Silos Are For Corn, Not Community Strategy

Building a strong strategy for your online community is important. It guides the work you do, how it will be carried out, and feeds a resourced roadmap that will allow you effectively serve both your members and the organization. However, when you’re building that strategy, you should also be thinking about what else is happening in the association that your work will affect AND that will affect how you run your community.If your association has taken care to allocate budget and resources to your online community program, you can bet that in the organization strategy there’s an expectation that the community program will be a part of the equation for its future success. That said, you simply cannot build an effective community strategy without knowing your association’s focus and aligning to it.I recently had a conversation about online community with another person and we were talking about community value and how people will know that community is important. My response was simple: if the online community is aligned properly with the goals of the organization, that value is a result by nature. People will find their way to the community no matter where they enter. And if people start with community, they will find what they need from the association if it is properly aligned. This is the thinking that online community managers should adopt.The question then becomes, how do you become properly aligned with the organization’s strategy? That’s easy. Find out what it is. But first, a little homework…Think about what your community was built to do. When you created the business case for your online community, presented it to your executive team, and got their buy-in, what were the promises you made? What did you say community would do for the association? How did you say you would measure and report out on success? Start here and then go read your association’s strategic plan. It gives an overview of the direction the organization will move over the course of the next 3-5 years and lays out, at a high level, how it plans to get there. Get your hands on it. Familiarize yourself with the pain points and “will-by” statements (we will do XYZ by accomplishing ABC) that are in that plan. Where do you see that community fits in accomplishing those goals? If you’re not sure, this may be an indication that your online community has may no longer be aligned to the work you said you would do when you got the support to build it.Additionally, start having conversations with your peers. Find out more about the work they are being charged with to move the association forward. Are there ways that you can deliver value to your organization partners? There may or may not be, and there’s no need to force it, but you should always be looking for opportunities to create synergies wherever you can. A robust, well thought out strategy is very rarely created in a siloed way.When building your online community strategy, don’t go on the defense thinking about how you can save your budget and resources. Think more strategically. How can I demonstrate the VALUE (which is not necessarily shown as a dollar figure) of my online community to the rest of the organization? Where can we strengthen ties that serve the needs of our members and help contribute to the success of the organization, as a whole? These are important questions to reflect on as you think about how your community should operate. Make sure you’re not wearing blinders when trying to look at the bigger picture. You just might miss something.How have you approached strategic planning for your community? Are you having larger conversations? Why or why not?