Not only will your beta test users help you find and fix bugs, but they’ll also help ensure your launch is successful. Because they’ll already be bought in and understand how the community works, they’ll be able to lead new users after launch.
Higher Logic’s community platform includes built in logic-based triggers, automation rules, that you can set up to encourage engagement. For example, if a user creates a community account, you can automatically send an email encouraging them to upload a profile picture. You can customize this email to be as personal as possible, even making it look like it’s coming personally from your community manager.
This simple solution can do hundreds of manual activities for you, saving time while increasing engagement.
Set up automation rules
Before launch, decide which automation rules you’d like to use. Customize the template messages so every reply comes back to the community manager’s inbox. Review and edit to make sure the automated emails sound like your brand.
Set up regular email notifications
You might be wondering, “How will people know if somebody posts in the community or replies to a message?” That’s where email notifications and digests come in. You can determine how often and when users receive updates about what’s going on in the community. At Higher Logic, this is another built-in tool for encouraging involvement and repeat engagement in your community.
Add gamification via ribbons and badges
Badges and ribbons are a good way to engage and motivate your community members, and pre-launch is a good time to brainstorm what types of badges you want to create. Here are some ideas:
“Early adopter” for beta testers
“Attended our annual event/user group conference”
or “Conference speaker”
Bronze, silver, gold, or “platinum member”
for posters above a certain number of posts
Once your launch tasks are complete, it’s time to decide on a launch timeline. This depends on internal timing. Do you have 4 weeks to dedicate to planning? Is your team available? Does it conflict with a large event or other campaign? It also depends on when your vendor will be able to finish implementation.
There’s no such thing as too much planning, but be flexible, as well. Things are bound to change, and your launch may need to be pushed back due to circumstances you cannot foresee.
Heidi Ellis and Simon Helton, who work at the International Society for Technology in Education, shared their community lessons learned at our annual conference. One of their takeaways? Your members don’t want a surprise! So communicate early, and often.
TELL YOUR TEAM AND YOUR USERS
Once you’ve created and completed the items on your checklist, it’s time to promote your online community to your team and your users.
Not only is this essential for getting everyone on board, but you also want to make sure people know things are coming. Your users, members, customers, employees don’t want a surprise. They want to be involved and know what exciting things they can expect.
Here’s what you need to do to communicate your online community launch with your team and your users:
Before you start sharing information about your online community, carefully consider who the primary audience will be. Are you offering this to existing members of an organization? Existing customers? Prospective ones? There may be secondary audiences, as well. For example, you might split this into 4 categories with the intent of sending each different communications: regular and power customers, prospects, and staff.
Once you’ve defined who your audiences are, you can then decide how you’ll communicate. What channels do you currently use to stay in touch with these groups? Those are a good place to start.
For staff
Make sure everyone knows who owns what. This goes for your immediate team and for the whole organization. Remember when you designated someone as the Community Owner and someone as the Community Approver? Make sure people know who they are. If you’re relying on contributions from other teams, communicate those expectations before the launch.
For users
When it comes to users, make sure they know who to go to with questions, concerns, and feedback. As part of your community, you might create a way for people to easily submit feedback.
For staff
Launching an online community is an exciting milestone, so make sure your staff knows about your efforts. Be sure to share timelines, key milestones, and exciting wins. You want your staff to be excited about your community, but they can’t get excited unless they know about what’s going on.
For users
When launching your online community, it’s essential to build excitement for your users. This means creating a strategic marketing campaign specifically for your launch. For this campaign, you need to identify communication channels where you can share updates and build excitement. For example, you can tease your community via social media, on your website, via podcasts.
You'll need to keep on promoting the community. People need to be told about new programs repeatedly for the Information to take hold.
With Higher Logic’s Communications software, you can move beyond one welcome email and expand it to an entire welcome campaign, nurturing your users to get more involved over a period of time.
Learn More about Higher Logic Communications
1
Decide what your goals are before you craft your email campaign. When launching an online community, your goal might be to encourage users to join the community and make their first post. Your goals will help you decide what actions you want new members to take. Structure your emails around those tasks.
2
In an email drip campaign, you need to decide on an email send frequency that gives members the information they need without overwhelming them. For example, you might want to send a pre-launch email, then an email for launch day. Following that, what emails will users receive? When?
3
If you use gamification in your online community, consider creating a badge for your welcome email series. Newbies can earn the badge by completing welcome tasks from your emails. That lets new members start off with a reward and some standing in the community. It also provides an incentive for new members to pay attention to your messages and start participating.
4
In addition to tracking opens, pay attention to what people click on and the pages they visit in your community. If new members open your emails and close them without further action, they may not find value in your content. If this happens repeatedly, review metrics to see the cause.
To encourage community adoption, you need to provide training for both users and staff members. That means creating guides, handbooks, training materials, and support content that makes it easy for everyone to join in.
Gwen Basaria and Jennifer Richards at the American Association of Airport Executives and Shanna Montoya, Marketing and Community Manager at the Colorado Bar Association, are community launch pros. They shared these ideas for encouraging adoption among staff and users post-launch:
For staff
For users
GET ANSWERS
Ultimately, it’s up to you. There are many benefits to having a private, or customers and members-only community. These benefits include privacy, member collaborating and networking, and exclusive content and resource sharing.
However, there are benefits to allowing the public to have limited access to the community. If the community is somewhat open, it shows the value of the community to anyone who isn’t a customer or member. Content you leave open to the public within the community can help with boosting organic traffic to your website, as well.
The community is meant to be run by its members — unless, of course, you’re developing an employee-specific community. Consistent content coming from staff can cause a decrease in engagement. It should be a place where members feel they can come to collaborate, network, etc.
If your users feel like they’re being watched or overly moderated by staff, this may discourage participation. They might fear saying the wrong thing or not being their true selves. But there are instances where staff participation in the community is important.
Here’s when it makes sense for staff to participate:
There’s a lot of debate about whether you should allow anonymous posting. Here are both sides of the issue:
PROS
CONS
We recommend waiting until your community is mature to ad groups outside of the main community forum. Start small, grow, and as you learn your users’ needs, you can consider adding sub-groups. At the end of the day, it’s tough to manage 50 different communities. You want each community to have a purpose.
If you allow requests, develop a formal application process that includes:
We all want more engagement in our online communities. We all want our communities to be essential parts of our users’ lives. There’s nothing more disappointing than launching a new community and seeing it sit there, inactive. And it makes sense, because without people coming, engaging, and returning, how can we reap the benefits that we know our communities can offer our organizations, like loyalty, satisfaction, and advocacy? An engaged community can transform how an organization connects and communicates with customers, members, and employees across every stage of their journey.
But, how to engage community members? Whether it’s a lack of insight about the proper approach to community engagement, or whether your community was built on a platform that doesn’t have what you need to foster engagement, we’ll walk through engagement from the ground up: How to build the right community foundation and move into the tactical, practical things you can do to encourage users to come, engage, and return.
To help you achieve the benefits we know an engaged community of members, customers, or employees can provide, we’re sharing the experience we’ve gained from our almost 15 years in this industry.
Whether you’re planning to create a brand new community or you’d like to get your current community more engaged, you should start with evaluation of your foundation: Do you have the strategy, people, and technology to make sure your community is engaged?
People
Technology
Strategy
Strategy
Great communities create generative value because of sustained engagement – users coming, going and returning. But when you’re starting out, or you’re working your way up from good to great, it’s tough to know if you have a community engagement strategy that will create this habit in your users. Will it stand up to uncertainty in markets, new business goals, or the changing priorities of your members, customers, and employees?
