It’s always tempting to dive into potential solutions for a struggling community without first trying to investigate the cause.
In one recent client project, we brought some prospective members together into a shared online space to both diagnose what’s going wrong for the community today and identify what the community could become if we collaborate together.
Using a zoom webinar with Mural, we asked members some key questions:
What’s stopping you from participating in the community?
What do you want from the community?
What can you contribute to the community?
What might be a good trigger to visit the community?
You can see the responses here:
This isn’t a definitive list of questions or topics (it’s also good to ask about the toughest challenges, what’s stopping people achieving their goals at the moment, who they want to connect with etc…).
However, It yields some good and immediate insights you can use when developing the strategy. Better than that, the mere act of bringing people together to identify what is and isn’t working about a community creates a shared mission.
This might not work well for customer support communities, but if you’re trying to build a community of practice I would definitely recommend it.
