Online communities have been around for a long time. When I joined Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) over forty years ago, communities were already operating quite successfully, known as VAXnotes Conferences. But there are always organizations discovering them for the first time and wanting to see if they can make them work.
I’ve led communities programs for DEC, Compaq, HP, and Deloitte for over 20 years. At the APQC KM Conference in St. Louis in 2005, I started the SIKM Leaders Community and have managed it ever since. I have written and presented about communities many times. In this post I will share proven practices based on my experience for preparing, launching, growing, and sustaining communities.
Preparing
The first step in the preparation phase is to learn as much as possible about communities. I recommend reading books, blogs, and articles (see the resources listed at the end of this post). It’s also helpful to listen to live and recorded presentations and talk with peers to understand how successful programs are run. Joining and participating in several communities such as the SIKM Leaders Community, KM4Dev, or others to see how communities operate and are led is always recommended as well as attending training and conferences.
Once you have a good idea of what you would like to implement, you can then identify a few key objectives for the program. These goals could be fundamental such as improved knowledge sharing, innovation, reuse, collaboration, and learning. Or the goals may include more detailed ones such as increased efficiency for asking and answering questions, finding resources, and solving problems.
Vision
Developing a clear vision of how the program will work when it is fully operational will be helpful to you, your senior leaders, and your target audience. It may take a while to achieve your vision, but passionately repeating it should get others to join your efforts to make it a reality.
Here is a ten-part vision I have used and recommend for use:
- A single, global, cross-functional community is available for each major specialty and role.
- Everyone belongs to at least one community, including the one most relevant to their work.
- All community members pay attention to the discussions and activities, and whenever they see a question or a request to which they can respond with assistance, they do so.
- Anyone needing help, an answer to question, content, an expert, or information on what the organization has done and is able to do can post in a community threaded discussion and receive a helpful reply within 24 hours, ensured by active monitoring of threaded discussions and follow-up by community managers.
- When other channels (e.g., email), are used to share, ask, or find, those who receive these messages redirect them to the most relevant communities.
- Each community offers a site, a calendar, periodic events, useful news and content, and active online discussions.
- When someone takes the time to share useful information, they receive positive responses in the form of likes, replies, thanks, and praise.
- Everyone can interact with communities in the ways they prefer, including entirely by email, mobile client, desktop client, web browser, RSS feed, etc.
- There is a user-friendly process for requesting and creating new communities.
- A single global platform is available, including a communities directory, standard site templates, and standard tools.
Use Cases
The people you want to have join communities need to know what is in it for them. To address this, you’ll need to define compelling use cases for communities by clearly showing which tasks communities can perform more effectively than any other alternatives, such as email or chat.
Here is a list of seven use cases I have found success with. You can adapt it to what your organization will find compelling.
Launching
Launching communities begins with getting senior leaders’ support. Ideally, you’d want them to approve a reasonable budget, communicate enthusiasm for the program, help set organization-wide goals and measurements, and encourage, recognize and reward participation. And it’s an added benefit when leaders directly participate by posting and replying online.
Choose the right platform. It should have an established track record of satisfied users, support all required functionality, integrate easily with other systems currently in use, and scale well as the number of community members increases. If your organization already uses Microsoft 365, it makes sense to use Viva Engage. And there are many other platforms from which to choose.
Define how communities will be governed. It’s important to control community creation to prevent redundant or narrow niche communities. In a small organization (up to 200), a single community may be all that is needed to start. For larger organizations, select topics that everyone agrees are important.
Choose community topics carefully. They should not be too broad or too narrow. The names of the communities should use industry-standard, easily recognized terminology that potential members will identify with. For example, for project managers, call the community “Project Management,” not some organization-specific, esoteric term. You want all project managers to see that community and want to check it out.
Select community managers with passion for the topic and willingness to spend time building their communities, and then nurture them. They should spend time increasing membership to build critical mass, which is typically 100 members or more. This is due to the 90-9-1 Rule of Thumb that says only 10% of community members will ever post.
Recruit respected experts to participate visibly in communities. This helps attract others to join and indicates that if members have questions or problems, they will receive answers and solutions from those who know best.
Prime the pump by posting to share, ask, find, and answer. This provides examples of how to participate, demonstrates that the community is active, and showcases successful interactions. If you post a priming question, get a respected expert to answer it to show how this works.
Personally recruit initial members to join communities relevant to them. Find community champions to help promote the program in their organizations and community managers to lead communities.
Publicize the initial communities. Share the vision and the use cases. Explain how to join and participate.
Growing
To lead by example, create a community of community managers.This includes bringing in outside speakers who have led successful programs who can help bolster your messages, while setting clear expectations for community managers. They should be prepared perform these SHAPE activities:
- Schedule: Line up speakers and set up events.