The Community Roundtable’s research has shown shared characteristics of advanced communities, which require community leaders to take certain actions behind the scenes:
Once you’ve set the stage, it’s vital to put the community users front-and-center of your strategy.
Online community platforms can increasingly help provide a curated experience. We’ll get into the necessary technological pieces for that later, but we first have to understand some of the drivers at play with our members, customers, or employees.
That knowledge will inform our strategy on how to increase community engagement. In the next few pages, we’ll dig into how we can deliver a community engagement strategy that fits them, fits us, and builds shared success.
Higher Logic has over 13 years of expertise in online communities and engagement, representing over 350,000 online communities with over 200 million users. We’re here to help you from launch to maintenance with extra guidance, manpower, or Strategic Services.
This question should be top of mind when you connect with new users. We know in general that communities create access – a gateway to a destination that’s shaped to their needs. We know that newcomers commonly cite a need to network with their peers, connect with experts or to receive specialized content.
As you form your approach, keep these three pillars in mind: Find, connect, collaborate. Once your user finds the community, is it easy for them to get involved and collaborate? Once they’re there, they should have many touchpoints for getting involved and contributing. So it’s all about building a destination that’s designed for them to engage.
Think through these questions as you build your community engagement approach:
A lot of energy goes into acquiring each new user. And you need them, but our experience has shown the benefits of taking a balanced strategy that includes a focus on sustained community engagement tactics.
A user may come to a community for any number of reasons, and they may return or stay for different reasons. This, we recognize is a puzzle, but you want to create a wide enough set of opportunities for them to continuously engage. Their return and longevity signals value for your users which translates to growth for your organization.
Think about self-sustaining approaches that increase the ‘stickiness’ of your community, like these:
People
Every organization needs at least some dedicated management for their community. This is one common reason a community will flounder – lack of active management. Communities need somebody to take care of them.
That being said, most small organizations don’t need a full-time community manager. But a large organization with a lot of customers, members, or users most likely will. Community management can also be a part-time position that could be taken on by someone at your organization.
The bottom line is this: It’s less about the number of hours, as it is about the experience level of the person who’s managing the community. For example, a person with more experience will need fewer hours to be highly effective, while someone with less experience will have to spend more time learning and executing effectively. Ultimately, what you need is someone with a specific skillset, and to do it well, additional capabilities.
We’ve seen that in our own customer base, as those who use our paid community management service see much higher engagement.
This is a good indicator that dedicated community management is an essential.
Higher Logic has an industry leading team of community managers and strategists. Take a look at what we can do for you.
Community management is a profession that’s evolved rapidly into one that requires a sophisticated combination of analytical skills, project management, strategy, and business acumen. And that’s on top of needing to be engaging, write well, understand the technology, and stay calm in a crisis.
What it comes down to, no matter the situation, is accountability. You’ll need someone to keep your community going, tend to it, create engagement. What you put into your online community engagement tactics is what you will get out.
check out The Community Roundtable’s research on their eBook,
1. Calm, cool, and collected
Communities will have their share of needs, often enjoyable, but often stressful. Your manager should not only set and moderate the policies of your community, but they should also gracefully navigate group dynamics.
2. Change Agent
Find someone who can navigate internal constraints, goals, and organizational structures so they can tap into vast areas of organic growth and user-led advocacy.
3. Connector not just networker
Your manager should easily engage with your users, not just at a chatty level, but with the mission of the community and goals of your organization in mind.
4. Professional engager
Look for someone who knows how to be open online but understands the legal and ethical constraints of the profession (and how your community users might feel too).
5. Analytical storyteller
You need someone who can crunch the numbers, but what’s harder to find, is someone who knows how to tell a story with the data. A thinker, not just a doer.
TECHNOLOGY
The modernization of community engagement software space is skyrocketing. Community management as a profession is powered by technology, so we have to look at the implementation of your tech as a change project initiative. Think about your tech stack as the foundation upon which you’ll build the destination that supports all your users’ “must-haves.”
It’s worth repeating: The technology needs to serve your member, customer or employee selection criteria – first. Yes, your needs count too, but making them happy will go a long way toward your success.
You’ve probably googled best practices, read case studies, and heard many sales presentations. We have too, and we’ve also been hands-on working with a lot of different kinds and sizes of organizations to onboard engagement software. To us, it comes down to three things: Alignment, Capability, and Support.
There are lots of ways to interact with your members, customers, and employees: industry events, advisory councils, webinars, social media platforms, visiting them at holidays. Ok, probably not the last one. But, not social media either.
For real, community engagement to happen, users need to feel a high degree of comfort about their privacy, asking questions, and belonging to the space. Sharing and showcasing their expertise often gets diffused on social media platforms or open source solutions.
Think bigger than a support portal or forum or a listserv. Find a solution that can work with your vision of creating an engagement destination that people want to come to and return. We recommend using a proprietary community platform, for several reasons:
If you create your community on social media or open source solution, you’re subject to any and all of their changes, with no say, effectively building your house on rented land.
Community vendors place privacy as top priority – it’s their job. With a Facebook or LinkedIn Group, you have a limited ability to protect your members’ privacy and your own information.
On a social media platform, they gain invaluable data that your community will inevitably generate about your members and customers – you do not. If you create your own online community, you’ll have access to all that data, helping you understand your users and creating a curated experience for your users.
With a community platform like Higher Logic’s, engagement tools are built in, specifically designed to help you create an engaging experience.
If you want an engaged community, you need to build your community in the right place. When you can motivate members, customers, and employees to consistently engage in the community, you impact key experience metrics. The technological infrastructure of your community can help your organization achieve higher productivity, deliver more innovative products and services, and improve loyalty in your userbase.
As you read on in this chapter you’re going to be inundated (in a good way) with advice on how to keep cranking up your engagement levels. You’ll see tips, case studies, checklists, and more – but there’s no magic wand. Yet.
When you get into segmenting users, building subgroups, creating advocate campaigns, building programs, and all the other best practices that permeate successful communities, you’ll have a better idea of what platform you’ll need.
Higher Logic focuses on creating sustained, long term engagement centered around expertise sharing at all levels. We get there through built-in tools that encourage customers to come, return, and stay longer once there. We envision our community product becoming a comprehensive resource for your customers, members, or employees, a destination focused on engagement in a variety of ways.
Your goal should be to create content relevant to the audience and where they are in their journey so that you reinforce bonds and create shared value.
People typically join communities, because they want to grow their knowledge, connect with others, and build their own brand. Unfortunately, these same people may get distracted, forgetting why they joined, especially if they don’t find something to engage them on the first visit. There are a lot of moving parts to capture their attention, but it boils down to: Is your content of value to them?
If you want your users to give you their time and attention, then we need to make it worthwhile for them. How do you create content that matches your organizational goals with their drivers?
In this chapter, you will get to see the inner workings of how we successfully help our customers create engaging communities through the content. It’s a roll-up-your-sleeves chapter filled with timelines, examples, and checklists.
Coming up:
We all know that planning saves us in the long run. Building your master calendar is worth the investment to set up, as it’ll streamline your activities. You can plan out your work in advance, so that on any given Tuesday, you know what you’ve got on your plate.
After that, the amount of content you post depends on your community. You may need to have a staff person posting every day in some situations. In other cases, it’s ok to slow down your activity level in favor of encouraging your power users to take a leadership role. In our software, you can assign admin privileges so that they don’t have access to everything but still can help you.
