Create your community
Tackling the technological aspects of our tools in order to design a community is not the only creative task at this stage, it is also important to focus on creating an engaging atmosphere for members and encouraging recruitment.
In order to stimulate communication throughout the group communities must try to foster an atmosphere of trust, create an open and fair environment and develop a sense of achievement within the group.
Finding and welcoming members
People are the community so it is important to involve as many as possible.
Welcoming members
From the outset members must be made to feel welcome within your community. Without this, online environments often struggle to achieve any level of real engagement.
Every community should clearly state their purpose, who can join, how they can join and, what is expected of them once they join.
The key to creating a healthy community is encouraging high levels of member engagement. Encourage members to take ownership of their community: this helps develop a sense of shared responsibility and pride in what you are contributing to your field.
Online atmospheres can be a little impersonal so, in addition to contacting members as they join, you should try to maintain regular contact with the group throughout its life.
Digital tools
Choosing the right tools is important.The community should consider how it wants to communicate and share to achieve its aim therefore select digital tools that best support them.
Examples of tools are:
- Microsoft Teams
- The Knowledge Hub - The Social Media and Online Collaboration CoP brings together a group of local government public sector and voluntary sector peers looking at and working with social media and online collaboration tools, to improve ways of working. With a focus on their use within organisations and how they can be used for organisational engagement with their clients.
Writing for the web is not like writing for other mediums you may be used to. Attention spans are often short online, and people generally absorb web content by scanning pages quickly.
Information and resources
To support the work of the community it is important to have easy access to useful information and resources. Populating a community with information can be time consuming so it is a good idea to have developed a set of key topics that need to be covered.
To help gain a better idea of what members would like to see included you could hold workshops, discussion areas or provide surveys.
Good places to start:
- think about hot topics of interest to number of members
- think about shared areas of practice.
- think about shared areas of expertise.
Once you have an idea of what kind of information the community needs and wants you will need to think about where to find reliable resources. This is very important as users opinions and engagement with a community will be influenced by the reliability and relevance of information.
Marketing and promotion
Initially, it can be useful to gather a group of core members: these could be from within your own network of contacts.
- Who would want to be involved?
- How would they become involved?
From there you can begin to actively publicise your community. As well as using traditional routes such as events, word of mouth, relevant newsletters and flyers you could consider liaising with other communities working in similar fields and work together to create links between your websites.
Ways to find people include;
- Mapping stakeholders to identify relationships between interest and influence.
- Approaching people in coordinating roles in the subject area to help identify members.
- Identifing key people who already provide information as part of their role.
- Considering stakeholders and developing diverse representation.
You might like to make prospective members aware of some of the benefits of joining your community.
It is important that the work you do as a community is recognised by people outside of the group and perhaps even shared with them.
The content and ideas that you generate can also be used externally; professional development schemes, new practices, raising awareness and induction training materials are all areas that could be impacted by the work your community does.