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Building a Mobile-First Community to Meet Members Where They Are

February 20, 2025 By Jim Storer

Launched in 2020, Community Food Navigator envisions a food system rooted in justice, in which the people who produce, distribute, and consume food also control its production, distribution, and governance. Their mission is to expand food sovereignty — particularly in Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities — by engaging Chicago-area food growers, producers, educators, and eaters; strengthening connections and collaboration; telling more truthful stories about the Chicago food ecosystem; and redistributing power.

Their community already existed in Chicagoland, but the Community Food Navigator team recognized the need for an online place for collaboration amidst peak COVID-19 conditions. In-person meet-ups were not an option. It was critical to the team that members felt on-going ownership of the space they co-created, rather than handing them a tool that didn’t meet their needs.

Learn how the Community Food Navigator community team built a mobile-first app to meet their members where they were.

Download the Case Study:

More Community Case Studies

  • Eight Ways to Improve Your Online Community Programs

    Eight Ways to Improve Your Online Community Programs

  • The Power of Metrics: Enhancing Community Engagement at ISTE+ASCD

  • Building a Mobile-First Community to Meet Members Where They Are

    Building a Mobile-First Community to Meet Members Where They Are

  • Building a Cost Impact Model for Community Growth

    Building a Cost Impact Model for Community Growth

  • Building Connections Through Community: Esri’s Storytelling Initiative

    Building Connections Through Community: Esri’s Storytelling Initiative

  • Driving Engagement and Innovation in the UKG Community: A Strategic Success Story

    Driving Engagement and Innovation in the UKG Community: A Strategic Success Story

  • Network Highlights: June and July in The Network

    Network Highlights: June and July in The Network

  • 45 Resources to Boost Online Engagement

    45 Resources to Boost Online Engagement

  • Network Highlights: May and June in The Network

    Network Highlights: May and June in The Network

  • Three Reasons Community Managers are (Still) Crucial to Online Communities

    Three Reasons Community Managers are (Still) Crucial to Online Communities

Good communities plan now for a mobile engagement future

September 12, 2016 By Ted McEnroe

By Ted McEnroe, Director of Research and Training

Organizations are changing. We’re on the move. We work remotely. We rely more and more on smaller devices.

And our communities aren’t keeping up.

kids-with-mobile-devices-smallIn the State of Community Management 2016 survey, we introduced two new questions for community managers. The first was pretty straightforward: What percentage of your members regularly access your community from mobile devices?

Not surprisingly, while the numbers ranged basically from 0 to 100, but the average was just a shade under 30%.

The second question, however, raised a few research eyebrows. How do you rate your mobile experience? The graphic below sort of speaks for itself.

SOCM2016_Fact_#11_Mobile

It wasn’t the low percentages on their own that got our attention. Some of the biggest community platforms offer a mobile experience that is something akin to torture. Text you can’t read. Margins that break. Pinching. Zooming. Fields you can’t fill.
Want to learn more? You can download the State of Community Management 2016 at the bottom of this post.
What is surprising is sometimes how willing we are to accept it. Thinking about Stage 2, where the majority of communities in our survey ended up. On average, 3-in-10 of your members access your community with mobile, and 78% of them aren’t doing it on a very good platform. That’s a massive problem for engagement, since members suffering through a less than optimal experience are a lot less likely to comment, post or answer questions – the exact behaviors that give community its greatest value.

Think mobile doesn’t matter? Communities that said more than 60% of members used mobile regularly had nearly 1.5x the active engagement of their peers. 

But where there is failure, there is also opportunity. Our best-in-class communities were more than 50% more likely to say their users were having a very good or excellent mobile experience. But here’s the real reason to invest in mobile. Communities that said more than 60% of their members used mobile regularly in their communities had nearly 1.5 times the active engagement as their peers. 

We like to remind people that strategy trumps platform when it comes to community success. Having a great mobile platform alone won’t drive community success. But communities that think mobile as part of their strategy and make it a prime platform consideration are reaping benefits now, and are ahead of the curve for an increasingly mobile future.

 

The State of Community Management 2016 from The Community Roundtable

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.

Jerry Canaday on Applying Community Management Principles to Non-Traditional Community Roles

June 16, 2015 By Jim Storer

Our community podcast series, “Conversations with Community Managers” is back!

Join TheCR’s Jim Storer and Shannon Abram as they chat with community managers from a variety of industries about their community journey. They ask the community questions you want to know the answers to, including:

  1. What’s your best advice for someone just starting out in Community Management?
  2. What are your best practices for increasing community engagement?Jerry Canaday, Mastercard
  3. How would you survive the zombie apocalypse? (Ok – they might not ALL be community questions…)

We pick up where we left off with episode #27, featuring Jerry Canaday, Solution Architect – Internal Systems at MasterCard. Podcast highlights include:

  • Applying community management principles to non-traditional community roles
  • The intersection of the future of the intranet and mobile, and community management.
  • How community management has a natural analog in professional sports

 

https://www.communityroundtable.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/TheCRPodcast_JerryCanaday_Final.mp3

Download this podcast.

Subscribe to this podcast series.

Know someone we should have a conversation with? Let us know!

About Conversations with Community Managers*
To better reflect the diverse conversations our podcast covers we’ve changed the name of our long-running series to Community Conversations.
Community Conversations highlights short conversations with some of the smartest minds in the online community and social business space, exploring what they’re working on, why they do what they do, and what advice they have for you.
These episodes are a great way to begin to understand the nuances of community strategy and management.
Each episode is short (usually less than 30 minutes) and focuses on one community management professional.

https://media.blubrry.com/608862/communityroundtable.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/TheCRPodcast_JerryCanaday_Final.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS

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