Business benefits
Choose your community type and develop a clear, prioritized list of community goals by connecting business goals and audience needs.
Research what your audience want and need in a community.
Conduct stakeholder research to discover what your organization needs from a community.
Prioritize the organizational needs for your community by required or nice to have and order of importance.
Involve other stakeholders in the process by hosting a stakeholder workshop or letting each stakeholder assign a score to each goal and aggregating the results.
Consider a support community like Microsoft Answers that prompts members to help each other.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Easy to get started and measure. | Hard to keep members engaged, with a small number of members asking most of the questions. |
| Offer direct value. | Tricky to keep updated and current. |
| Scale support to more people at no extra cost. |
Consider an exploration community like a Reddit subreddit that allows people to explore a topic together.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Member engagement easier to accomplish. | More difficult to get started. |
| Create valuable resources, while improving the expertise of the entire group. | Quality difficult to sustain with a natural tendency to become self-promotional. |
Consider an influence-based community that helps members collaborate to improve something they would be unable to improve alone.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Largely self-organized. | Difficult to control – problems can harm a brand as a result. |
| Can sustain a large level of member contributions. | Difficult to overcome the collective-action problem due to conflicting member interests. |
Consider a community of belonging that builds a true sense of inclusion and rapport.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Provides indispensable and exclusive benefits to members. | Prone to fights and conflicts based on differing interests. |
| Difficult to sustain as the community grows. |
Pick a community type that best suits your organizational goals and member needs.
Last edited by @hesh_fekry 2023-11-14T09:56:39Z