The Community Roundtable

Empowering global community leaders with research-backed resources, training, and tools.

Building effective content and programs for online communities

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If your technology is the venue, and your members are the party goers, then content and programming are definitely the snacks, music, and games that keep your online community party rolling.

In this webinar Kelly Schott shares five lessons we’ve learned from TheCR Network members about planning and managing effective content and programming in your online community.

Kelly’s five lessons include:

  • It’s All About The Planning​
  • Try, Adapt, And Try Again​
  • Meet Your Members Where They Are​
  • Show Me The Data​
  • Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

Watch the archive here:

Find more community management webinars.

Community is not a content funnel: don’t force-feed your members.

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Wondering how much is the right amount of community content? You might be asking the wrong question.

I was at a client meeting recently, where a lot of the conversation revolved around content, and one executive’s general conclusion was this: “More content is better, and more content with targeting is better still.” I left with an image of a content shotgun, with each pellet targeting a specific person in the group. Keep on blasting and they’ll all get what they need, eventually.

The latest research from the State of Community Management 2017 confirms that’s about as wrong an approach as you can get.

First of all, it ignores member programs, which we know from our research is a critical counterpart to traditional content approaches. And second, the idea that we need to simply turn up the firehose finds neither qualitative nor quantitative support. In fact, the best communities do about the same frequency of content and programs as the average in our SOCM survey.

What’s the difference?

They provide their content and programs strategically. They shape their content and programs with the community and organizational strategies in mind, to make sure that the community and organization are working in sync as much as possible.

Best-in-class communities were about twice as likely as the overall sample to align and integrate content and program strategies with the overall strategy. That doesn’t just help with “messaging”, either. By keeping major organizational themes in mind as you develop content and programs, you are, in effect, putting the entire organization’s communications effort at your disposal. You’re also making it that much easier for people just coming into the community or potentially leading community programming to connect with the discussions inside the community. And you may be able to leverage other resources in the organization for your community efforts, or use the organizational priorities, things like organization-wide HR efforts, to get new members to visit the community.

The finding doesn’t suggest that you should forget about reacting to community needs and desires. In fact, aligning strategies helps you understand better where and how to fit community-generated or community-specific content and ideas into your overall content and program strategy.

As we have said in many other places, starting and staying strategic with your community can make a major difference in how much you are able to accomplish, and the kinds of resources you can tap into in order to move the community forward.

The best community managers share leadership of community programs: SOCM2016 Fact #8

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By Ted McEnroe, Director of Research and Training

Multi ethnic business people's hands raised with speech bubble.

You start a community. It’s awesome. People engage, share ideas and provide value. You moderate, plan, provide tech support, train, encourage, goad, scold, backchannel and do about 37 other things, and that’s just before lunch.

And it works. Your reward? The community gets more active. More people. More onboarding. More moderation. More programming. More of everything. Except you.

Let’s face it – a lack of “human capital” can play a huge role in slowing the growth of a community, and it’s only the most forward-thinking organizations that preemptively add capacity. That means it’s up to you to make the case for help, even as you do more of everything. But it turns out there is one resource that is willing, eager and able and often goes untapped. Your current community.

The State of Community Management 2016 finds that our most successful communities, the “Best in Class”, did a better job of tapping into the talent already in their systems to take a more active role in a number of areas, including community programs.

SOCM2016_Fact_#8_Leverage

To put it another way:

  • Best-in-class communities are 61% more likely to tap internal experts to lead programs.
  • They are 59% more likely to tap members.
  • They’re 62% more likely to tap moderators.
  • And 63% more likely to bring in outside experts.

And they do it all while holding relatively the same frequency of programming as their less-advanced peers. In other words, the best communities don’t offer more community programs than their peers, they just bring a wider variety of voices and expertise into that programming. 

This is powerful for a number of reasons.

It helps you scale yourself. Running a single program is a lot of work. Running every community program is overwhelming. Bringing in your community to help is a great opportunity to redistribute a little from your plate and let you tackle some other things.

It can strengthen your members’ commitment. What are members more likely to pay greater attention to… a community where someone else does all the work or one where they, too, have made an investment in the success of the community?

It provides valuable skills for members, and you. Being able to present effectively is a powerful skill. Being able to practice it in the community can help people grow not just as members, but as professionals. And managing the program strategy is a great skill for a community manager interested in moving up in their own career.

You don’t know everything. Turns out you know community as well as anyone. But there are experts who know way more about many other topics and can bring insights and questions to the table you might not think of.

It introduces skeptics and outsiders to the community. Want someone to take a greater interest in the community? Having them present is a great way to get them connected with members and see what it’s about – and do it from their comfort zone.

It’s better for you, and better for your community. So who are your untapped experts?

We can’t wait to hear what you think – tag your thoughts with #SOCM2016 to join the conversation!

Are you a member of TheCR Network? Download the research inside the Network here.