How To Develop A Community Strategy

Overview

Welcome to FeverBee’s Strategic Community Management resource.

Strategic community management is a new way of thinking about how you manage communities. Our goal in this project is to significantly move the needle in how we develop strategies. We want to explain how to develop a strategic plan that decisively reallocates resources, links to the organization’s objectives, and can clearly demonstrate results. We will highlight what steps to take at each stage and what to measure.

In our research with community professionals and our decade of experiencing working with organizations,  we have found some common misunderstandings about community strategies:

  1. The first was a profound failure to understand the purpose of a strategy. The purpose of a community strategy is not to do what you do today even better. The purpose is to decide what to do first and decisively reallocate resources to achieve decisive outcomes.
  2. The second was a common confusion between a strategy and a strategic plan. The former is your broad approach to achieve your community objectives. The latter is a detailed list of steps to follow to execute that strategy. The plan explains who, what, why, when, and how you will take each action.
  3. The third was a consistent failure to align strategy with organizational goals. Almost every community professional appreciated the difference between the two, but many had become locked into reporting engagement metrics and, therefore, executing a strategy to increase engagement metrics. These metrics often come at the expense of driving real outcomes.
  4. The fourth was a total failure in improvement. Most people measure the metrics their analytical package tells them (or lets them) they measure. Yet, these packages are not designed to measure strategic outcomes. Many people that measure data do not use that data to improve what they do. It often becomes a vanity exercise rather than a process to improve your work. You should collect data to guide where you will spend your limited resources in order for them to make the best impact. Don’t track data without knowing what you plan to do with that data.

We hope to move the profession away from shiny tactics and towards clear, strategic, thinking. We want us focused on driving valuable behaviors over maximizing engagement. We want to create a resource that everyone can follow to clearly understand their community at every level. You will know how to identify your goals, your objectives, and your strategy by thinking strategically. You will learn what tactics to use, how to execute those tactics and how to measure your efforts.

We genuinely believe that understanding strategy and learning how to execute one is the single biggest opportunity for improvement today. We’re going to provide you with the skills, knowledge, and resources to do this.

To accompany this free resource, we have already created a 6 week program to train you in the skills detailed here and equip you with the same resources we use to build communities for our clients.

Salesforce have sponsored you all with free access to some useful templates you can use. You can download these at http://scm.feverbee.com for free.

Let’s get started!

 

Richard Signature

Thank you,

Richard Millington
Managing Director
FeverBee.com

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