Building Engaged & Sustainable Communities
You have a database of users you want to transform into a community, but your activities are not engaging them. Why?
Within the 1337 Ventures network, our respective brands engages different types of communities. We work with investors, startups, and corporates. We also have a willing group of mentors from the experienced sectors who want to give back — and one of the questions we’re looking to answer this year is how can we curate an engaged and self-sustaining community.
I decided to crowd-source the answer on the hottest app right now — Clubhouse. I was joined by co-moderators Shannon Chow, Daniel Cerventus, and Zikry Kholil to discuss how to go about Building Engaged and Sustainable Communities.
The three of them have, collectively, about 3 decades worth of experience in building and sustaining communities. Shannon was a prolific blogger, Daniel manages a 41k Malaysian entrepreneur community (among others), and Zikry is the co-founder of the Incitement movement, founded during his days of working in MindValley Malaysia.
The 5 Steps to Start
1. Set your purpose.
Do you actually need to have a community? Why not go with an easier brand communication strategy? Be really clear why you’re creating a community and what is the vision of the space.
2. Give the community an identity and cause.
People rally around causes. Something that appears to a sense of person, or wonder, or learning, or sheer outrageousness. People need a sense of belonging, so there needs to be an identity of "I am X".
3. Provide clear value.
What is the point of being a part of this community? What am I getting out of it? Is this a safe, supportive space, or a place to vent and just be? Am I learning something? Is it free from excessive self promotion and spam and meaningless good morning messages?
4. Speak the same 'language' as your audience.
Cater messages in a way that makes your audience respond, and set communication tones early. It sounds counterproductive, but having your own slang / jargons / abbreviations help people bond.
5. Define boundaries early.
The limits you set are the exceptions you make - set the rules of community engagement and enforce them firmly and fairly. Moderation is a consistent, on-going process.
On Growth & Sustainability
Starting a Facebook is easy. Getting people in there, tough but not impossible. Keeping it active, empowering and growing? T O U G H. It takes being relentless about talking about it and getting people in, consistency in creating value and providing first access to events / launches surrounding your topic.
There are a few hacks:
- get press coverage if you have interesting human interest pieces
- get KOL / celebrities to contribute or share it on their platforms
- be mentioned by the Prime Minister during a COVID briefing
- stand up for something the establishment doesn’t condone
On choosing platforms, Cerventus shared he looks at platforms from the perspective of velocity (how fast or slow) and longevity (how long discussions can last). He mentioned also that discoverability of the topics of discussion is important. All moderators favourite Facebook Groups as the evergreen platform for building and maintaining communities.
Why Facebook Groups?
At the end of the day, love or hate it, Facebook checks the boxes of thriving communities.
☑ People are already there — this seems a given, yet companies insist on using proprietary platforms. The problem with this is very few people wake up to check your platforms. But they’re already on Facebook, and they never leave. This is it’s biggest competitive edge.
☑ Searchable, archivable, tag-able — you can find posts since October 2010 which is when Facebook Groups launched! The functionalities work well, and they are easy to use whether the users are teenagers or 93 year olds.
☑ Integrated Ad system — the boost posts, advertisement modules, while designed to make FB more money every year, is also incredibly easy to use. By making it pay to reach, if the needs ever arise, you can reach your groups and people who like groups like yours (the demographic matching feature) really easy.
☑ Administrator functions — there is so much you can do, so many permissions, and ways you can manage your groups. You can also utilise the native filters to automate modding.
Remember this formula:
Value + Consistency + Exclusivity = Engagement
- provide valuable insights and content to the users
- be consistent in moderation, in providing content, and language
- where possible, provide access to things your community cares
What about other platforms?
There was also a lot of questions on how to moderate and on curating content. Key outputs from that were:
- When you start out, there is a lot to ‘grind’. You will be posting at least once a day (likely with low rates of engagement), but the keyword is consistency.
- When it comes to moderation, understand that it must change based on the lifecycle of the community. At the beginning, less moderation more content, later on, more moderation needed but discussions start on their own. The key is to ensure value is being created throughout.
- Human elements are important — genuine, authentic connections always trumps self promotion and hard-selling.
- You can grow from good value (takes time), and you can speed it up with good product/personal brand — which makes you the go-to for your niche.
- On how strict you need to be without impeding expression and discussions, it was suggested that certain types of content like self-promotion and invites to random events not be allowed or be limited to a once-a-week, specific thread type event.
- When asked what metrics to track / how to know you’re doing well, besides the number of people in your community, look also at engagements (comments, number of discussions) and remember that your analytics are limited by the tools of the platform. (i.e Facebook has great analytics, but if you use WhatsApp, you are limited to the basics)
- The speakers were also quick to caution that anyone who is thinking starting a community should also look into communities that are already out there — see what they lack, look for the key problem to solve and then start your community with like-minded individuals.
- Shannon added that you don’t have to necessarily create all content from scratch — search for relevant content and copy it over to your community (with proper attribution) and start discussions around that.
- Community building is a lot of work — so it’s best to ensure you actually care about the cause / passion / niche your community is set in. Remember that people may join at different levels of commitment, but you’re all in.
Last Notes
Shannon and Daniel recommended two bodies of work to help anyone thinking of starting community building:
2. Check out The Community Canvas by clicking on the Canvas below which is a great resource on community building. It’s got a guidebook, worksheets, and everything you need to kick you into action if you’re serious about this.
