Primary Navigation
Building a Community 101
Community Building 101
This 101 GUIDE outlines useful guidelines and best practices for community creation, engagement and management - including practical, legal, member and content management information.
For a more detailed explanation and building checklist, download the complete Community Building 101 Guide.
1. Define your community’s purpose
Clearly defining the purpose of your community will help you decide on both its structure and what resources you will need to support and facilitate it.
Online communities are created for different reasons:
- managing a research project
- organizing, managing and publicizing an event or conference
- teaching an educational online course
- information dissemination via a public web site or portal
- improving organizational efficiencies and knowledge sharing via an intranet or extranet
IGLOO Hot Tip: Your community should fulfill a certain need or solve a particular problem and this will help to define its purpose. Write up a mission or vision statement that clearly outlines your community objectives based on the input from your stakeholder groups.
2. Define and understand your audience
Who do you want to participate in your community? Develop specific messaging for the different target audiences of the community.
Highlight Benefits for potential users: Outline how members will benefit from participating in your community. How will your field of practice/study benefit from the community?
IGLOO Hot Tip: Identify the key "pain points" of your audience and try to ensure that your community addresses them. As well, select champions or advocates who can act as evangelists for your community in each target group.
3. Create a structure for your community
The content within your community will also dictate its set up and structure. Organize your site’s content or information using a site map. A site map provides a logical framework for the way in which a visitor or member would navigate through your community page. When planning, take IGLOO’s community features into consideration.
IGLOO Hot Tip: As an IGLOO member, you have access to a royalty free image library to build out the "look and feel" for your online community. You can choose from hundreds of images such as icons, banners, photos from a variety of different themes.
4. Engage and build membership
Members will engage in your online community in different ways depending on their level of comfort, interest, motivation, and time.
Community members are either "Consumers" and "Producers". After you invite members into your community, you need to create an environment that is engaging, dynamic and exciting.
IGLOO Hot Tip: Keep it personal. You are creating a ‘culture of community', not a ‘culture technology'. One way to overcome barriers and encourage engagement is to supplement online community activity with in person meetings, conferences and workshops. Use the Calendar functionality to organize and promote these events.
5. Set leadership roles
Clearly defining roles, responsibilities and expectations will help build a successful community. Be sure when choosing members for leadership roles that they are qualified, trained and the expectations are clearly defined.
IGLOO Hot Tip: The Community Administrator's role can require a significant time commitment. It is important to clearly understand what you want this person to do and dedicate adequate resources and training toward supporting this role.
6. Set up a steering committee or advisory council
Depending on the size, scale and scope of your community, you will want to establish an Advisory Council and/or Steering Committee.
- An Advisory Council is a panel of senior community members who meet on a regular basis to provide strategic guidance, direction and planning advice.
- A Steering Committee acts as the governing body for your community. It is charged with the task of setting out strategic goals, developing expected community outcomes, and monitoring and evaluating the project as a whole.
IGLOO Hot Tip: When establishing your Steering Committee, include people who will bring unique skill sets and perspectives to the project. You might want to include people with specific backgrounds, such as marketing and communications, internet-based technology expertise, group facilitation and project management.
7. Establish community guidelines and rules of governance
Successful online communities usually need some guidelines to ensure the safety, privacy and well being of all its members.
- Members of the Steering Committee, the Community Administrator and the Sponsor can aid in the development of community membership criteria, rules & code of conduct for online interactions and guidelines for submitting content.
- IGLOO, for example, provides a collection of legal agreements that protect its users.
IGLOO Hot Tip: Developing a community charter to guide interactions can be an excellent community-building exercise among members. You might also want to appoint a Referee for your community. This role involves bringing attention to and/or enforcing community norms, rules and procedures. Referees help regulate the community, protect members and deal with issues as they arise.
8. Focus on great content as a key driver to your site
Developing a solid knowledge base is an essential step in creating an environment for effective knowledge sharing and exchange. Create value for users by posting content and conversation that is not available elsewhere. Start by identifying and collecting an existing body of documents and content related to your community. Create a taxonomy or hierarchical structure for content resources on your site using a series of folders and sub-folders within a Community Library.
IGLOO Hot Tip: Make sure that your members know what’s available to them in your community on a consistent basis. Automated tools, such as Announcements, are a fast and easy way to push information to members and drive them to new content on your site.
9. Support your community
Create a Community Help Desk that offers resources and materials:
- Contact information for support, experts and guides
- Training documents/manuals
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Learning Tutorials
- Tips and Tricks
Solicit your membership on a regular basis for feedback, suggestions, new ideas and comments. This can be set up easily using an Forum.
IGLOO Hot Tip: A Help Desk communicates to members that the lines of communication are always open. Be sure to be responsive; respond to inquiries promptly with useful answers. View our Help Centre for additional information and ideas.
10. Promote your community
Without regular participation and contribution, your community will not thrive and grow. This makes the job of promoting your community all the more important. You will need to be strategic in choosing venues and tools to promote and encourage engagement in your community.
IGLOO Hot Tip: For detailed information on how to promote and market your community, visit Community Marketing 101. For the tactical execution of strategies presented in Community Marketing 101, visit Marketing Toolkit; it is filled with numerous examples and downloads.
11. Measure the success of your community
Set goals and objectives for your community so that you can measure outcome, results and impact. There are two ways you can evaluate effectiveness: quantitative and qualitative data.
- Quantitative metrics include measurable statistics like site traffic, number of page hits, online surveys, increase in membership, increases in contributions, blogs, forum postings, etc.
- Qualitative information is much more subjective and could include anecdotal evidence of the organic development of initiatives by community members-particularly active members, stellar leadership, or newly developed partnerships as a result of community participation.
IGLOO Hot Tip: Setting goals and targets from the outset, before you build your community, will help you determine your outcomes and how to best measure them. When you make progress toward achieving goals and the indicators of success that you have outlined, then you will know that your community is a success.
12. Celebrate your successes!
The success of your community is largely dependent on the ideas, activities, time and efforts of your members. Be sure to recognize any unique contribution made by a member. This will help to stimulate community pride and encourage member participation and interaction.
… Remember, 90% of your community’s success is based on its members and only 10% is based on technology.
IGLOO Hot Tip: Use Announcements to regularly publicize the achievements of community members. You might also create a feature area on the homepage to highlight community successes – be sure to include photos or include a link to the Photo Gallery to provide faces and names behind your successes.
Once you have built your community, you will be ready to promote it. For tips on how to effectively market your community and retain membership, please refer to Community Marketing 101.
For an overview of marketing tactics you can implement to effectively promote and market your site, visit our online Marketing Toolkit.
Viewed 552 times