We spent a lot of time talking about the inputs.

We spend a lot of time talking about the clicks, traffic, comments, likes, drama, and plenty more.

However, a community has to do things for members. A community has to have real outputs.

What is the real, meaningful, tangible, impact that the community has had on members?

You might not know, but it's worth finding out.

Ask members, what impact has the community had on their lives. What specific things has the community helped members achieve/do/be?

Document these. Literally write these up and add it to areas of your community. You can publish this as a weekly/monthly round-up if you like i.e. 'Joe discovered an entirely new way to takes photographs in dim-lighting without a flash.'

 This sets an example of behaviour for others to follow, increases the sense of pride felt by members, and provides a nice place for member-generated tips. Perhaps, most importantly, it keeps the community focused on the meaningful outputs, rather than the neverending inputs. 

Simple and effective to do. 

We've covered this before, but many people are new here. 

Skipping the internal aspects, this is our process. We've simplified it as much as possible. 

Build up a list of 50 to 150 potential members

Build up a list of 50 to 150 potential members of the target audience. You can find these people through a variety of channels. Existing relationships/contacts/customers works best, social media channels is secondary. There are lots of examples here.

As a tip, look especially for words or actions members of your target audience are likely to do. 

Make contact with each of these members

This is a full-time job. Begin outreach messages to each of them. Ask them an ice-breaker, something that's relevant to who they are, what they do/have done, or what they think/feel about a certain issue. If you can't establish these early relationships, don't even think about growing a community. 

This is when they list of 50 to 150 potential members begins to dwindle. Some you can't sustain relationships with, others simply won't have any interest in you. Especially to lose up to 50% at this stage. You can read Tim's post for some help on good outreach. Skip to a few paragraphs down, 

Interview them

When you have a good standing, ask them if they wouldn't mind speaking on the phone for a few minutes about a project you're working on. Specifically, you want to know more details about who they are (demographics), what they spend most time doing (habits), and what they think/feel about different issues in that sector (psychographics).

This is simplified, but specific questions we ask include: "What are your biggest problems/challenges", "What are your goals/aspirations/dreams?". You can base your entire community concept around this. 

Importantly, at the end of the interview ask if they would like to be one of the founding members of the community. These people are the first members of your community. You want to have good relationships with each of them. It helps if you're already a prominent, participating, member of the community. 

Conceptualize the community

This is a huge topic, see here. Based upon your data, decide the following:

1) Who the community is for (pick a specific sub-group of the interest to begin with. Use demographics, habits, or psychographic clusters)

2) What the community is about (similar to the above, be specific. i.e. This is a community for {x} that believe/like/do/are {x}.

3) What type of community it will be (action, place, interest, circumstance, practice). Use your competitive analysis here to make sure it is the only community of its kind. 

4) What will the community aim to do / What will happen in the community. These two are connected. 

Build a founding members group

Begin inviting these founding members to a mailing list, Facebook/LinkedIn group, or some other simple platform. Invite a few members per day. Initiate regular discussions based upon the biggest challenges they highlighted in the interviews. Directly reach out to the people you invite and ask them to give their opinions on the discussions. Continue inviting a few more people every day until you reach the 25 to 50 mark. 

Remember, if they're not actively participating, it doesn't count.

At this stage you typically rejig the concept around the topics that got the most discussion/generated the most excitement in the community. This is a quick process of testing different community concepts until you find the one people love the most. 

Once the platform is ready, move the discussions across and use the initial group as the insider/volunteer/meta group.

Keep inviting new people, initiating discussions, soliciting responses and building relationships with key members. You will find it soon begins growing by itself. it will begin taking off by itself. You will also find you can begin initiating regular events/activities for the community, plan out a regular content schedule, and focus on other elements of the community management framework. 

Good luck.

If you want to learn more, sign up for our training day on March 9th at the London School of Economics. 

Look at these two platforms; HR.com and the HR Business Network.

Both cater to the same audience, yet one is designed as a content site and the other a community site. 

HR Business content, above, is a content site. It gives full priority to giving people information. It features content in the most prominent areas of the community. Members will visit when they want information. 

HR.com, below is a community site. It's designed to connected HR professionals with one another. When you visit the community you seek the contributions of other members in the most prominent positions.

Both are perfectly fine, but produce very different results. 

