A strong sense of community not only attracts and retains members, it also encourages engagement and collaboration within your organisation. Most memberships centre around an idea; be that a career, cause or charity. A community strengthens the links of these common interests between your members.
In this post, we’ll explore key strategies for building a vibrant community where relationships and bonds between members builds longlasting loyalty for your organisation.
Define Your Community’s Purpose
Your first step creating a community should centre around your organisation’s missions and values. Consider how a community helps you achieve your overall goals. With a clear purpose in mind, you can communicate the value of your community with members more effectively.
Encourage Open Communication
Promoting open dialogue creates an environment where members feel heard and valued. A strong community stands on the foundations of open communication. It involves encouraging member-to-member interactions.
Therefore, offer avenues such as forums and social media for members to express themselves, to share individual and organisational milestones and discuss the latest news in your organisation .
Encourage Member Participation and Contributions
Despite giving channels for members to engage in dialogue, encouraging them to participate is a whole other task in itself. Consider how you will reward active participation in your community before you launch it. Incentives vary from exclusive perks to shoutouts.
As long as they positively reinforce the act of participation and satisfy your members, you should encourage members. Just remember the key is to offer satisfying rewards. If you invite a member to share their expertise or experiences through blog posts for example, then you might want to give them a special shoutout and a surprise.
The process of earning rewards can also be hugely satisfying. Consider using gamified elements. Challenges, prize draws and even treasure hunts can be interwoven into the experience of participating with the wider community.
Create Valuable Content and Resources
Engagement is one of the main benefits of a thriving community. To keep your members engaged requires unique and valuable content and resources. Your goals and purpose should be a point of reference to make such things unique. But to make them valuable they must address the needs and interests of your members.
Share industry insights, success stories and event reports. Also, consider any resources you can put aside exclusively for community members. This could be an invite to a particular event like a meetup session where members subscribed to your community can finally meet face-to-face.
Cultivate a Sense of Belonging
A sense of belonging is integral to your community. After all, it’s this core emotional response that manifests as customer loyalty. As friendships and relationships develop between members they’ll naturally want to stick around.
That’s why it’s important to establish a positive culture early on in your community. Create a welcoming and inclusive environment where every member feels respected and valued. Take the lead in celebrating member achievements and milestones. Not only does this set the community’s tone, it shows you’re invested in your members’ successes.
Gather Feedback and Improve
Community of any kind is an ongoing process of collaboration and communication. Regularly seek input from members to understand their ever-evolving needs and preferences. You can also get an accurate picture of their expectations by analysing engagement metrics.
Identify areas for improvement and adjust your strategies accordingly. That way, as your community grows and evolves, you’ll be better prepared to adapt to the changing needs of your members.
Encouraging, Engaging, Enriching = Strong Community
Trying out some of the strategies above will put you in a stronger position as you’ll create a community that:
- Encourages participation.
- Gngages members with unique content and discussions.
- Enriches their experiences with compelling rewards and incentives.
Who better to share your long term success with than a community of your people?
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