When you’re tasked with starting a community, it can be intimidating to know where to begin. Take a look at the big picture first—there are a few things you’ll want to know before you get started, like planning your strategy before tackling software.
Step 1 - Establish Goals and Objectives
Before you do anything, ask yourself why I am starting a community. Who is it for, and what type of community will it be? Once you have the answers, talk to the people you’re planning to engage to make sure you’re on the right path. Without their insight and the right data, you’ll have a much harder trek to success. Done that? Go back and talk to more people. I mean it—this is the most important part of what you’re doing. Internal and external stakeholders—talk to all of them.
- What are the common themes emerging? Is it what you thought?
- Are the wants of your external users aligned with your internal stakeholders? How will you reconcile them if they aren’t?
- Once you determine what your external users want, what business goals do they align with?
- What type of community might meet these wants and needs?
Step 2 - Develop your Strategy
When you have the themes, some alignment of ideas, and business goals in mind, then the strategy work can begin. What should it include? Here are some elements I included in my initial JumpCloud community strategy:
- Why are we building a community, and what kind of community will it be?
- Feedback from users (our UX team helped us with research, and hearing quotes from our target audience was incredibly helpful)
- Emerging themes from the feedback, which informed our planned approach
- Our objective (informed by the themes)
- Our core strategy (content, events, recognition)
- Success metrics (how we’ll be measured)
- Timeline: Discovery / Build / Launch by quarter (to set expectations and show we had a plan)
There are a number of ways you can approach planning. Feverbee has a much longer guide that you can walk through in depth. In my working strategy, the detailed one I use day-to-day, I have a copy of our community rules, some tactics for each area of our core approach, onboarding, and gamification plans, outlines of a future super user program, and how we’ll handle GDPR for any members from the EU. This is my working document that gets updated regularly. It also houses my future roadmaps and common slides I use for presentations or road shows, including for the executive leadership team.
Step 3 - Select the Right Software
Once you’ve developed the strategy, you can start making a list of requirements and begin looking at software. This is critical. Why? Because you won’t know what software will fit your needs until you know what you need.
How do you make a list of requirements? Think about what actions you want your users to take when they are in the community. Here’s a template for requesting proposals (downloads an excel file) that you can download and customize. It has a ton of options, but don’t get overwhelmed. Just delete what you don’t need, and it gives you a good list to compare vendors side by side.
(Note: you may need to paste the URL directly for the page to load, as it just downloads the excel file. I promise it’s worth the effort, and I used it during my platform search.)
Choosing community software is similar to choosing any other software. You want to find the best match to your needs within your budget. There are MANY vendors out there now, and more are joining each day. If I were to list them here, it’d probably be outdated in a few months. Here is a list of the major players that are unlikely to go away anytime soon. This isn’t an exhaustive list, by the way.
First, the enterprise platforms:
- Khoros
- Insided
- Higher Logic / Vanilla
- Verint
- Salesforce
Other platforms used for community that may or may not include forums (which is what is traditionally considered community):
- Circle
- Mighty Networks
- Discourse
- Discord
- Slack
- Influitive
Companies also build Facebook Groups, subreddits, or Twitter Communities, but you don’t own your community there and are at the platform’s mercy. If your account or page gets shut down for any reason, you lose access to your audience with little recourse. Own your space if you can.
Also, remember that you’ll want to access data about what’s going on in your community. Some platforms may not give you much information, which could inhibit your ability to measure success down the road.
Step 4 - Develop a Launch Plan
Once you’ve compared platforms and chosen the best one, it’s time to plan for launch. Most vendors have a sample launch plan to help with this, but you should have your own, too. Here’s a good one (from ep. 11 of In Before the Lock) that goes from discovery through strategy, choosing a vendor, and going public with your community. A lot goes into a launch, so you’ll need to line up resources well ahead of time: legal, procurement, IT, marketing, web, design, customer success/support, etc.
Don’t forget your communication plan! You’ll want to have clear messaging for before and after launch—to your audience to drive traffic and to internal stakeholders, so they stay informed.
Additional Resources
We’ve only scratched the surface of the basics of launching a community, but these areas I’ve mentioned are good places to start. In my next post, I’ll talk a little more about some things you should know after you launch a community. Until then, here are some additional resources if you really want to go deeper into learning:
- The Indispensable Community by Richard Millington
- In Before the Lock, a community podcast by Brian Oblinger and Erica Kuhl (both have been VPs of community at different companies and they share all kinds of insights and resources on their pod website)
- Build Your Community by Richard Millington
- Building Brand Communities by Carrie Melissa Jones and Charles Vogl
- Platform reviews on YouTube: Insided, Khoros, Salesforce
- Communities for community practitioners: The Community Roundtable, Community Club, CMX
- Community Manager Breakfast, a Monday morning newsletter by Evan Hamilton (HubSpot, Reddit), where he shares a handful of interesting links
- Jenny.community, by Jenny Weigle, a strategist who used to work at Khoros; she also has a newsletter and regularly shares great content on LinkedIn
Let me know what other questions you have below.