If you create a content site, you're in the content business. You're not building a community, you're building an audience. You're competing against every other source of information on the topic. Loyalty levels are quite low. Average length of visit is low. Members only visit when they want information, and might not be that often. It might only be when they have a problem. 

If you're building a community site, you're in the connection economy. You're competition are other social groups. People keep visiting because they feel part of a peer group. They want to know what their peers are doing. They're participating to satisfy their social needs (ego, validation, self-esteem etc…), not their information-needs. Loyalty to communities is extremely high and members visit for longer periods of time. 

Both have their uses, but they're very different approaches. Pick one or the other with great care. Design your platform to be a great content site, or a great community site. Don't try to do both. 

Perhaps this exists, but I haven't seen it.

I want a platform that will send a daily e-mail to the community manager. This e-mail will contain a list of members whom have made their first contribution to the community. 

We know from theory that the response to a member's first contribution is critical to retain that member. If the response isn't quick enough, doesn't ask a question, doesn't disclosure any information about the responder, or simply isn't good enough, the member doesn't participate again.

This is a high impact area. A small intervention here can significantly increase the number of members that become regulars. If the community manager is sent a daily list, they can easily ensure that every first-time contributor gets a good response. 

We need a platform that has the capability to do this. Let's make it happen. 

Members need to feel they can influence the community.

If you don't feel you can influence the group, your participation in the group declines. 

This means you need to do two things:

1) Provide members with opportunities to have influence

2) Amplify and showcase the influence members have had. 

The former is easier than the latter. The latter, however, is more important. 

Not every member will have influence, but every member must feel they can have influence. 

The first step is to ensure that every member does have the opportunity to have influence. This means creating the right sort of platform. Next it means creating these opportunities. 

It helps to have a be more involved area in the community. This can ask members to be more involved in running areas of the community. You can specifically list things taking place in the community for which you need more support. This might be someone to do regular interviews, create columns, contribute news, or be responsible for newcomers etc…

Second, this means frequently calling for opinions, ideas, and advice. It means asking members for their opinions on topical debates and ensuring these contributions make an impact in the community. 

You can also give members influence in other ways. You can turn one of smartest members into an ask the expert series. Autodesk and Element14 do this well. Element14 gives top members their own area in the community to run.

It makes a lot of sense to give members whom have showcased an area of expertise their own group/forum category for people that want to showcase that expertise. This also gives members a single destination to ask questions about this topic. 

Autodesk lets top members create blog posts. Autocad gives participants their own blog in the community where those that have showcased a high level of expertise can regularly update what they do. 

Mashable highlights the best comments of the week. Note, not the people that post the most comments, but people that post the best comments. This lets the rest of the community know that a single, quality, contribution can have a big impact upon the community. 

Is the idea of building genuine communities for organizations too utopian? 

Why bother with the sense of community, building real relationships between members, and trying to create a community that makes a meaningful different in the lives of members?

What if you just need members posting?

There are two reasons. First, members that develop real relationships and feel a stronger sense of community participate more frequently and stay for longer. If all you wanted was activity, then this makes building a real community worthwhile.

In every type of community (action, circumstance, interest, place, practice), pushing members to participate to satisfy their social needs (validation, ego, efficacy, self-esteem, affiliation etc..) generates more growth, activity, and a stronger return on investment. Catering to the types of discussions that get members emotionally involved, self-disclosing information about themselves generates better results. 

Second, isn't the job more rewarding if you're building a community that does make a real impact upon the lives of members rather than collecting clicks? Wouldn't it be easier to attract and retain the type of community managers that want to do this sort of work? Isn't this the sort of organization you would want to be?

It makes sense to be very selfish and build an incredibly strong community. 

p.s. Click this link to watch a slightly suspect recording of my Amsterdam talk; How to use social sciences to increase activity in your community. 

We're inviting you to our Community Management Masterclass on March 9th. 

Judging by the registered attendees so far, it's going to be a group of terrific community professionals. It's also a good mix of non-profits, internal community specialists, and external community managers. 

One of our goals is to tackle your biggest problems. Not just tackle the problems, but to master the process for identifying, prioritising, and tackling the problems in your community.

Many organizations complain about something relatively minor. There might be a member posting too frequently or driving away newcomers.

When we look at the conversion funnel, we might find that most members drop out after their first contribution…or after the second week…or fail to complete the registration process. When we fix these, the numbers increase significantly. 