Do a search on Amazon for planning calendars and there are thousands of results – some with llamas on them. You can put a llama on your How to Increase Community Engagement calendar if you like, but what we want to talk about here is how and why to incorporate a planning calendar. It’s a must-have tool to engage your members, customers, and employees.
The main goal of your calendar is for you to understand how your content is distributed throughout the year. The calendar helps show you when to deploy it. It’ll help you remember to support your annual user event. You can add seasonality as appropriate to your industry and audience.
As you develop your Community Engagement Strategy, you’ll want to plan different types of content for different types of community members. Our experience has shown that different types of content generates different types of engagement. It may make sense for your strategy to shift how and when you’re using different kinds of content, depending on your goals.
Traditionally, community leaders want to see more contributions than simply consuming, which totally makes sense, since you want to have people engage that’s why the community exists. Although we agree, don’t worry too much about consumers, or “lurkers” – you need the appreciators just as much as you need the louder people – they play a vital part in viewing, consuming, and benefiting from created content that your creators and contributors are making.
We like to classify community members into four different types in this sample community audience matrix on the next page.
| TYPE | DEFINITION | SCENARIO | EXAMPLE ACTIVITIES |
| CREATORS | Users who create posts, blogs, and other new content | Everyone knows Sally. She likes to write a blog post when she runs into a particularly interesting work situation and see what advice and reactions her peers have. | Consider inviting your top creators to be in your community super user or champion program. These members are obviously committed to the community and you can enlist their help in moderating, writing a weekly post, or even activities outside of the community, like presenting at your annual event. |
| CONTRIBUTORS | Users who reply to comment on the created content | Stanley checks in when he sees interesting content in his weekly email digest. Very often, when he reads an article or a discussion, he will provide his advice. | Send an automated email to your contributors encouraging them to submit a question for an Ask Me Anything session. |
| CONSUMERS | Users who exclusively view or log in to consume the created content and its contributions (also known as “lurkers”) | Lakshmi regularly reads the content – we can see it in her profile, but she is highly unlikely to do anything more than view and read. | Try grouping users who tend to consume and create an automated email that invites them to make their first post. |
| INACTIVE | Users who have not made any actions in the community in the last year | Pieter joined the community a few years ago, but he hasn’t taken any action in the last year. | If you haven’t seen a community member on the site in a while, contact them using automation rules or re-engagement campaigns. We’ve seen success rates upwards of 30% – and these users stay re-engaged more often than not. |
Many of your users will be comfortable with accessing content, commenting, or posting something due to the proliferation of technology across all of our lives. But that doesn’t guarantee everyone will be a natural at creating a discussion post that’s designed to engage.
Here’s why you should put in the effort to create engaging discussion posts and provide training to users on this topic:
Sometimes, especially early on in the life of an online community, the community manager is the one who has to start discussions. Here are some strategies you can use and share with users to teach them how to create engaging discussions.
Make it personal: This post genuinely relates to my situation
Explain context and motivations: I’ve got a new boss and want to help her
Promote peer interaction: Let’s create a sub-group and build this!
Make it “skimmable”: 50 – 250 words is a good rule of thumb
Respond within 2 business days: The event is Tuesday, don’t wait
Invite peer collaboration with @mentions: @JohnG didn’t you have this problem?
Start with the needed action: I need a quicker way to translate web content
Put a question in the subject line: Know any shortcuts?
What is it? Set up a regular event – on your content calendar – where users get the opportunity to discuss a topic and ask questions with one of their own experts – an Ask Me Anything or AMA.
You can work with the experts ahead of time by going over the topic in a pre-event meeting, creating a test community for practice, and giving them best practices, such as responding as fast as they can. When they’re prepared, they get excited and that spreads to the rest of the community.
The first event may not be the best! Its purpose really is to help everyone know what to expect and how they work. Send out a post-event survey and get suggestions for improvements or topics.
Why do I need it? An AMA is a great way to create community-exclusive content, giving members a chance to ask questions of an expert and understand how other professionals or industry leaders solve problems. Plus, with an AMA, you generate a large amount of content at one time that you can repurpose and share across other channels.
How do I do it
| 4 Weeks Before | 2 Weeks Before | 1 Week Before | Day of AMA | 1 Week After |
| Select a topic Select an expert Coordinate the date with the AMA expert | Train the expert Promote the event Collect questions from community members | Promote the event (newsletter, social media) Promote the event within the community Collect the expert’s answers to the pre-submitted questions Create, and then close, the discussion thread for the AMA | Promote the event (automation rule email) Get on a call with the expert Open the discussion thread Post the pre-submitted questions and expert’s answers Post a closing message and close the discussion thread | Send a thank you email to the expert Re-purpose the content generated during the AMA (newsletter, social media) Promote the event to disengaged community members (automation rule email) |
Any secrets to success?
Make AMAs a special event; a good rule of thumb is to have one 1x per quarter
How to pick a topic: Review community reports for "Threads with most replies" and "Most liked content" to identify topics that are already engaging community members
Have a community manager post the first seed question to encourage engagement
What is it? Help community members to become familiar with the online community platform, so that as their comfort level increases, they get more value.
Why do I need it? You can highlight features/ functions that are overlooked or new to your group. These become great reference points to onboard community members, and easily repurpose for welcome campaigns (more on these later!)
Does it work? Yes! Since something as simple as confusion with the platform could be a barrier to participation, Tip Tuesdays are great ways to help community members who might be less tech-savvy get involved.
How do I do it
| 2 Weeks Before | 1 Week Before | 1 DAY Before | POSTING DAY | 1 MONTH After |
| Review community health metrics Review the search term reports Review frequent questions received from community members Determine tip topics to highlight Determine #TipTuesday cadence for the month | Create each #TipTuesday template before the scheduled posting date | Create and schedule the post for the following day | Post the tip to the Open Forum community as a new discussion post Monitor community members’ responses to the post | Monitor community health metrics |
What is it? Content such as questions or resources, which a community manager posts on behalf of the community’s members. Seed content is your secret weapon: It’s user-created content that you can strategically post when your community launches. An empty community – one without questions or ideas – isn’t particularly welcoming. Seed content allows you to instantly engage users when your community opens.
Keeping a cache of “easy-to-answer seed questions” is an effective community engagement strategy. Plus if your best-laid plans go awry, you’ve got seed content to fall back to if necessary. Better yet, why not share your list with active members or MVPs and they can use it, too?
Why do I need it? The 90-10-1 rule of community engagement says that you’ll usually only see 1% of community members post content organically (among Higher Logic customers, this number is more like 23%). Having seed content to rely on helps to create organic member-to-member engagement in the community.
Does it work? Yes! The seed content that works best has ample background context and has to do with a relevant topic that other users are also interested in. These seed questions should come from real users and be tailored to the interest of your users.
How do I do it
| SET UP | 1 Week Before | POSTING | 1 WEEK AFTER |
| Establish a reoccurring automation rule that goes out to engaged members asking for seed content Ask users if you can post their questions on their behalf Identify active members or MVPs who can assist | Identify author Generate draft | Post the question or topic to the community Track responses | Identify any responses of note to repurpose Update calendar or seed content list as needed |
Any secrets to success?
Get questions straight from your community members to ensure seed content is natural and seems organic, rather than something you’ve just made up. This can make discussion deeper and more authentic.
Use these drivers to help you brainstorm:
What is it? A thread (usually monthly) that features a member of the community based upon determined criteria.
