It Takes a Village

We relaunched our member community in September of 2018. Before we relaunched, I presented our community strategy to our executive team. One thing I wanted to make very clear was that community engagement was not the sole role of the community manager. Your association’s online community should be an extension of the association’s community. In today’s world we are blessed (and cursed) with being forced to move all interactions online. No more in-person events. That is a scary concept for a lot of our members and staff. How do you engage with your association virtually? Here’s the good news. We already have a virtual community platform. Instead of the “community manager” being the only person to lead engagement – all staff members can join in the effort to engage the online community. I had a senior staff member contact me about how to engage certain niche members within our organization. She didn’t want to start a new program. She wanted to learn how to engage our members how I was already engaging – but she wanted to leverage her network. That’s the kind of staff engagement I was advocating for when I presented to our executive team during the summer of 2018.  How do you onboard staff to engage your community in the new virtual environment? Here are some ideas…Help staff master the “ask” Organic community engagement is great. But it doesn’t always happen. As an active association and community professional, you must know what the organization is doing well. You have members doing great, awesome things. But they are often the members that are too busy to pay attention to community digests. However, if you send them a quick email asking them to share their expertise, they are honored that you thought of them and happy to weigh in on the topic. But you must do so in a way that is friendly and engaging. Here’s example text:I hope you are doing well and staying safe. This question was posted in ASCE Collaborate and I thought you would be a great person to share some guidance on virtual mentoring. Are you interested in responding on the thread? Thank you and stay safe!I typically make the subject line the same as the post and include a screen shot of the post. I shared this template with my colleague. Image how powerful your community could be if every staff member of your organization followed this protocol with members in their network? On the flip side, I use this template to share with staff who might also be interested in a topic. Your community members are doing great things and asking great questions. Learn how to leverage their posts so they can get the most out of the community! Host an AMA (Ask Me Anything)We’ve had many conferences cancelled. Departments have programming and staple events that they want to continue, but they don’t know how to host these virtually. An AMA (Ask Me Anything) is a great format that accommodates a lot of these needs. One conference had an “Ask the Leaders” session. What a great event that can be brought to your community. Talk to your colleagues about what they are having to cancel and figure out if any of these events lend themselves for AMAs. I am sure you can find a few that will be a great value add to the community. ***I also recommend explaining that these events reach a much larger audience (look at the analytics). Also, you don’t have to pay for the in-person cost (especially if there was a meal associated with the event). Share posts to help create content Our communications team has done a fabulous job at looking at community content to create organization content. If we do a news story, we call the community members who have commented on the same topic in the community. If a post got no interest, we probably don’t produce content on that topic. We recently started a virtual roundtable and we asked the community to help provide topics and we use community discussions for developing topics and seed questions. I share conversations with our marketing, professional development, and continuing education departments to help them create content. You know what community members are talking about and what is important to them. You don’t need to pay for market research. Share community content to engage staff. Think about how valuable that information is as staff try to create content. Share, share share…In closing, I want to reinforce that your online community is an extension of the association community. Staff engagement is essential. It takes a village to nurture the association community. During these trying times it is important that we make that transition to the virtual environment. Connection and association are still there and, in many cases, already existed virtually. Look at the silver lining about how many more members and “fringe” members you can reach because the new environment has made your online community more vibrant and relevant. From an ROI standpoint think of all the money your association is saving on staff travel and venue cost.