By Shannon DiGregorio Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.
Whether you are starting from scratch with a new community, or taking over an existing community that could use some love there is a good chance you’ll be tasked with building a community strategy. This can be both daunting and exciting. In our State of Community Management 2014 research we found that the foundation of a successful community really is the presence of a well-defined strategy- one that integrates social tools and methods with business goals and processes. A good community strategy also aligns an organization’s goals with member needs setting you up to succeed in both keep engagement high and provide ROI.
So – we agree a strategy is important, but how do you get there from here? In an earlier post “Building a Community Strategy” we outline the some of the primary tasks related to each competency of the Community Maturity Model as they relate to strategy building and planning. They include:
Strategy
- Define the business objective
- Articulate the community purpose, from the members’ perspective
- Assemble research to help build your business case
- Complete competitive audit – what competes for members’ attention?
- Build a business case
- Calculate and secure investment required
Leadership
- Find or develop executive sponsors
- Determine what executive and stakeholder education is necessary
- Calculate and secure investment required
Culture
- Articulate cultural limitations and opportunities
- Assess willingness and aptitude for change
- Determine if specific training or change management initiatives are needed
- Calculate and secure investment required
Community Management
- Understand the community management approach needed, based on business objective and member characteristics
- Define roles and responsibilities
- Calculate and secure investment required
- Assign roles and responsibilities
Content and Programming
- Define content and programming needed to reach the business objective
- Determine gaps in available and required content and programming
- Calculate and secure investment required
Policies and Governance
- Assess current policies
- Amend or develop policies as needed
- Audit current governance – or lack thereof – of social media and collaboration environments
- Develop a governance model
- Calculate and secure investment required
Tools
- Determine required tools – software, applications, templates, and guides
- Audit current toolset
- Calculate and secure investment required
Metrics and Measurement
- Articulate primary value that will enable business goal
- Articulate secondary value
- Determine metrics for executives, operational management and tactical management
- Assess ability to capture metrics
- Build capacity to capture metrics, as needed
- Calculate and secure investment required
Etienne Wenger’s book, “Cultivating Communities of Practice” is another fantastic resource when thinking about some of the big community building blocks questions . They include questions broken down into categories to help you step back and really evaluate what you are working with, and working towards. They include:
Domain:
- What topics and issues do we really care about?
- What are the community’s values and goals?
- What kind of influence do we want to have?
Community:
- What roles are people going to play? Who are the stakeholders, decision makers and leaders?
- How often will the community meet and how will members connect on an ongoing basis?
- How will members deal with conflict?
- How will newcomers be introduced into the community?
Practice:
- What knowledge will we share, develop and document?
- What kinds of learning activities will we organize?
- Where are sources of knowledge and resources outside the community?
The whole book is really worth checking out if you’re feeling overwhelmed and need a primer on strategy building.
Another great resource is our Start Toolkit ($299), which includes a strategy template, but also walks you through the exercise of who, what, when, where & why for all stakeholders with the end goal identifying the overlapping wins for your organization and community members. (Disclosure: as an organization we tend to err towards a simpler strategy that can adapt and be responsive as the community matures and then use the Community Maturity Model as an assessment tool to create a detailed roadmap. This might work great for some communities and not for others, so definitely check out the Toolkit and see if it would be helpful for your needs.)
For those of you building an external community (not an employee or other internally-focused community) our friends at Feverbee have a very detailed community strategy template that you might find helpful if you’ve already sorted out the answers to your main goal-based questions. Other resources that you may find helpful include:
- The Basics of Strategic Planning and Strategic Management, Balanced Scorecard Institute
- Online Community Strategy Framework, Lauren DeLong
- Online Community: Heart of Social Strategy, Lithium
- The Ultimate Framework for Planning an Online Community Strategy, Socious
Are you in the process of building out a community strategy? What tools or resources are you finding useful as you tackle this project?
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