Why do I need it? Members, customers, and employees continually cite the importance of learning from people like them. If you’re facing a work problem, or don’t understand how to upgrade a software, it’s more satisfying to hear how other people tackled the issue. The people that lend a hand in this situation also gain, since the featured member feels valued as an expert and improves their status.
Does it work? Yes! Your community members, especially those who want to build their brand or professional network, will love being recognized, as well as learning about other members. This is a great way to put faces to names and make that personal connection.
HOW DO I DO IT
| TEMPLATE CREATION |
| Determine member spotlight criteria Generate community thread template Generate outreach template |
| START OF QUARTER |
| Identify 3 members to highlight in next quarter Send initial outreach to identified members |
| 1 WEEK LATER |
| Generate drafted threads for member approval If a response is not received: Follow up with member to verify if interest (potentially identify backup spotlight) |
| 2 WEEKS LATER |
| Add approved threads to content calendar |
| POSTING DAY |
| Add thread to community when posting date occurs (potentially leverage schedule functionality to pre-schedule threads all at once) |
Any secrets to success?
Try using these criteria to find members to spotlight:
Repurpose the content from your spotlighted member: Use it in collateral and identify potential advocates.
What is it? A program to encourage your “lurkers,” or consumers and inactive users to take more overt action but accomplished in a way that’s not too pushy. Understanding the make-up of your audience, and the consumer and inactive sub-segment is critical here, as is the timing and cadence of your outreach.
Does it work? We recommend that our customers who haven’t seen a community member on the site in a while try contacting them using automation rules or re-engagement campaigns. We’ve seen success rates upwards of 30% – and these users stay re-engaged more often than not.
How do I do it
| 2 Weeks Before | 1 Week Before | 1 Day Before | POSTING DAY | 1 Month AFTER |
| Review consumer/inactive metrics Identify easy CTAs Determine cadence for the quarter | Create each before the scheduled posting date | Create and schedule the post for the following day | Post the tip to the Open Forum community as a new discussion post Monitor community members’ responses to the post | Determine consumers’ response metrics |
Any secrets to success?
Don’t expect to convert consumers into always-on advocates. The majority of your time is better served ensuring all members receive the help they need
Try to understand why consumers don’t participate. Is it because they don’t know how or what to do? Identify easy call-to-actions (CTAs) for them to accomplish (this is where Tip Tuesdays may come in handy)
Target specific consumers (automation rules are a great way to do this) get everyone to post a profile picture, or respond to a quick poll
Create smaller discussion groups or identify other ways to make interacting in the larger group less intimidating
A community platform with built-in automation helps community managers interact with a broad audience with improved personalization, increase the efficiency of their time and efforts, and deliver an experience that aligns activities to the goals of the organization.
It’s an easy feature to adapt to multiple purposes, but here are some of the most common use cases. We give you some of our favorite automation rules to use again and again in the next section.
Alleviate daily or repetitive tasks. Automation tackles the repetitive and time-consuming tasks that repeat on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.
Encourage behavior you want. Create habits either for you and your team or for your end users.
Stay organized. Instead of chasing to-do lists or being buried by things to remember, get the system to do it for you.
Improve communications. By automating, you can more quickly respond to members, avoid bottlenecks, and anticipate needs.
Personalize. The system can support user recognition programs or help you focus on multiple subsets more easily.
Higher Logic’s community platform includes built-in logic-based triggers that you can set up to encourage engagement. Automation is a streamlined way to stay organized and active with members, while also improving communications, reporting, and user recognition.
Gamification is an approach you can use both to motivate and include an element of fun in your community. Gamification done right (intrinsic motivation) helps community managers shift users’ behaviors from short-term transactions to long term engagement; it gets at the heart of motivating people’s behaviors, as most users like some form of recognition and competition.
Backing that up is Herzberg’s Two-Factor Theory, which describes two types of motivating rewards:
Extrinsic motivators, like cash prizes, are less likely to motivate for the long-term, so as you design your gamification program, focus on intrinsic rewards.
One example is including ribbons or badges on users’ profiles. These can appeal to the intrinsic motivators that drive long-term community engagement. For example:
Gamification applies game characteristics like rewards, rules, and experiences to non-game contexts. Higher Logic’s community platform includes gamification tools to help you engage, motivate, and reward and recognize users when they complete goals.
Intrinsic motivation is driven by an interest or enjoyment in a specific task and doesn’t rely on external factors — it exists within the individual. Achievement, responsibility, gaining knowledge, and competence are all examples of intrinsic motivators.
Extrinsic motivation is driven by the desire to attain a desired outcome or reward. Money, competition, positive feedback, and avoiding punishment are all examples of extrinsic motivators.
Which type motivates more will vary for different people. Extrinsically motivated people perform to achieve a specific end goal, and once achieved, that goal no longer motivates. Intrinsically motivated individuals perform for their own satisfaction or achievement, and the motivation is generally self-sustainable and long lasting — that’s optimal for online communities.
Sarah Hawk, Feverbee
Using Automation to Support Motivation
Gamification can work well to incentivize participation, but a one-size-fits-all approach won’t work for every community or for every segment within your community. It may not be appropriate at all for your users. Go back to your understanding of your user’s goals and motivations. They might feel like it cheapens the community. Or they might feel patronized if an everyday activity results in a badge; perhaps your user requires more of a challenge or twist.
Run through these questions to determine when to use gamification in your community:
This is a way to track which individual users have contributed to the community. Everyone can understand who is most involved without reading every word on the banner.
Examples:
During an in-person conversation, we consciously and subconsciously gather feedback; polls are a quick way to get some feedback in your online community. They help make capturing information intimate and immediate. We like using them in fun and serious ways.
Examples
Use gamification to connect fun activities to the elements that’ll contribute to your community’s overall success. Profile completion, especially adding a photo, makes an online community platform more human-focused. It also increases post responses and engagement metrics.
Examples
Nearly all communities have engagement as their driving goal, but having a community super user program to help you achieve that is less common. It’s actually one of the best ways to see more community engagement and lighten the community manager’s load. A super user– sometimes referred to as a power user, a community champion, or MVP – works on your behalf inside the community.
You could extend the super user’s work outside of the community, but what we’re talking about here is focused on community activity. It’s a big return for little effort, and best of all – they make your life easier.
If you don’t have one, or need to improve, start now. A powerful transformation occurs where the collective knowledge improves: the whole community gets the benefit of learning from these MVPs and the MVPs feel empowered and valued. You get to meet people who feel as strongly as you do about your association, company, or employer.
Here are some engagement metrics you can track (if your community platform provider makes them available):
Engagement metrics will tell you how successful your community is by helping you understand how many people create, respond, and interact with content.
There are two keys to measuring engagement:
Key #1: Measure on a regular basisYou’ll need to measure engagement on a regular basis in order to see how your community is doing over time. While you can measure engagement on a monthly basis, we recommend measuring quarterly. This is because a user’s engagement may vary a lot month-to-month, but much less if you look at it on a quarterly basis.
Key #2: Measure the right thingsYou’ll need to measure engagement on a regular basis in order to see how your community is doing over time. While you can measure engagement on a monthly basis, we recommend measuring quarterly. This is because a user’s engagement may vary a lot month-to-month, but much less if you look at it on a quarterly basis.
A rule about online engagement has floated around the internet for a while, called the Rule of Participation Inequality, or the 90-9-1 Rule. The rule goes something like this:
User participation in any online internet community generally follows the 90-9-1 rule:
Is what you should expect?
