How to Integrate Communication and Community Strategy

Building a community is huge task. It can’t be handled by a siloed community manager. That’s why your community strategy needs to be part of your organizational communications strategy. At my organization, our community “lives” in the Communications Department – it didn’t always. It was part of member communities and then the web team before finding a home in communications. Even if your community does not live in the Communications Department, you need to be aware of your organization’s communications goals. If you are developing a community strategy it needs to be at the core of the communication strategy in the organization. Here’s why: Editorial Team I attend weekly editorial meetings with our communications team. We discuss analytics - this means I’m aware of what topics interest our members. This creates better SEED questions. There is also time to debrief the team about popular discussions happening in the community so they can create content based on those discussions. There are often opportunities to connect our content being created with the discussions and members participating in threads. This improves the relevancy of your organizational content.  Don’t think of your community as a closed group, but another channel of communication from your organization.Newsletters I believe it is essential for your members to see communications about your community outside of their discussion digest There is some resentment about being autosubscribed. It is important for your members to notice discussions without receiving that annoying notification that they often overlook. That’s where your organizational newsletters come into play. We send three popular discussions in our ENewsletter every week. Our newsletter has a section called “What’s Hot in ASCE Collaborate.” This shows them what they have been missing in the emails they have unsubscribed from or overlooked. We put discussions in our monthly newsletter for students and younger members. We have a few of our technical institutes that include discussions in newsletters as well. Try curating content for your organization’s newsletters and communications. This is a great way to draw attention to your community without seeming intrusive. Pairing community and organizational content  We developed a series through our Wordpress site on women in engineering. I had just joined the communications team and our lifeless community. We decided to start the conversation in our community. This integrated approach helped bring more interest to our community and more interest to the topic. The series had the best analytics of the year, and the community had the most posts it had seen in months. It was noted and appreciated by many of our prominent female members who have continued to be active contributors to our community. We continue to link from organizational pages to relevant conversations in the community and vice versa. The most recent example is a thread we started on the flooding in the Midwest. This linked to our Natural Disaster Response page. Your members have a limited bandwidth to notice your organizational content – make it relevant and beneficial by curating your content to everything your organization has to offer. Events I would assume most of you are Higher Logic users (I would love to hear what platform you are on if you are not). The event feature in Higher Logic is something we could be utilizing better. We have started these efforts in our community for younger members. I search through our communications submissions folder for events that appeal to younger members and add them to the events page on our younger member microsite. This allows me to curate content that appeals to members that align with our communications goals as an organization. Your community does not exist for the community’s sake. It exists to support the organization and your members.  Promoting events through the HL Event feature helps promote the organization. ***Set the community views to public so you can share the events on social media. Please contact me if you want to discuss this strategy more. Strategic Plan This has been discussed on this blog before, but I can’t stress it enough. Know your strategic plan and what role your community plays in it. If it is not directly cited in the plan, start aligning your goals and strategies with the organizations. From what I hear, I imagine your biggest goal is member retention in the first five years after graduation. There is nothing innovative or new here. Every organization is facing this problem. How can your community solve this problem? I read our updated strategic plan on an airplane on the way to one of our leadership conferences. I was shocked that every goal aligned with our community strategy almost perfectly – I felt empowered. But it shouldn’t have been a surprise, our communications team was involved in marketing and communicating this plan. I had already received direction about what we should be accomplishing in our community. Promotion We added a mentoring program and forum for younger members connected with curated content in the same month. These were both part of a push for member value within our organization. Both these community initiatives where the opening slide to kick off our leadership conference. If your leadership team is visionary, they know they need an active community for the organization to succeed. If you want your community to succeed, you need backing from your members through proper communications. Ask your marketing and communications teams what they can do to better promote your community. Policies and Initiatives It is a common occurrence to have members post questions about organizational policies and initiatives. Some of these items are not popular topics. You need to know what the organizational stance is when handling these issues. I’m not suggesting you squash these conversations. But staff need to know what members are saying. In certain situations, it is appropriate for a staff or committee member to answer these questions from an organizational standpoint. Online communities are the embodiment of your membership. This is where members concerns should be heard and answered at an organizational level.Reaching your members is the biggest challenge. If your communications and marketing team is not on board with your community, you will struggle. Get internal support. It still won’t be easy to get member support. But you need internal recognition before you can warrant external recognition.