Check these three easy community management to-dos off your list and set yourself up for community success in the coming year.
A new year can be both an amazing blank slate, and also, a terrifying blank slate. If you’re back at your desk and feeling overwhelmed by your to-do list, here are three easy ways to take stock of where your community is right now, and ideas for prioritizing for the coming months. Bonus: these research-backed tools help you make the case for needed resources for your community program.
1. Check your community’s temperature.
Through a short, 20 minute survey you can:
- Identify strengths, gaps, and opportunities – By assessing your community program in the context of your strategy and approach, you can determine where you have gaps that matter (some gaps may be intentional or OK for your context) or opportunities to improve.
- Prioritize initiatives with the biggest impact – Your assessment will identify activities and initiatives that will contribute to your community’s goals and growth. These may be tactical activities, like programming or larger initiatives like governance and strategic alignment.
2. Calculate your Community ROI
January is a great time to benchmark the ROI generated by your community. Not only does it communicate the value you are currently creating, it also helps you set goals for where you’d like to be in the future.
The formula is designed to be simple to use, and simple to explain to stakeholders – but like any ROI model, it is best used as a piece of strategy development and discussion, not just as an output.
3. Create or Update your Editorial Calendar
One of the most common questions we get from members is, “How do I increase the value and the volume of member engagement?” This challenge persists across all community types, sizes, and use cases. One way we’ve found to increase audience engagement, in terms of both quality and quantity, is to implement an editorial calendar for your community programming.
If you are already using an editorial calendar to plan your community programming now is a great time to review what worked from last year, and tweak your plans to increase engagement. If you aren’t using an editorial calendar now is a great time to draft one for the new year. This short webinar highlights best practices for building an editorial calendar for an online community program.
Ready, set, go!
We hope these three ideas help you kick-start your community initiatives for the new year. Have a specific question about any of the above? You can always ask a question in our private facebook group or send us a message.