For anyone new to community management, this is a discouraging benchmark. If active participation is this low, what’s the point of creating an online community at all?
For organizations who’ve already launched an online community and don’t see high engagement, this rule might lead them to accept it’s the norm.
But we see communities generating impressive results for their organizations every day. To do that, a community needs to have solid engagement. The 90-9-1 rule just doesn’t align to that.
We decided it was time to re-look at the data so that we could have accurate expectations for engagement levels today. We wanted to dig into the reality of what engagement or the new 90-9-1 rule looks like for our own customers at Higher Logic. Does the rule hold true?
Turns out, it does not.
In our research, we found that the 90-9-1 rule has given way to more community member participation. In fact, a large portion of community members participate in the online communities they’re part of, especially in small communities.
Unlike the traditional 90-9-1 rule, where just 1% are creators, we found that a much larger group of community members, up to 23%, are actively creating new content.
The 9% part of the 90-9-1 rule was fairly consistent with our research when we looked at the contributors (members who only respond), because that was around 10%. But when you combine it with the creators (who respond and create), we saw engagement levels up to 33%. This holds true in branded communities both big and small.
So how much engagement should you expect? It depends on a lot, like where you’re building your community, what type of content you encourage, and who your members are, but overall, our customers see much higher levels of engagement than the 90-9-1 rule would indicate.
We reviewed over 1,000 of our customers’ community sites to uncover three community engagement trends (plus, we included tips for increasing engagement after each trend).
You don't have to manage your community alone.
Imagine if you were building a house, but on your own. You have a vision for how you want it to look, but you just don’t know how you’ll be able to get it all done alone.
As a community builder, you might feel similarly overwhelmed at the idea of building or relaunching your online community on your own. It can be challenging to manage and moderate communities as well as work on all those other things you know are important: investing in professional development, advocating for your community program, or creating new content for the community.
Now imagine that same house building project, but with a group of people standing around the construction site with the skills and willingness to help you. All they need is a plan to follow and some encouragement.
Your community might have this same team of people gathered around – you just don’t know it yet. A community super user or champions program is an effective way for a community manager to lighten the workload. With a little planning, you can harness the support of enthusiastic users and create a community champions program.
Your community super users enhance community engagement by taking on tasks such as curating content and welcoming new members. They can also support other strategic efforts within your organization, such as your customer advocacy program.
But the main purpose of a community champions program is just what the name suggests: Strengthen the overall community by applying the focused energy and expertise of enthusiastic users.
At this point, you might hear the skeptic in your head saying: “Sounds great in theory, but isn’t setting up and managing this program just going to make my to-do list longer?”
Here’s the good news: With a small upfront investment in planning, you’ll see big improvements in your online community engagement, while freeing up your time to focus on other things.
The term “super user” comes from a systems or software background. It originally referred to someone who knows the ins and outs of your product or service, most likely using it every day, and even offering advice to other users.
A community super users program takes that same idea and applies it to your online community. If you’re a software company, your product super users may or may not overlap with your online community super users.
You may have noticed other terms that are synonymous with community super user — such as community champion or community ambassador. All of these terms point to the same group: namely, your most highly engaged community members, who work on your behalf inside your community.
Creating a community champions program is a way to formalize their contribution to your organization. You might include special perks to reward them, like a badge on their profile, an invitation to a customer or member council, or inviting them to special events with your executives.
Let’s dig into each of these areas.
1234Community champions can also help support other efforts throughout your organization. This could involve contributing to your organization’s blog, providing a video testimonial, speaking at your organization’s conference or presenting a webinar. Community champions can also support advocacy efforts — whether that’s using their product service expertise and enthusiasm for customer advocacy, or government advocacy work that adds their persuasive voice to help inform policymakers.
When you seek champions, you’re looking for shared traits. You want people who are knowledgeable and enthusiastic about your organization and know how to use your online community.
Fortunately, these individuals aren’t hard to find. Community analytics offer a good starting point. Reporting within Higher Logic Community can help you identify top contributors, most active participants, or most questions answered, etc. to help you find ideal candidates for your champions program.
You can also try identifying your community super users by looking for traits like these:
Contact these individuals directly with a personal request. You can use an automation rule to send personalized emails to everyone who meets your specific criteria.
If you’re just starting to build a community and don’t have established contributors, there are still plenty of ways to identify potential champions. You can issue a call for volunteers and evaluate them for suitability. In addition, consider looking to people who are involved with your organization on social media, as well as speakers at your events, and see if they’d like to be part of your program. These are people who clearly see the value your organization offers — and just as important, have demonstrated their ability to articulate it publicly.
If the words “launching a new program” make you feel mildly stressed, remember the goal is not to create something elaborate, it’s to save you time on basic tasks. Start small and build from there.
Review the essential components for building a successful community champion program. To that end, here are some tips shared at our annual conference by Simon Helton and Lauren Kocher at the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE):
Identify Goals
What are you trying to achieve with this program? Increased engagement is a given – but you’ll want to paint a clearer picture of what success means to you and your organization. What aspect of community engagement would you like to improve most?
Determine Tasks
You know what you want to accomplish — now choose the tasks to get you there. What would you like your champions to do on your behalf? You’ll get more consistent responses when you provide specific tasks. Examples include:
Communicate
The more personalized your outreach to the champions-in-training, the more likely they’ll respond with the desired action. For example:
Recognize Contributions
Make this a meaningful activity for your group. When you empower and recognize champions, it also reflects positively on the community’s culture — and this lays a foundation for future Community Champions.
Maintain and Improve
Take time to celebrate your successes and also look for ways to do better. Remember to:
TIP: Be careful of making it feel like a burden
That’s another piece of advice from Simon and Lauren at ITSE. A danger in building a community champions program is that you might overburden your champions, so always keep the idea that they don’t work for you or receive a paycheck top of mind. Instead, make the program manageable by creating a time limit for champions. Give them the opportunity to opt in and opt out every six months or so. Regularly check in to see if they’re feeling overtired. Otherwise, the idea of a never-ending commitment may be off-putting for some users.
You want your champions to stay engaged and consistently help in ways that best serve your community. If you feel the program isn’t providing the response you need, it may help to re-evaluate the program by viewing it from the champions’ perspective. The problem might not be a lack of interest. Instead, your users may be feeling overwhelmed or burnt out, particularly now.
Consider these ideas for maintaining a high level of responsiveness and enthusiasm among your program’s participants.
Scale it back
Are there ways to scale back the requests you’re making of community champions? For example, experiment with reducing the number of posts they’re required to create. Consider ways to simplify those tasks and provide additional guidance, so they don’t feel overwhelmed. For example, if one of their duties is welcoming new members to the community, create a one-pager with the exact steps they need to post a private welcome message and an email template they can use.
Use microlearning
Make the ongoing training content in your program as concise as possible. If you’ve taken an hour-long training video and reduced it to 20 minutes, that’s great. Even better, break that into shorter modules (say, five minutes each). Your champions will digest information more easily when you give them smaller bites. Microlearning means any learning content that can be consumed in a few minutes and is focused on a specific outcome. This could be a video, infographic, a podcast, or anything that can be quickly consumed to help your community champions perform a task.
Many communities require that to be a part of their champion program, participants must post a certain number of times per quarter. To help keep your champions on track, create and send a calendar invite one week before the scheduled posting date. It’s a quick and easy way to remind participants to submit their content.
The most consistent contributors in your community will be driven by intrinsic motivators — such as helping others or gaining responsibility and knowledge. Although not everyone cares about status, there is one common thread that affects behavior: We all want to feel valued.