- Host: Initiate and run conference calls, webinars, and face-to-face meetings.
- Answer: Ensure that questions in the online threaded discussions receive replies, that discussions are relevant, and that behavior is appropriate.
- Post: Share information useful to the members by posting to the community site, online threaded discussions, blog, and/or newsletter.
- Expand: Attract new members, content contributions, and online threaded discussion posts.
They should also regularly curate online threaded discussions by editing thread titles to make them informative, adding and editing hashtags, merging and splitting threads, correcting erroneous information, fixing broken links, and removing content that violates community guidelines.
Find existing support and communication channels (e.g., email lists, subscriptions, and call centers) and work to redirect messages and queries sent to these to the appropriate communities. When you receive messages that are sharing useful information, asking questions, or seeking resources, redirect those as well.
Offer to demonstrate how communities are better than other alternatives for the recommended use cases. For example, communicate that the next time anyone needs to share, ask, or find, you will assist them by conducting a side-by-side comparison between posting in the community versus sending out an email, and then comparing the results.
Get senior leaders to model desired behaviors by posting and replying, reinforcing the recommended use cases, and taking a moment to thank and praise those who spend time leading and participating in communities. Offer to spend ten minutes a week with them to help them post and reply. Schedule periodic online jams where they are available at scheduled times to interact with community members by asking and answering questions. Augment events such as town halls with online discussions. Launch idea campaigns and innovation challenges in communities.
Set goals and measure results for each community using PATCH metrics:
- Participation: Percentage of target population which is a member of at least one community
- Anecdotes: Percentage of communities displaying the following on their sites:
- Testimonials by community members on the value of participation
- Stories about the usefulness of the community
- Posts thanking other members for their help
- Tools: Percentage of communities having all five key SCENT tools
- Site: home page - for reaching new members and sharing information with current ones
- Calendar: of community events - for promoting interaction
- Events: meetings, conference calls, webinars - for interacting personally
- News: newsletter or blog - for ongoing communications and publicity
- Threads: online threaded discussions - for interacting virtually
- Coverage: Percentage of desired topics covered by a community
- Health: Percentage of communities meeting these criteria (adapt these as necessary):
- At least one post to an online threaded discussion per week
- At least one newsletter or blog post per month
- At least one conference call, webinar, or face-to-face meeting per quarter
- At least 100 members
- At least 10 members participating in each event
Set a weekly calendar reminder to review communities, post and reply, and to check for unanswered questions. Post regularly to share useful content, start lively discussions, and post content and queries redirected from other channels. Ensure questions are answered, either by prompting the community to respond, privately asking an expert to reply, or providing an answer directly.
Recognize and reward those who lead communities, share useful information, ask questions, and answer questions. Offer distinctive digital badges for community managers, frequent posters, presenters, and those who answer questions. Display a percent completion indicator on the personal profiles of individuals for joining, subscribing, attending, posting, and replying in communities.
Collect success stories taken from communities. Promote these stories to inspire people to join so they won’t miss out. Use the collection to prove the value of the communities program.
Sustaining
To sustain a communities program once it is operating successfully, the program manager should do the following.
- Evangelize: Promote effective use of communities across organizational boundaries. Establish collaboration use cases, differentiate available tools, and recruit new community managers, contributors, and members.
- Provide program and project management: Lead the formal program for communities. Manage projects and project managers.
- Lead by example: Regularly post, reply, like, praise, and share in communities. Lead one or more communities, including a community of community managers.
- Educate: Develop, maintain, and deliver training about communities. Regularly post tips, tricks, techniques, lessons learned, and proven practices. Nurture inactive of ineffective communities back to good health.
- Communicate: Publish and maintain documentation, websites, FAQs, and the master community directory. Celebrate and promote active communities. Collect and publish success stories.
- Implement: Define, document, implement, and manage processes for creating, merging, splitting, and retiring communities. Respond to requests, help launch new communities, and help communities merge or split as required.
- Support: Work with IT and vendors to implement, maintain, and improve platforms. Answer questions, respond to people seeking help, and talk to those requesting new communities.
- Report: Produce and publish periodic health reports for communities. Produce and distribute periodic reports on new communities as they are created and launched.
- Govern: Establish guidelines, principles, and creation/retention/retirement criteria for communities. Monitor activity, moderate content according to guidelines, intervene as required, and retire communities when inactive or no longer needed.
- Learn: Participate in external knowledge management and community management communities. Read articles, blog posts, and books. Attend training, workshops, and conferences. Network with peers to share and learn. Invite outside speakers to present to your organization. Go on site visits to other organizations and reciprocate with invitations.
Resources
To hear more about communities from Stan, register for the August 14, 2024 APQC KM webinar Back to School Edition: Building Effective and Long-lasting Communities of Practice.
For additional information, visit the links below.