Community Strategy Insights

The latest insights on community strategy, technology, and value by FeverBee’s founder, Richard Millington

Educating Community Members

Richard Millington
Richard Millington

Founder of FeverBee

Better educated members make better customers. But, educating members is extremely hard.

Most don’t have the time to be educated beyond a useful tidbit or answer to their problem. Others don’t have the motivation. (A few might already consider themselves experts).

The challenge isn’t sourcing the knowledge in the first place. It’s easy to find experts and useful solutions in almost any field. The challenge is turning the knowledge into a format the audience can digest.

You can spend weeks on a comprehensive resource which only a tiny percentage of the audience sees.

For example, we wanted members to be better informed about community platforms available.

We can do this via:

  • Replying to discussions about the topic.
  • Writing short blog posts.
  • Highlighting digestible tips each month.
  • Developing a series of autoresponder emails.
  • Having a live chat with implementation experts.
  • Hosting a webinar going through each of the big platforms.
  • Creating a wiki/eBook.
  • Developing a video training series.
  • Building an entire training course.
  • Hosting a conference about community platforms.

You will notice the steadily rising level of commitment (and probably smaller audience) at each step. You have to decide which level your new knowledge should live.

The temptation is to go from the easiest, simplest, level through to the more intense. I’ve repeatedly found the opposite works better. Begin with something which requires a lot of commitment and make it exclusive. Perhaps a free training course, but only available to community veterans (scarcity overcomes the motivation problem).

Then turn the training course into a series of short videos followed by a webinar on the topic, a monthly ‘top tips’ on the topic shared by the community, and respond personally. As more people pick up the key elements, they become more likely to reply to other discussions.

If it’s a really big topic, you will also need to change the structure of the community so discussions on the topic appear in a prominent place (ideally above the fold on the homepage). This makes it far more likely the knowledge will spread.

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