It’s easy to get confused.
Here’s a simple cheat-sheet.
| Goals | This is the direct value your organization gets from the community. e.g. Increased customer satisfaction scores |
| Objectives | This is what you need your members to do to get this value. e.g. Experts answering questions in the community faster. |
| Strategy | This is the emotion you will amplify to get them to perform this behavior. e.g. Build a superior group of top experts |
| Tactics | These are the exact things you will do to amplify this emotion. e.g. Fly top experts to your HQ to meet the CEO, give them inside information on the product roadmap, and solicit their feedback. |
| Action Plan | This is who will do these things and when they will do them. e.g. Mark will identify and invite the top experts for Jan 3rd, Jenn will introduce them to the product roadmap on Jan 11th. |
| Improvement | This is how you learn to do things better. e.g. Did the meeting with the CEO, the inside information, or having their opinions have the biggest impact? Let’s do more of what worked best. |
This is a community strategic plan broken down to its most simplest form. You can use it to build a huge number of simple strategic plans for your work if you like.
The art of developing community strategy is to figure out the best things to do to achieve your goals.
Think Strategically About Everything You Do
I want you to think strategically about everything you plan to do in your community today.
Are you doing these things because they are clearly directly connected to the layer above and have been shown to drive results?
Or have you just gotten into the habit of doing them?
The biggest way to improve today is to do far fewer things really, really, well.
That means you need to stop doing all those things which might drive engagement but aren’t strategic. Be really ruthless with your time and devote your time to your biggest wins instead.
What We Learned From 1k Community Professionals
We’ve worked with over 1k+ community professionals in our academy and we’ve found almost every single person can deliver more results simply by cutting out the tasks that don’t drive results.
If you’re not sure, try working upwards from the table above. Begin at the actions you’re taking today and identify the tactics, strategy, objectives, and goals. You might be surprised to see your own mismatch.
p.s. Registration for our Strategic Community Management program will open next week. If you’re tired of chasing metrics and want to work on the things that matter, I hope you will consider joining us.
