Bringing together a large group of people online who share common interests is critical to starting a community. However, achieving true community success in the long term requires more. Specifically, online community managers and community moderation tools play an essential role.
What Is Online Community Moderation?
Online communities are like gardens. They thrive when well taken care of, including removing weeds and receiving the key ingredients to grow, like sunlight, water, and nutrients.
Online community moderation is the art and science of guiding a community to align with specific values. Many communities have a list of formal rules. For example, Reddit community rules often discourage self-promotion. Other online communities – particularly those aimed at younger people – have rules discouraging inappropriate language (e.g., profanity).
There are two broad categories of online community moderation: software and manual. Software-based moderation (included in Arena Live Chat) is an excellent way to filter profanity and other objectionable words. Manual moderation has a role to play in other scenarios. For instance, you might be hosting a celebrity for a Q&A event and want to keep questions on-topic — both manual and software moderation can help you run a successful event.
Ways To Streamline Community Moderation
You can use a few strategies to make online community moderation easier.
Community Rules
Posting a community code of conduct or rules is an effective way to set expectations when new people join. If you host live community online events, it is wise to repeat rules that apply to those interactions so that everybody is on the same page. For example, the r/science community – which has 31 million members – on Reddit enforces multiple rules, including:
Must be peer-reviewed research
No abusive or offensive comments
Non-professional personal anecdotes will be removed
No medical advice
Comments dismissing established findings and fields of science must provide evidence
Manage Access To The Community
As communities grow larger, it becomes more difficult to maintain standards. Therefore, you should curate your community deliberately. For instance, a publisher can offer several online communities. One community – open to all registered users – may have limited moderation. In contrast, the same publisher might also have a second online community limited to paying subscribers.
For example, a publisher that offers “subscriber only” content and community limits access to people with an active subscription. By the way, a single organization can host multiple communities, including an open community where anybody can join and a more exclusive community for paying members.
Recruit and Retain Volunteer Moderators
Scaling up to a larger community with tens of thousands or more members is tough if you have a single moderator. Fortunately, you can recruit volunteer moderators (often called “mods”) to help maintain community standards. Usually, extending an invitation to a community moderator is best based on the person’s track record. For example, a person who encourages positive dialogue and gently reminds others of the community rules might be a good candidate for a volunteer moderator.
To retain your community moderators, offer them exclusive benefits. For example, content moderators might be invited to ask the first question when you have question-and-answer events. Publishers can also reward moderators with gifts like apparel or subscription discounts.
Build Safe Online Communities with Arena
Although social media can be a good place to start, bringing your online communities can bring numerous advantages for your brand. You can engage with your customers through Live Chat, Live Blog, and other Customer Engagement ideas. Arena is easy to integrate, perfect for conversations, community chat, as well as ratings and reviews.
Arena Community represents a significant leap forward in audience engagement and interaction. With its comprehensive feature set and user-centric design, Arena Community counts with moderation features that guarantee your virtual community stays safe and enjoyable for your audience.
Subscription businesses, whether offering software, products, or information, are poised for significant growth. According to research, the subscription economy, worth $650 billion in 2020, is projected to grow to $1.5 trillion by 2025. However, this booming market comes with its challenges. On one hand, buyers are more open to subscription-based purchases, but on the other, we’re seeing signs of “subscription fatigue.” In a 2022 survey, two-thirds of consumers reported canceling at least one streaming service in the past year.
Economic pressures such as high inflation and supply chain disruptions further complicate the landscape for subscription businesses. For instance, US inflation rates in 2022 ranged from 6.5% to over 9%, impacting consumer spending. Additionally, supply chain issues have caused delays in product deliveries, eroding customer trust. Higher interest rates also limit consumer spending on high-priced items and make business financing more challenging.
Despite these obstacles, there is still a growth path. Building a flywheel for your online community is the key to unlocking sustainable success.
What Is A Community Flywheel?
A community flywheel is a way to lift growth, consisting of a community-centric approach to brand building, where a brand joins or creates a community that promotes awesome experiences for customers, increasing audience engagement and translating that into sales.
In simple terms, investing in a community flywheel means that your community members make your brand more valuable through their contributions and participation and bring others into your space. In other words, your community becomes central to your brand’s success and future growth.
