Review Your Existing Community Plans

As part of our consultancy, we spend a lot
of time reviewing a client’s existing plans for a community.

There are a variety of things we look out
for. Some we’ve listed below:

Strategy

• Do you have clear, ROI, goals?
  i.e. not likes/engagements but one of these?
• Do you have a framework for
  measuring the health, progress, and ROI of the community? Is this framework
  logical and valid?
• Have you set a specific time to
  collect and analyze the data you need?
• Are your data collection methods
  valid?
• Is your community concept clear
  and based upon research you’ve undertaken?
• Are you taking the right
  actions for your stage in the community lifecycle?

Growth

• Do you have a plan to
  proactively grow the community?
• Are you targeting a specific,
  segmented, group to join the community? Is your approach genuine or does it
  feel corporate?
• If you’re just launching, do
  you know specific who to contact and have you already established relationships
  with this audience?
• Do you have a process for
  converting a newcomer into a regular?
• Are you inviting members to do
  something specific within the community?
• Are you optimizing the newcomer
  to regular conversion ratio? Do you know where members are dropping out?

Moderation

• Do you have a calendar of
  discussions you plan to initiate over the next 3 months? Is this based upon
  audience research?
• Are you highlighting and
  promoting the most popular discussions in the community?
• Are your discussions linked to
  your events and content?
• Do you have a process and
  criteria for removing negative members from the community?
• Have you reviewed whether your
  community needs to concentrate or dissipate activity?

Content 

• Have you established a weekly
  calendar of content categories?
• Are you creating daily content
  about the community?
• Are recruiting and making it
  easy for members to submit their own content (not just providing the means, but
  also the motivation)?
• Does your content establish a
  social order and narrative within the community for members to follow? 

Events
& Activities

• Are you organizing and
  facilitating regular online activities for members? (webinars, live chats,
  challenges/quizzes etc…)
• When will you host an offline
  meetup?
• Are you documenting the results
  of previous events and publishing these somewhere?

Influence

• Has the community manager
  chosen a path to gain influence within the community (reciprocity, likability,
  or expertise)?
• Have you identified the top
  members of the community, is there a plan and specific time set aside to build
  relationships with these top members?
• Is there a plan to recruit
  volunteers to help contribute guest content, undertaken community activities,
  and provide regular support?
• Are the opinions of members
  regularly solicited?

 User
Experience

• Does your platform feature the
  latest activity, above the fold, on the landing page of the community?
• Is there a clear place for
  members to interact with each other, not for the organization to interact with
  the members?
• Is the platform easy to modify
  and update? Or will it require a lot of maintenance? Has it been used before to
  develop successful communities?
• Is the platform open, with all
  content accessible to non-members?
• Are there any plans to concentrate
  or dissipate the level of activity in the community?
• Is there a community history, a
  good FAQ, and a simple registration form?

Business
Integration 

• Does the organization understand
  what a community is, how to participate in the community, the benefits of a
  community, the time it takes to develop a community, and the resources a
  community requires?
• Is there a full-time community
  manager?
• Are more employees than just
  the community managers participating in the community?
• Is the community integrated
  with the product, price, place, and promotion of the organization?
• Does the organization have the
  ability to scale the community?

All of these are important questions to
answer. You can also use our community strategy template, development process, and checklist.