For mature communities, understanding what to work on next, mastering the social sciences to tackle the problems, and being able to measure results is critical. If you can master this skill, it makes it easier to put together a comprehensive community strategy.

If you want to join us in London on March 9th, please sign up.

We would love to meet you. 

Sagazone, a community for the 50+ founded by Saga, is dead.

Recently there have been complaints about content posted in the Soapbox and Debate Zone. We closed these areas of the site but people continued to post controversial and offensive content on other areas of the site.

A social networking site is about freedom of speech and there are many places on the web where people can express their views in a robust and unfettered manner. However, Saga Zone is in a Saga branded environment and when members post content that others find offensive on a company's website it can impact how the company itself is viewed.

We are sad that the site has been used to post offensive messages and that we cannot continue to run Saga Zone with the threat to the brand that this content poses.

Here is a good assumption to make about your community; anticipate that members will make racist and homophobic comments. Anticipate that your community will attract trolls. Anticipate that a small minority will do the worst thing they can possibly do.

…and have a plan to deal with it!

The solution to members posting offensive/illegal comments isn't to remove the place where members are posting such such comments. It's to be quicker and more effective at preventing and removing those responsible. 

Speedier moderation, vetting members, instant banning, and greater awareness of guidelines can help. The key is to have a plan to deal with your worst problem before it becomes your worst problem. 

There are two schools of thought.

First, when you grow a community, each member sees the possibility of having a bigger impact. They have an increased sense of efficacy. The level of participation increases. Everyone wants to be part of a growing community.

This is true…up to a point. 

The second school of thought is that growth is bad for a community. The problem is two-fold. Growing too quickly is bad. The more members there are in a community, the less familiar you are with each. The community's unique identity begins to dissipate. The recognition, familiarity, tone, references to previous discussions/activities decline. Everything that attracted the new members can vanish quite quickly. 

Growing too big without planning for it causes problems. These are problems like information overload, declining attention for each member, inability to recruit volunteers to keep undertaking all the necessary community tasks. Over time, the community becomes a numbers game. Hire {x} moderators to handle {x} comments per day. 

Yet, a community that fails to attract new members enters a death spiral. More members leave than can be recruited. Less activity begets less activity. 

The solution is not to treat growth as a standalone activity. It's a delicate balancing act. You juggle an increase in growth with sustaining both activity and a strong sense of community. 

If you're going to recruit members, you need to target them as a group. You need to plan out their first few weeks in the community, you need to have a plan to integrate them with existing community members (interviews, welcome discussions, newcomer orientation, community culture documents, rituals/traditions etc…).

You also need to protect existing members. Ensure that the level of familiarity doesn't drop, facilitate sub-groups for members based upon more distint interest. This is why you can never focus on one single thing.

That's not going to be easy, but then you probably knew that. 

Discourse looks interesting. It looks sleek, modern, and displays most of what people need. It's also open-source. It might be a fantastic new community platform. 

It's going to tempt a lot of people to switch platforms…and this is the problem.

Switching community platforms is one of the riskiest things you can do. The benefits are usually minimal and the dangers are colossal. Unless you picked a terrible platform initially, changing a platform won't help you much.

If you want a better community, it's rarely a new platform you need, it's a new and better approach to community management.

How are you driving activity and growth in that community? 

What are you doing to recruit members? Whom are you approaching? What are you telling them? What is their reaction? What tactics have you tried/not tried? How are you encouraging them to invite others?

How are you initiating and sustaining discussions? What topics have you tried? Who and how are you prompting people to respond to these topics? What types of discussions work best? What does your audience analysis tell you will be most interesting?

What events are you facilitating? Have you scheduled regular, live, events? Are you reaching out to and inviting the top people in your community and sector to participate in these events? 

Are you building relationships with members? How are you building these relationships? What is working/not working here? 

Have you diagnosed your community? What specifically does your data tell you is going wrong? Is it growth, activity, or sense of community? 

Are you embracing the full community management framework? Or are you just doing a tiny sliver of the work you should be doing. 

Too often, we jump straight to the conclusion that the platform is the problem. That's rarely the case. It's almost certainly the activity you're doing on the platform that matters. 

This is why new platforms have made it easier to build communities, but haven't helped us build better communities. 

The answers to these questions are far more important than the platform or its features.