Reintroduce Your Community

I joined the American Society of Civil Engineers 16 months ago. I inherited a lifeless community. Staff and members had a deep disdain for the platform. I spent the first four months analyzing our metrics and trying to figure out why and how the community/communities were configured. At first, I assumed we had examined every use case before we implemented. Our organization is so large, that was not the case. You should revisit user experience and best practices periodically. A relaunch is a great opportunity to do this in a collective, strategic way.With the help of my direct supervisor, communications, and marketing teams, we decided to relaunch our platform. I had analytics in hand to tell us what needed to be done. You should never try to relaunch a community without taking a long and hard look at the analytics.Gaining recognition is hard when you launch your organizational community, but regaining recognition, respect, and trust from your community is even harder. It is a huge task. Here are some of the lessons I learned.Brand You will need to reintroduce the brand. How was your community marketed before? What was successful and what could be improved? What were some of the things you can do to improve the look and feel of the platform? For us, we had technical forums housed on specific institute micro-sites. We auto-subscribed members from multiple institutes to three technical forums. Even though our structural engineers were the most active in our Integrated Buildings and Structures forum, if they clicked on the link to where the post was held, they were directed to a micro-site for architectural engineers. It’s a poor user experience. We fixed this by rebranding the forum homepages by making them their own micro-sites.Notifications and automation rulesOur biggest organizational complaint is that members receive too many emails. Guess what our biggest community complaint is? They receive too many emails. Higher Logics “best practice” is to auto-subscribe to a daily digest for each community. I understand the value of doing this because it takes time and effort to raise community awareness without auto-subscribing. Given that we had already auto-subscribed most of our members in the launch, we decided NOT to auto-subscribe any new members after the relaunch. We recently started a “consolidated digest” campaign directed at the members who were previously auto-subscribed as well.Ambassadors Finding the right members to volunteer as ambassadors is so essential. I credit the success of our relaunch to our team of “Topic Moderators.” One of the biggest issues we had was members being upset about staff rejecting or editing their posts. You need a team of members to take this responsibility on. We were so blessed with wonderful moderators who love our organization and saw this as a great opportunity to give back. It’s a low cost, easy time commitment for your members. They are flattered to share their expertise. After our relaunch, if we have a member that violates our Code of Conduct, we have a team of members weigh in on whether it should be published, edited, or rejected. If there are any questions these members are willing to speak with the poster. Find an organizational champion I think my boss who hired me wanted and expected a relaunch of our platform. However, she never mentioned that in the hiring process. I started producing analytics to her and showing her areas that needed to be changed. She embraced this wholeheartedly and helped me pitch the idea to our executive team eight months after I had started at the organization. She was there for the presentation, but I did most of the talking (very nervously). Our executive and leadership teams have embraced our community moving forward. Staff support from the top down is needed to build a successful community. Whether it is your boss or a prominent figure in the organization, you need an advocate to fight for you and the community – you just need to provide them with the proper analytics.Infiltrating networksNetwork with your members. There are spheres of influence within all membership organizations. Get to know the prominent members and ask them to introduce you to other members. Take these opportunities to get their support. Relationships are the only way to build more relationships.Finding new ways to engage Gaining trust is hard. Don’t go back to the angry members to say, “look it’s new.” You need to gain excitement from others who aren’t familiar with the concept. Their excitement of the new product will give the previous users a reason to revisit the failed concept. Look for new places to promote and engage members.Benchmarks Decide what metrics are most important to you moving forward. The best advice that I have received for online communities is gather your metrics monthly and compare year to year for that specific month rather than month to month. Depending on what kind of organization you are with, you will notice certain months are much more active then others.If you are thinking of relaunching your community, I hope these were helpful to think about. Please feel free to contact me personally if you would like to discuss anything further.