Essentially, the most popular metrics for assessing the community performance are a) number of members, and b) number of community interactions within recent period.
Building community is about growing these engagement indicators during all stages of community life cycle:
1. Conceptualization and launch.
2. Engagement growth.
3. Mature collaborations.
It is implied – very tacitly though – that communication management plays the central role through all stages of online community life cycle. But to achieve the expected results in community development one should be really consciousness how the different aspects of communications should be handled during this process.
In general, the community engagement can be portrayed as the process of community interactions nurturing with the help of communication directed towards people inbound involvement into community collaborations and further member retention within them.
All controllable factors that are defining online community framework and are affecting the engagement can be grouped into three elements comprising the community engagement model that can be also named “3C model” after the first letters of each element, namely: concept, content, collaboration.
Accordingly, the online community creation can be seen as the set of the processes: a) community concept design along the online community structural model components; b) kickoff content generation; c) engagement of participants into community interactions; d) facilitation of ongoing collaboration.
Further, all communications within the process of online community building can be distinguished into two distinct layers. At the first layer is the strategic communication of community concept and content to the target audience. The objectives of communication at this level are mainly to raise awareness and interest to community among target audience. The second layer comprises the communicational aspects of collaboration among the engaged participants. The conversion from awareness to active engagement is achieved as the combination of communication efforts at both layers.
In its turn, the concept of the community is framed by the following elements: addressed problem, value proposition, target audiences, key performance indicators, and, finally, channels of strategic communication. In other words, the concept of the community provides answers to the questions:
- What is the problem of the target audience that community is created to solve?
- What is the value added of the community that solves the identified problem?
- What are the channels of strategic communication that will be used to deliver the message of the offered value added to the target audiences?
Answering those questions precisely before jumping into the process of the community building is hardly possible. The more feasible way is to outline the concept of the community in general terms and grounding on that adopt the agile approach through all stages of community building.
The concept of the online community should allow reaching the balance between flexibility of iterative experiments on one hand, and keeping the steadiness in pursuing the community purpose on the other hand. This can be enabled in the process of community creation by introducing the community canvas and community backlog documentation.
The canvas defines the major elements of the community concept while the backlog helps to keep the track of community strategy implementation. These tools help to align the iterative efforts and creative experimenting in the process of community building within the initial framework settled by the community purpose.
If the community development capacity allows, communications should be splitted organizationally into strategic and collaborative with the corresponding assigning of communicational roles and tasks.
