Cross-Departmental Partnerships Grow the Community Team
It feels like every job description I look at the position requires “cross departmental collaboration.” If we are being honest, every employee should know what other departments are doing to some extent - that’s just being aware of strategic goals and initiatives. However, as a community builder your work should be supporting all departments. Community can provide scalable solutions for many departments. You need to look at each team's goals and figure out how the community can help them accomplish their goals. Aligning departmental goals to community goals is a great way to become a strategic partner. What teams can you support?
Some team goals are more aligned than others. It may be helpful to speak with teams regularly to learn what they are working on so you can inform your champions, share with the community as a resource and find ways for the community to support their goals and mission. Here are a few of the teams you may want to target if you don’t already work with these groups.
Content Teams
In my opinion, the best content is community content. When I say “community content,” I don’t mean content that is posted in your community. I’m referring to content that originated in the community. What are your community members talking about? What are the popular topics? How many replies, likes, and pageviews are you seeing based on the topics being added to the community? Share what content is popular with your content teams. Could these topics be used to develop conference content, papers, or courses? If you’re already seeing a lot of engagement in the community, you can expect that the content will see the same engagement in other platforms that can generate revenue and brand awareness.
Membership
This is a big one. I’m a firm believer that community is a huge element of your membership journey. Part of this journey depends on your permissions for the community. Who can view it? Who can post? Are you using the community for acquisition? Or is the community exclusive to membership? All of these elements factor into your relationship with your membership team (if you aren’t part of the membership team). I communicate early and often on individual members' experience and membership data to make sure the community is being leveraged to provide a great membership experience. We want our local groups to use their local community spaces to attract and retain membership as well. Membership and I are always looking for new ideas to increase members and improve member experience by leveraging our online community.
Marketing
Community and marketing is one of those push/pull relationships. It’s definitely a balance that you need to acknowledge with your marketing team. Communicate about what programs and events they are trying to promote and think of ways you can get information into your members hands to advocate for these programs and events in the community! If you’re able to promote content for marketing, chances are they will be more likely to use their channels and resources to promote the community as well!
Committee Liaisons
Do you have communities set up for your committees or working groups? Communicate with these staff members how the community can make their workload lighter. Offer to host tutorials for their members. Bottom line - be available to help make their life easier. Serving and supporting in an “IT support” type role for your staff contacts makes staff more willing to help support community goals (one example would be helping you find members to answer unanswered questions).
Information Technology
Are there elements of your online community platform that can be leveraged as technology solutions in the organization? I have a great relationship with our IT team. When there’s a solution that we need as an organization they often reach out to me to see if it might be functionality available in our community platform. Working with colleagues to find tech solutions is one of my favorite elements of my job!
Working on internal committees and teams
In addition to working with various teams independently, it’s also important to represent your community on larger, more strategic teams across the organization. I recommend seeking out opportunities to serve on cross-departmental collaborative teams across your organization to be the community and member advocate to all the stakeholders in your organization. Being the community voice on these teams is invaluable!
In closing
Every one of the teams in your organization is working to find solutions and support team and organizational goals. By helping them accomplish their goals through the community they will become additional internal community advocates. Working with stakeholders across your organization is the best way to grow the “community team.”