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.
