Relationships Matter

As an online community manager, you know that you also step into the role of relationship manager. It is important that your members have a feeling of trust with you. You help guide conversations, connect them to other members and resources, and guide the culture within the virtual walls of the community. This level of trust is an important piece that makes them feel safe enough to come back and contribute in meaningful ways, helping the community continue to grow. You take this relationship with your online community members very seriously. And you should. But are you considering the relationships within your organization, as well?I have always believed that the connections that you develop within your organization are just as important as the ones you develop within your community. Why? Because, while you have a responsibility to do what’s good and just for your community members, you also have a responsibility to ensure that you are contributing to the success of the organization. How do you go about doing that? It starts with relationships.Talk to your peersYou’ve read your association’s strategic plan. You know the direction it is heading in and you are all set to create a community strategy that supports that direction and gives your community members a one of a kind experience. The one thing you may not be doing is talking to your peers to figure out how they’re moving forward.Your association’s strategic plan gives you a good understanding of the problems that need to be solved and the plan to solve them. However, if you dig a little deeper you can see exactly where those problems lie. We tend to get so caught up in ensuring that our community is saved that we have conversations that are meant to defend it versus conversations that offer collaboration and shared problem solving. When we have conversations with people like the Membership Specialists in our organization, it may sound something like this: “Community is important because it brings people to the organization, so they can discover membership!” Instead, the conversation should sound something like this: “Tell me about your membership goals this year. What are your acquisition/retention challenges?” This takes the conversation from “let me tell you why you need community” to “let community help you meet your business goals.”Check in often Once you’ve had the initial conversations, make sure you go back to them. Priorities may change at any time which can shift the focus of any business unit within the association. Where the focus was once on membership retention, it may shift to improving acquisition. Your chapter development team may be trying to figure out ways to provide direct support for their chapters to enhance programming. These are business problems that community can help easily solve, but you won’t know how unless you are continuing to have conversations.Make a note to check in often with key business areas within the organization. Have bi-monthly or quarterly conversations with your partners to see how things are progressing, if the tactics your community has employed to help address challenges has helped, and explore other areas you might be able to assist. One thing you should keep top of mind is that all the work that is done throughout the association is to better serve your members. The last thing you want to do is work in a silo.Ask for helpYes, your online community is in a unique position to help the rest of the organization meet its challenges. However, your community has challenges of its own and, if you’re building strong relationships across the organization, you should be able to lean on your partners across business lines to step in where appropriate.Say you have members in your community asking questions about your certification program. You have some degree of knowledge about the topic, but nowhere near the level that will satisfactorily answer the questions they’re asking. Instead of struggling to figure out how to properly answer their questions, go to your certification team and ask someone to pop in and clear up the confusion in the discussion forum. This lends to the overall credibility and accessibility of your organization and shows members that the community (and the organization) cares about ensuring that they receive the information they need to make informed decisions or, better yet, act as advocates on behalf of the association without prompting. It’s a win all the way around.But don’t just present the ask…We’ve all had those conversations where someone enters a conversation with us with the intention of asking for something. It starts out with asking how the program is going and quickly transitions to an ask. And while this is one way to uncover where there are collaboration opportunities, this can’t be the only time conversations take place.Part of creating and nurturing collaborative relationships is not just coming to someone with an ask. If I asked you to sit down and identify five ways you could collaborate with someone within your organization, I bet that would be easy. If I asked you to identify 5 ways you could collaborate with someone within your organization that had NOTHING to do with how it would benefit your program, how easy would that be then? Be purposeful about your conversation. Do not walk into it thinking about how it will benefit you in the future. If you’re nurturing these relationships for the right reasons, collaboration and help are natural outputs of those relationships.By building strong, cross-functional relationships, you can uncover the challenges your peers are facing, create alliances across departments, and create a culture of collaborative work across your association. The focus on internal relationship building and connections ensures that your community and organization are providing maximum value to the members you serve and contributes to your association’s overall success.Tell us in the comments below how you’ve gone about building internal relationships? What has worked really well for you? What lessons have you learned along the way?