That’s why it’s important to provide public recognition for your community champions. In addition to giving them the appreciation they deserve; this also reflects well on your organization’s culture and conveys a feeling of generosity and respect. Public appreciation can also attract future community champions, because it generates interest from other members and makes them think, “Hey, how can I get involved in that too?”
TIP: Ask your members to select one community champion as their “Champion of the Year” for their assistance in the community. This helps ensure you’re rewarding qualitative contributions, and not just quantitative.
Check out these ideas for rewarding your champions:
Bringing everyone all together and engaging with them through ongoing, meaningful interaction can create moments of surprise and delight you’d never expect, and go beyond what your organization can do alone.
Ongoing engagement with that community is the foundation for your success. Making sure your online platforms feel safe and enjoyable for all of your participants is essential for the function of your community.
That’s where community moderation becomes so important.
All it takes is two or three trolls to ruin even a 40,000-user community — trust us, we’ve seen it before. Fortunately, with over 13 years of experience in the community space, we have tips and best practices for you to follow to ensure you can effectively moderate your online community.
The practice of managing comments and discussions from members on your platform so it aligns with your Terms and Conditions and/or Code of Conduct, usually done by a human community moderator or team of moderators.
Full Moderation equires every post to be approved by you. We recommend this setting for the first 24-48 hours after launch, to develop trust and get your community off the ground. The downside of this approach is that it can hinder engagement by removing the instant gratification of seeing your post live – which is why once your community is stable, we recommend switching to…
Self Moderation gives you the flexibility for your community to moderate itself, with the help of a team of online community moderators. There’s no time lag when community members post, but they can mark certain posts as inappropriate, which notifies admins and temporarily removes the post for moderation. This is the sweet spot for the majority of our customers.
Higher Logic also offers No Moderation, which is a hands-off setting that gives community members freedom to post with no time lag and no flags. We recommend this type of moderation for committee communities or a product advisory panel, since admins can still remove or delete posts.
A large part of becoming a good online community moderator is knowing how to strike the balance between controlling conversations to maintain order, contributing to keep conversations fresh, and giving members, employees, or customers enough freedom to feel like they can express themselves. You don’t want mayhem, but you don’t want to discourage discussions before they even get going.
Community moderation is a skill, first and foremost. Take these seven steps to effectively moderate your community.
1 Your first step should be to create a written, downloadable guideline reviewed by an attorney that will be ready before launch day.
Your guidelines should:
Make this document easy to find, such as a link in your site footer or on your community homepage. We recommend forcing acceptance of terms and conditions when users are first asked to login.
One last tip: If you make your online community’s moderation guidelines overwhelmingly lengthy, not even your most emphatic community member will feel inclined to read it. As a rule of thumb, try to stick to one page (or under 500 words). You can place the community guidelines at the top and then add the necessary legalese at the bottom to ensure members notice the guidelines.
2 Now that you’ve written the guidelines, it’s your job to know them inside and out. By choosing to maintain an account in the online community, members agree to abide by these policies.
So what happens when they don’t?
We recommend a three-strike rule to protect your community and to give your users the benefit of the doubt.
“My assumption is that people just don’t know better until they prove otherwise. Honestly with some heated topics, people just feel passionately and get out of hand and it’s not their true nature.”
Cindy Taylor
Systems Coordinator for the Association of Independent School Admissions Professionals
If you have it from the beginning, you always have your policy to rely on when you need to back up moderation decisions.
| Strike 1: Educate | Strike 2: Moderate | Strike 3: Remove |
Provide a written notice to the member who violates the guidelines. It’s likely they didn’t know what they did wasn’t allowed (yes, even if they signed the Code of Conduct when they joined). Educate them on what happened, why their post was flagged or removed, and guide them towards positive engagement. Example: A user posts promotional content for their business, when that’s against the guidelines. Response: Send a direct message to the user explaining why it’s not allowed and include a link to a relevant topic to their business, asking them to offer advice without selling. | At this point, there are no excuses. But you should still hear the user out. Place them on full moderation and send a second written notice of the violation, offering to talk on the phone or via videochat about the infraction and what community means to you. Have the template all set up in your email – keep the process clear and concise. | Suspend access to the community and send a final notice to the member in question. Three strikes — you’re out. TIP: Keep a spreadsheet with a list of people with moderation issues in the past and how many strikes they’ve received, clearly documenting these issues so you can back up your claims when you do remove the member. |
You don’t want to publicly shame members, but if everyone has already seen the flagged post before you could remove it, here’s what to do:
1 Even if all of your community members signed a clear terms and conditions document, you need to have a plan in place for when you see a violation. Who will respond and how will you tell the member that they broke a rule? It’s not enough to just know what a violation looks like — you need to have a clear course of action outlined for a swift response that’s consistent.
With Higher Logic’s Watch Words, you can automatically flag and manage language deemed inappropriate, insensitive, or incendiary. Learn more about our Community software.
Enforcing is easier said than done — telling passionate people they’re acting out of line can be hard. But it’s critical for maintaining the community’s integrity.
2 Moderation is more than just knowing the rules. As a community manager, you’re pretty much a living, breathing example of them. If someone wonders, “How should I start a conversation?” or “What should I say in response to X?” they can look to you.
But a community is so much bigger than that. A great online forum moderator builds a community that eventually moderates itself, letting community members feel as if they have some control and pride in what they’ve built.
Before you swoop in — provided it’s not too inflammatory — let the comment sit for a few minutes. Your community should lead by example, marking it as inappropriate or responding to the troll themselves. If no one takes action, then you can model the right behavior.
3 As your community grows, creating its own social norms and expectations, learn to trust them. Part of being a good moderator is training members, employees, or customers to moderate discussions themselves.
If you did your job well — wrote an excellent guideline and modeled good behavior — your members, employees, or customers should be well trained, able to keep valuable discussions alive and self-police unproductive behavior. It will be easier for new folks to get up to speed, since they’ll have so many positive role models to emulate.
Once your moderation team includes members of your community, and not just employees, you know your community is on the right track — they’re finding value in the community and taking ownership of how it’s used.
4 When something does go wrong, rather than shut down, listen.
Reaching out personally shows vocal or disgruntled users you do care, you are listening, and you’re working to solve the problem. If it doesn’t feel appropriate, then have a manager or executive reach out. This simple gesture will go a long way.
If you’re hesitant to be very communicative with members during a crisis, remember that silence can be your worst enemy. Don’t just passively listen and churn out disingenuous responses — truly listen to what people say, let them know they’re heard, and try to learn from their dissatisfaction.
5 Finally, don’t be afraid of change. Your guidelines were never meant to be static. Your community norms, mission, and goals will evolve as more people use it, and if you need to change your Code of Conduct, do it. If you do, make sure you let your community know, either through a general announcement, email, or both.
Now that you’re well on your way to successfully moderating your community, you’re probably wondering: What should and shouldn’t you moderate? Here are our do’s and don’ts of great community moderation.
If you want to compete in today’s highly personalized, specialized market, you need to put your people at the center of everything you do, from product development and program offerings to your sales cycle and onboarding journey.
The fuel that powers that human-focus? Data.
One enormous and often overlooked benefit of building an online community is the data it can provide.
When you create an online community for your organization, you’re building vital connections between your customers, members, and employees, and with you.
This unlocks collective knowledge, giving your organization an extremely powerful way to know how your community members think
First things first, make access to your community data your #1 priority.
