Membership organisations are starting to see the real value and insight that can be gained from online communities. According to the latest Digital Excellence report from MemberWise, 41% of membership organisations now have an online community.
Community launch is vital to initial and sustained engagement. While not overly time-consuming, best practices to getting this right will make all the difference.
Here are some of our critical must-haves for successfully launching an online member community.
Content Seeding & Sprouting
The primary driver of community value is content. Your new community members need to see valuable, engaging content on their first visit, otherwise they’re less likely to return for a second one. The value of content is amplified by the community members who offer it, and reinforced by the conversations surrounding the content.
There are loads of relevant content for your members across multiple online sources – whether that’s your member magazine, main website, or newspapers – which will be interesting and worthy of conversation in your community. These are often effective seeds, with an initial discussion sprouted from seed content that confirms value and extends the opportunity to engage.
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Content & Feature Modelling
Community platforms offer rich features that allow for more nuanced interactions, including emojis, @mentions, images, likes, videos, and wiki articles (to name just a few). These are available to help your members communicate effectively, and generally make the whole experience more engaging and personalised. These features should be on display within the seeded and sprouted content at launch.
It’s important to note that many users are only willing to post after exploring and understanding a platform; once they know they can truly trust it. Writing a post or sharing an opinion reflects trust in the community, as well as trust in the platform itself.
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Content-centred Marketing
Ensuring your members know the community is available, helpful, and actually being used by other members is vital to initial engagement. Fortunately, enterprise-level community platforms take care of all this for you via email and activity notification features.
Ideally, content should be personalised, and highlight the community content of value to the individual members. Try to stick to content that helps members address specific challenges that may differ from person to person – more general calls-to-action like ‘come and check out the community and connect with peers’ tend to be much less effective in the membership sector.
Your members will come for the content but return for the conversations!
In the UK membership sector, online community is already making a massive difference for many organisations.
Cantarus is a multi-award-winning full-service digital agency specialising in delivering websites & with deep expertise and an outstanding client portfolio in the membership sector.
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