By Shannon Abram, The Community Roundtable
When community sentiment is good, it often gets taken for granted. When it’s bad, it’s clear that it is one of the biggest barriers to success and value.
What’s not always clear is this: you CAN create the community environment you want.
The Community Roundtable collaborated with a well-known brand to create a welcoming and supportive community that they are proud of – and that delivers real value for both the members and the business.
In this case study, Jillian Bejtlich, Community Architect here at TheCR, covers how they did this, focusing on the following community management practices:
- Developing policies and guidelines
- Creating moderation and escalation processes
- Modeling behavior and coaching advocates
What this case study shows is that by investing time in defining a long-term vision of the culture you want, you can shape the overall sentiment of your community. To do so, you must connect strategic goals to day-to-day tactics.
Take moderation for example – thinking tactically you might decide, “Let’s get rid of all negative posts” – and certainly that’s not a bad goal, but it’s not a strategic one. Put on your long-term vision goggles and rethink the goal and you might say, “Let’s make sure our community a safe place to ask questions.” By looking at the same activity strategically a fairly simple moderation task becomes a strategic one – the result of which may mean leaving some negative comments that are opinions while moderating out the offensive ones. That is more likely to achieve your strategic goal of making the community a safe place to ask legitimate questions – making it easier to achieve larger business goals and improve overall sentiment.
The success of this project was far from obvious at the start and it was no easy task – but by thinking about the project strategically, and reframing the challenge into a long-term goal Jillian not only helped turn the overall community sentiment around – but helped our client create a thriving and valuable community that exceeded everyone’s expectations.
Find out how she did it: Download our new case study “Improving Community Sentiment: Taking a Community from Hostile to Happy”.
Let us know if you would like to find out how we can help turn your thorny community challenges into strategies for success.
Are you a member of TheCR Network? Download the case study directly here.
