Collab4Dev Community Managers Roundtable

Discussion » Why and How do I grow my Community?

Why and How do I grow my Community?

Some questions are timely and topical. Roundtable Evan Samuel Caplan sent me this scenario this morning. "My manager has tasked me with growing the GSG and CoP membership by about 200 people. Do you have any thoughts on how we can do this?"

 

My short answer, yes This followed quickly, by give me a quick call... I wanted to learn more about Evan's community and what they wanted to do... this also, to verify whether Evan or colleagues were ready for the Smart Growth - Community Management Level 2 Training Module that is being offered this week at 9:30 am EST on Thursday Feb.15.

 

Action requested/suggested:

 

Related:

  • A few years ago a newish community manager came to me and shared, "My manager said we should have 1,000 members by December." I asked, "To do what?"

 

Smart Growth often comes down to use cases. In Evan's case above, the Community-Driven Development (CDD) Community of Practice is a dynamic, cross-disciplinary body of CDD practitioners, development partners, and other interested researchers from different countries and sectoral themes within and outside the World Bank. They are interested in both dissemination and engagement. They are looking for ways to grow their targeted email distribution list to extend their reach. They have a heavily viewed "Member's Only" C4D Group - one of their monthly newsletters received over 500 views in its first 2 or 3 days after publishing. This post helped generate a one day spike to over 4,000 views, many of these from non-Members. So, this CoP could be a great candidate for "Smart Growth", this versus a group that has not really focused yet on "To do what" or planned its member onboarding and engagement strategy.

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    Thank you for sharing this Bruce Summers.  It's a good reminder that number of members itself don't make sense   And the example from CDD CoP is very impressive. I took the training module last year and it was very helpful. Good to hear that I'm allowed to take it again. Can't make it this time though, we have a big event for the Smart Cities KSB on the same day. I think this topic is also important for the communities who want to expand the outreach outside of the WB, right?

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    Summary from - Smart Growth, Community Management Level 2 Reading Assignment – pages 12 and 13.

     

    Growing a Community - Summary

     

    Unfortunately, growth is often something that is done wrong. Community managers tend to ignore the reasons why members participate and join the community to begin with in favor of tactics that deliver sheer volume. Or even worse, they just hope that growth will take care of itself.

     

    So, when you’re thinking about growth, keep these principles in mind:

     

    • Grow for a reason – Make sure that you’re growing for a reason. Take a good look at your community and determine whether or not it even needs growth to begin with. What is the real benefit from growth?
    • Slow and steady wins – It’s much better to have slow and steady growth instead of a large, viral explosion of growth. Large bursts of growth are challenging for the community to absorb, and they’re much more challenging for you as a community manager to convert into active members of the community. Converting someone into a regular, active member takes a lot of time and effort. With a large amount of growth, you won’t have the same time available to convert these members, and you risk missing members that would have otherwise converted because you don’t have enough time.
    • Promote activities within the community – Make sure that you’re promoting the activity that happens within the community rather than the community itself. When many people try to grow a community, they’ll say “join the community for these special things” and be done with it. And that really doesn’t put the community member in a participatory mindset. Rather, it’s smarter to promote an in-community activity like an upcoming event or discussion to someone outside of the community. Ask them to lend their opinion, or have them join the panel. By inviting someone to participate on a particular activity directly, you make an appeal to their social needs. Once they join and participate, they’re far more likely to continue participating, rather than forget about the account they’ve just created.
    • Optimize your time – When you’re increasing the number of members that are joining your community, you’ll also need to increase the time you have available for converting these folks into active participants. What good are your efforts in driving people to your platform if they don’t convert into active members? You’ll also want to optimize the conversion process for long-term members.
    • Measure and repeat – Measurement itself is such an important thing to community growth: inputs, outputs, and outcomes. It’s important for you to measure (posts, comments, questions and answers, time to respond and so on), so that you understand what the best sources of growth are, and optimize your time and efforts accordingly.

      

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  • Attached please find - Sample "Smart Growth" Action Plans - Community Management Level 2 Exercise

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    Hi Bruce and friends,

     

    My tip is to use Twitter and Linkedin to find the people who work on your subject area. With programs like Hootsuite you can do a very quick scan of the entire world for things being posted on social media related to your CoP subject focus, and you can then reach out to the authors and experts behind new reports, etc. It's a relatively efficient way of searching the world for new members!

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