There are two main options for building an online community today: Online community platforms or social media networks, like Facebook, LinkedIn, or Slack.
Communities built on platforms designed for community and communities built on social media serve different purposes, behave differently, and provide a different experience to members, customers, or employees.
The appeal of forming a community on a social media platform is obvious. It’s easy and free to get started. But think about it this way – when it comes to that invaluable data communities generate, do you really want to build your community on a platform you don’t own?
Creating your own online community on a proprietary platform gives you access to all your own data, helping you build a secure and personalized experience for users (not to mention all the community management tools that come with a branded platform), rather than letting someone else take control.
Higher Logic’s Community platform dashboards make it easy to track key metrics and spot trends over time. You’ll even have a personalized engagement score with recommendations on how and where you can improve.
With a branded online community, you can…
If you’re an organization where engagement is high priority, retention is a major goal, and your users need the support of the organization and one another to succeed in their jobs, you’d get much more value out of a platform meant for online community.
In general, there are two types of online community data you can learn from:
If you’re thinking about implementing new offers, programs, events, or making large changes, begin with active insights so your community members can tell you exactly what they think about the idea.
Active insights primarily gauge reactions to ideas and can be a faster way to get insights — enough so you know if it’s worth investing in more research on a specific offer or prototyping a product.
The downside of active insights is that they only go so far. Just because your members don’t ask for something directly doesn’t mean they don’t need or want it.
Passive insights are the real magic of an online community. There are three types of passive insights:
It’s one way to listen to your members without asking them directly.
Higher Logic uses more data to provide relevant, personalized content based on user roles, interests, and even the actions they take. Unlike other community solutions, Higher Logic’s integrations with your member or customer database gives you a 360-degree view of your members.
There’s so much you can do with your online community data. From planning marketing campaigns to sentiment analysis, your community provides a wealth of information. Here’s how to use it to improve both your community and your business
When we started aggregating data, GDPR was strongly searched and frequently discussed in the community. So, we created a group and started pushing more GDPR content and resources based on the data we had collected. This was well before the regulation went into effect – we knew we had to be proactive. We put together a GDPR program much faster because we saw it growing early.”
— REGGIE HENRY, CIO at ASAE
Learn how ASAE gained valuable insights from their online community
1Build a better user experience 2Find advocates and volunteers3Personalize your marketing and sales efforts4Increase community participation5Identify ideal customers, members, and employees (and minimize churn risk)6Drive additional revenue
TIP: Keep in mind that you should never sacrifice your community’s authenticity and goal of driving member value to revenue. Your community is for your members – don’t make the mistake of putting lead generation first, or you’ll lose the value the community can provide.
Perhaps every company’s worst fear is having customer criticism front and center in a public place. Odds are, you will get negative feedback in your community. And that’s okay! It’s better to have occasional cranky comments on your own platform rather than posting on Twitter or complaining in a place you don’t even know exists. When it’s a complaint in your community, you have direct access to the individual and the problem, so you can address it immediately
Critical comments and venting can provide great insight into sticking points with your offerings or services, so use it as an opportunity to educate. Your team can leverage these posts as a starting point for a conversation offline.
Making a community member feel heard does wonders for the relationship and with continued support, will hopefully turn them into an advocate over time.
ASAE knew their community was a strong member benefit, but insights gleaned the community extends beyond just a place for members to interact:
They found that community users with at least one activity per month generate 5 times more revenue than users with one activity or fewer per month.
Communities give you a direct channel to listen to your members, customers, or employees, learning more about them in real-time than any other channel.
Becoming user-centric requires an ongoing investment in data. By building an engaged online community, you can gain powerful insights into your members, customers, or employees to build a better experience — one that drives more value for your organization.
Don’t solve just one data problem – let’s get as much data as we can into this warehouse, so we can continuously solve problems. And let’s bring the community along for that ride.”
— Reggie Henry, CIO at ASAE
Higher Logic’s automation rules cut out so much manual work – categorize and act on data, easily. For example, let’s say you’re looking for enthusiastic community members to help moderate your community. Use automation rules to identify a group of community members who have posted over 30 times this year and automate an email to these members inviting them to become volunteers.
Online communities are inherently good at growing retention and loyalty.
But they’re not only hubs for community members to interact and share knowledge, they’re also great platforms for generating additional revenue streams. Any community can use advertising, vendors, events and other unique revenue streams to help its organization to flourish.
If you have an engaged community, you can turn that consistent end-user engagement into revenue. You can promote your own products and services within your community so that members are aware of your offerings. You can also work with advertisers and sponsors who will pay to advertise or share within your community. Either way, you can strategically use your community as a source of revenue.
Online engagement tools open up a new world of advertising space and give you a new way to attract sponsors with compelling and diverse offers around events, community ad space, and member newsletters and mailings.
Whether you’re new to the idea of monetization or wondering how to optimize your efforts, this eBook will help you achieve those goals.
Before we dive into monetizing options, we need to cover this question: “Will monetizing my community destroy the engaging environment I’ve worked so hard to create?” It’s good to be cautious, because we’ve seen this happen. After all, if you joined a community for the first time only to see that all the latest discussions were promotional, you might immediately think, “There’s nothing of real value for me here” – and may be less likely to engage with that community. That’s definitely a scenario we want to avoid!
But never fear, if you know the best practices for monetizing your community, you can easily maintain your community’s authenticity while earning community-generated revenue.
The big picture is that all content, including content designed to generate revenue, needs to serve your overall community engagement strategy by providing value.
Blatant selling and self-serving marketing can hurt engagement but sharing resources that solve member problems or make useful connections will resonate.
In the next section, we’ll discuss using advertising, partnerships, as well as promoting existing products and services, in a way that both earns you revenue and maintains engagement.
You’ve got lots of different options when it comes to generating revenue from the community. Keep in mind, your options will look different depending on the type of online community platform you have.
1 When done correctly, online community advertisements can be very lucrative. After all, these ads are targeted directly to your community. This approach often generates more return for advertisers because you can target advertising to specific member segments so that they’re seeing relevant content. The more targeted the ad, the more worthwhile the advertiser’s investment.
The Massachusetts Society of Certified Public Accountants (MSCPA) has used community advertising to bring in $14,000in additional revenue.
MSCPA’s daily digests and weekly community e-newsletter, where MSCPA sells advertising space, are popular with both consumers and active contributors.
Kristin Wells, MSCPA’s events and business development manager, ramped up the advertising program just a few months after the community launched. She created a comprehensive media kit with community statistics and ad mockups to help partners see value and visualize what their ads might look like.
Ads are offered for the daily digest emails, weekly e-newsletters, and discussion pages. To keep the community from becoming a marketing channel, ads are offered only in sidebars and top banners and only one ad space is available in each weekly newsletter.
MSCPA’s first ad ran at the end of the year. The next year, MSCPA’s ad space was 75% booked, bringing in nearly $14,000 in revenue.
“The success with advertising has been huge for us,” said Kristin. “It frees us up to do other things.”
Higher Logic Community is designed with ad space, built intentionally to assist in balancing promotion and community activity. When you begin your monetization journey, consider using these different ad types:
2 Partnerships (where you ask an organization to create valuable content) and sponsorships (when you have an organization sponsor something you’ve already created) are a great way to generate material your members will find valuable, while allowing a partner to get involved.
Affiliates and partners have information your members want to hear. You should sell them the value of creating sponsored content rather than going the traditional advertising route. When an affiliate or partner buys an advertising package, you can give them various options: sponsor blog posts, feature logos in calendar events, hosted webinars, or listing them in a buyer’s guide.
