Building Community
I discovered the power of online communities at 3am one cold winters night as my son, then 6 weeks old was refusing to sleep, eat or do much except cry. The “twelve o clock bell” when baby was passed from husband who was at work the next morning, to wife on maternity leave seemed a very long time ago. I decided to go downstairs, log on and found myself on mumsnet - discovering what countless other new mums have discovered - that hearing 1st hand from others going through the same thing, really does help. Mumsnet is one of a whole brood of sites catering for new parents – offering news, chat and information.
There are many others – babycentre.co.uk, netmums.co.uk, together with the branded offerings from the likes of Boots and Pampers. A new arrival, Wiser Pregnancy is offering a new concept – it’s based on the idea that when facing a choice, we all like to know what other people like us decided to a do in a similar situation. It factors in your age, your socio- economic background, to find “people like you”… How many people like me chose a home birth over hospital or a midwife unit over a large hospital. It’s an interesting idea, its success resting on whether there is an active community taking part.
It’s a challenge faced by many would be creators of online communities: how to develop a community to enable all the clever things made possible by a thriving community. So here are three pointers from the not so usual suspects:
Offer clear tangible benefits:
IDEA, which supports innovation in local government, set up its “communities of practice”, creating for the first time, a space where hundreds of professionals working in local government can find others facing similar issues in the workplace. There are now over 40,000 people active in over 900 groups discussing subjects including innovation, efficiency and procurement.
Create a reason to come back again and again and again:
TES, created a community leveraging the success of the online publication of the Times Educational Supplement – a leading brand in the field of education. Round the clock news updates together with a range of features and databases, creates the repeat visitor numbers they need to continue to grow a large and active community: over 800,000 education professionals are now registered with the site.
Guide your community to help them find the most useful content for them – don’t expect them to have the time to find it:
Doctors.net offers both the ability to interact with other doctors in a private space together with news, information and online training. They build up a strong picture of who you are and what your interests are and astutely direct you to the content most relevant to you and your work – their figures show over 90% of UK doctors are members, with over a quarter visiting each week.
The message? Building successful communities can have fantastic results – but be prepared to put the hard work in, much like parenting in fact…..
