Community Times: Building block of a great community strategy

Hello there, Community Rockstar 👋

We hope you had a productive month and are staying healthy both physically and mentally. It’s important to take short breaks, give yourself some time, and burnouts are real.

In the community news, we hosted Brian Oblinger in the 7th episode of “Chronicles of Community Builders” with a great host Vineet Nandan Gupta, and also our monthly ritual, everyone’s favorite “When RETRO Meets METRO”.

On the other hand, a lot more new community builders have joined our community. Join us at Community Folks to get to know them and listen to their experiences.

We are here to keep you updated on all things community, the events that are being hosted, and the jobs that are open.

So, scroll down to see the complete picture.

Let’s goooooooooooo!

Asking too much commitment can lead to zero commitment. Start small, start strong

Wait wait wait, before you dive into the interesting news of the month, add us to your contacts so that the newsletter goes straight to your inbox.

---

Community Strategy

Why do we need a strategy when starting a community? Let us answer that for you:

1. It forces us to choose a tactic

2. Aligns organizational goals with community goals

3. Aligns actions with goals

This is just the tip of the iceberg, but there are 100s of reasons to build a community strategy.

But what exactly goes in a community strategy? Let us break it down for you.

1. Goals + Measure of Success - What are the organizational goals and how can you align them with the community’s goals(even if only 1)? How can you use these goals to create tracking matrices?

2. Research + Validation - What is the audience inclined towards, and what are the trends that are growing in the target audience? Who are the competitors and what good things are they doing?

   Do member interviews, and surveys for this. Do extensive research about the competition.

3. Content feature + Gating Plan - What you find from your research and validation will be useful for you when you start working on the content for the community. Create content cadences, do content classification, and create launch plans for them. You can also create access levels for some content to create FOMO among members.

4. Technical + Implementation plan - Do thorough research on the platform that you are gonna use for your community because switching platforms is never a good move. Remember there is one size fit platform out there, for everyone, there is a different platform. Look for what best suits your needs and start from there, mark 3-4 platforms and compare them based on your needs(psst, use flow charts, Akash from our team does). Test the platform and other tools before the launch, and talk to the technical team if need be.

5. Activation and rollout plan - Determine what channels you’ll be using to promote your community. Who is invited to the community and if it’s a staged rollout, who and when? What is your onboarding sequence gonna look like?

   How are you planning to activate and engage members, new and old alike?

These are not some pointers that are hard set in stone but mere guidelines for you.

when building a strategy, it’s good to keep the leadership in the loop. This way the leadership and the stakeholders are on board with the whole thing and if they have any feedback on it, they will let you know beforehand. It will also help when you ask for things or plan to launch new initiatives, they’ll be already on board.

---

Must Check Out -

Community podcasts

1. In Before the Lock - This week’s podcast of In Before the Lock brings Erica and Brian, Where they answer the question “What is one thing you wish you’d done better in the early days of your community careers?.”
   Listen to it here: It pains me to this day

2. Be Empactful - This week’s podcast of Be Empactful with Vineet Nandan Gupta and Shivakumar Valadi where they talk about the importance of proper mentorship and teamwork with Vivek, co-founder of Impactree Data Tech.

   Listen to it here: Leveraging the Bias - Leadership & Team Dynamics

Community articles

We know it’s very hard to pick from so many amazing articles that get published every month but we have tried and here are the best articles of the month for you.

1. What Three Things Motivate Community Members? - A look into how to create loyal users in the community.

2. What Motivates Community Members To Stay Engaged In Online Communities? - Richard talks about what to do and what not to do for driving meaningful engagement in the community.

3. The 3 Stages of Community Forum Development: Where is Yours? - If you have also wondered how a forum community is developed, take a look into this.

---

Throwback Time💯

Events last month-

1. We hosted the 7th episode of our series Chronicles of Community Builders with Brian Oblinger on the 15th of April where we touched upon various topics in the industry with our host Vineet Nandan Gupta.
   You can watch the session recording here.
   p.s. we have launched a new initiative where we give one of our community members a chance to be the host in the series. If you want to be one of them, contact us at: akash@communityfolks.com

   

1. We hosted When RETRO Meets METRO on the 29th of April. we talked about “identifying a proper community role" and got some great insights from our folks. We highlighted the stories of fellow community builders who have recently joined us. We also got to catch up with many new and old folks.

Till Next Time!

Have a suggestion for a piece of content we should include in our next edition? Email us and let us know!

(p.s. if you have a question/query that you want fellow community builders’ perspective on? You can ask here or contact us at akash@communityfolks.com)

Follow us on Twitter for interesting tweets.