Believe it or not, a partnership or sponsorship can pay for your entire community program. You could advertise it to one exclusive sponsor or open it up to multiple sponsors, but either way, their sponsorship might generate enough to pay for your community software.
As part of your sponsor or partner agreements, you could allow paid access to your community on the agreement that they won’t be doing promotion but rather, they’re being invited to join as members. As community members, sponsors can share best practices, build relationships and make connections. After all, content marketing works, and direct selling will turn members off.
Running an AMA? Hosting a panel? Offer the opportunity for one of your vendors to sponsor the event. They will be given the opportunity to be featured in associated promotional material and you could even offer two minutes at the beginning or end of a webinar for the sponsor to say a few words.
Sponsors can create featured blog posts or run webinars that showcase their expertise in certain areas. This will provide value to users while also making them aware of the products and services that sponsors offer.
You can get creative with how you showcase your sponsors. For example, you might create a Sponsor of the Month or Vendor Spotlight, which you promote in your email newsletter or directly in your community.
Choose sponsors with solutions that your members need, and make them easy to find. You can naturally promote sponsors and provide value to users by creating a special directory that members can use to search for partners with the right solutions.
Build a directory in your Higher Logic Community to promote your sponsors and partners.
3 Let’s say you don’t want to put ads in your community. There are valid reasons to keep them out, or maybe you don’t have the bandwidth to kick off and maintain a successful, robust ad program at the moment. No matter what, you still have spaces for potential ads – should you just leave them blank? No.
Rather than viewing banner ad spots as tools that only external organizations can use, put those spots to work for your own organization! You can place your own organization’s content or community events in those areas. Sure, you won’t earn revenue from selling those spaces to a partner, but you can grow your own revenue through paid course, event, or publication promotion. Each time you have a webinar, meetup or conference, pick a few strategic banner ad spots.
Selling ads, sponsorships, and promotion of in-house items don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Take a hybrid approach and allow outside organizations to advertise or sponsor within your community, but also save a few spots to promote your own products or services.
Your community is attractive to those who want to reach a specific audience. Plus, being online means you can use behavioral data to target specific ads and update ads in real time.
Create a media kit (explaining everything that’s available for potential advertisers to purchase). This makes it easy to sell ad space and partner with new organizations.
Include advertising rates for community ad spaces, information about your organization and your community (like community engagement rates, number of community members), audience demographics such as age, business information, gender, and location, and annual events that might include sponsorship opportunities.
Higher Logic makes it easy to see your engagement rates with our Engagement Benchmarking Score, which you can then share with potential partners. Plus, we provide you with a letter grade and tips for improving engagement.
Showcase Engagement Metrics
When an advertiser or sponsor is considering whether they want to work with you, they’ll want to understand how your community engages with content. This information helps them see what they’re likely to get for a return on their investment.
For example, you’ll want to share your community size and average engagement rates. Engagement rates include metrics such as number of newsletter subscribers, average email open rate, average email clickthrough rate, and number of community visits per day.
With a Higher Logic Community, community members can receive email digests in their inbox about what’s been going on in the community – and you can also include advertising on those emails. Due to the dynamic nature of the community digests, open rates are generally higher than typical marketing messages.
The more engagement you have on your channels, the more inviting your sponsorship package will seem. People want to advertise in well-trafficked areas, especially when the space has the right traffic. Prioritizing the engagement growth of your community will help you grow your sponsorship program.
Explain Community Targeting Features
One of your most compelling community features is your ability to target community members. Advertisers want to show ads to an audience that will be highly relevant, so they’re most interested when they can target their efforts to a particular group.
With a Higher Logic community, you can personalize ad targeting based on engagement, activity type, or volume – or even to specific roles, depending on what kind of database integration you have. This is a huge win for advertisers, as these hyper-targeting abilities gives them a better return on advertising investment.
For example, if you have a group of highly engaged users, you could put those users into a group using Higher Logic’s automation rules. Then, once you’ve got the group set up, simply target sponsorship ad placements based on that group.
Ideally, the more online community traffic you have, the better your advertising earning potential. These are three ideas for increasing traffic, both from the outside world and from your current community members.
123Communities have the power to transform people and organizations.
You know and we know that communities have the power to transform people and organizations. But does your leadership know? This chapter is all about learning how to prove your community’s value and learning how to make the case for more resources or staff. Plus, you’ll find an advanced community checklist to help you grade your community’s maturity and see where you can improve.
To get buy-in from leadership, you need to explain why your online community has value — in terms executives care about. Fortunately, you won’t need to take a crash course in sales psychology to make a persuasive pitch.
The best way to gain budget approval is to align your online community’s strategy with the priorities of your organization and its departments. We’ll show you how to do that by exploring useful steps to build your case, and build allies to help grow your online community.
Let’s explore effective ways to convince leadership that by supporting community expansion, they’re accelerating the organization’s overall growth.
If you want to take your community from good to great (or great to award-winning), you’ll need to convince executives at your organization to say “yes.” You’ll need their approval to access resources, whether it’s a bigger budget for your program, or a promotion, or funds to hire a staff member. With that in mind, we’ve compiled these tips to help you overcome objections and build a compelling case for your community’s value:
1234567You’ve done the hard work gathering information to make a compelling case for more funding, or whatever your community goals may be. Now all you have to do is make the pitch. Easy, right?
We know it’s stressful to communicate about a high-stakes issue you care deeply about. Although we can’t wave a magic wand to guarantee success, we can share these five tips that Courtney Howell, Community Manager at the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, used to successfully pitch community to her leadership. She shares her tips for communicating confidently with executives. From her experience, she’s learned that you need to bring three things to the table: proof, persuasion, and passion.
But first, take some time to evaluate your current program. If you want to move from a basic community to an advanced community program, use these five principles of an advanced community to audit yourself and identify areas where you could improve.
Here’s the checklist of fundamentals we recommend for advanced communities:
12345This is a common question that arises as communities advance, and there isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer. Like all staffing choices, it depends on the volume of work required at each organization.
That said, it’s worth noting that fostering vibrant communities is increasingly viewed as a strategic business skill. Most community roles are not entry-level, according to a survey from the Community Roundtable: They found the average community professional had five to eight years of community experience and more than 14 years of total work experience. (For more, check out their eBook on Community Roles and Responsibilities.)
Here are three roles commonly found at organizations that have multiple staff members supporting online communities:
This role focuses on tactical initiatives and projects to support the community team. They often focus on one of three areas: engagement, content, or technical initiatives. Responsibilities can include providing training for users, curating and editing community content, or working with analytics.
While community specialists are considered specialists, community managers typically have a generalist role. They are viewed as the face and voice of the community, which means they work to find value for both users and organizational sponsors. Although this is an entry-level role at some organizations, the average worker profile is a mid-level professional with more than a decade in the workforce and more than six years in community, according to the Community Roundtable. At
larger organizations, community managers may have direct reports or support from outsourced resources; at small organizations, they are often responsible for everything related to the community.
Professionals in this role often have operational backgrounds. In this position, they focus on securing internal support for community, communicating strategic progress, and managing the community team. They oversee the health of the community program, with responsibilities that include planning and delivering the community roadmap. The main focus of this role is operational strategy, with priorities rooted in governance, internal advocacy, and measurement. Much of their time is devoted to serving as an internal champion. That means ensuring executives understand the value of the community and get the information they need, while keeping the community aligned with leadership’s priorities.