Although it is a great strategy to deploy in your marketing department, there is a catch.
It takes an initial investment of time and resources to launch a community flywheel strategy. Getting the first 1,000 true fans (or more!) can be a long road. Once you have those fans in place, growth becomes far easier. It’s like investing in the stock market. It’s easier and faster to compound your returns when you start with a significant investment. That said, the magic of compound returns – for a community or investment – is still available to all who start.
How to Drive Growth With a Community Flywheel Strategy
Put these community flywheel strategies to work to get your community into operation. Your growth will take off as you put more of these methods into practice.
Lift Engagement With Online Community
Passing website visitors, who visit once and never return, do little for growth. Use these methods to spark engagement.
Build Anticipation And Cliffhangers
When your community members see a good reason to keep returning to your website, like experiencing a multi-day online event, it’s easier to grow engagement. For example, instead of delivering all of your best insights in a single webinar, look for ways to promote your content over a more extended period of time, driving more subscriptions.
Recognize VIP Community Members
Almost everyone enjoys being recognized for their contributions. The principle holds for your online community building. Use community badges, gifts, and thank you messages to encourage your most engaged members to keep coming back.
After you implement those strategies to inspire greater participation in your online community, it’s time to turn to revenue.
Increasing Revenue With Your Online Community
The way you lift revenue with an online community flywheel depends on your business model. Let’s consider a publishing business with advertising and how online events can lift revenue.
Offer Exclusive Digital Events
Many publishers offer conferences, talks, and other offline events in traditional venues. The next way to grow revenue is to offer hybrid and virtual events so that more people can join. Online events have fewer costs than in-person events, so if you don’t have a big budget for them, choose to invest in the virtual format.
Additionally, you can use digital events to lift revenue. First, you can use subscriber-only events as a retention method to encourage subscribers to renew their subscriptions. In addition, you can offer current subscribers a discount or early registration access to your events.
Provide Enhanced Community Curation
From your audience’s perspective, there are a few reasons why event participation is appealing. First is the event’s content, like learning new insights. Second, there is the social and networking aspect of the event – connecting with people who share your interests.
A thoughtfully curated community event is a powerful way to attract your audience. For example, you might invite Gen Z students interested in finance or technology with special guests in those industries. If Gen Z is an essential demographic for you, check out our post on 5 Ways Publishers Can Build Their Gen Z Audience And Earn First Party Data.
If you keep the event tightly focused, so will the public’s experience, and your audience will be more likely to make valuable connections.
Arena Makes Growing Online Communities Easier
Growing an online community takes a lot of heart, thoughtful content, and passion for connecting with others. Arena Community has resources to make online community building easier.
Use our virtual events checklist to plan, promote and run online events without the stress.
Building an online community is a smart way to accelerate your growth goals. Whether you’re after a larger audience to maximize advertising revenue or leads, there are several online community tactics and tools that can help you achieve success.
Use this post as a toolkit – picking the tools and tactics up as you need them.
Start With The End In Mind: KPI and ROI Goals
Community building takes resources and energy, so take the time to be strategic. Choosing the right mix of community tactics and goals is only possible when you have a clear objective. The following key performance indicators for most brands may be exactly what you need.
Engaged Visitors: Track the number of visitors engaged with your website, such as those who visit multiple pages. Alternatively, you might define engaged visitors by time on site or other metrics.
Average Time On Site: Generally speaking, higher time on site is desirable. Aim for at least 60 seconds on site as a starting goal. That’s enough time to make an initial connection with your audience.
First-Party Data: Gathering first-party data is vital to transforming an anonymous website visitor into an identified user. A good starting point is to track the number of people who sign up for your email list or agree to receive browser notifications.
Registered Community Members: Track the number of community members who have signed up by the week or the month.
Community Engagement Goal: The KPI mentioned above only tells you part of the story about the health of your community. It’s also vital to measure the quality of audience engagement. For example, you may also want to measure how many active members you have (i.e. members who post or comment at least once a month) or how many people attend virtual community events. Highly active community members may be good candidates to serve as ambassadors, community moderators, and other forms of community leadership in return for perks and other rewards.
We didn’t include revenue-related goals in the list because revenue is a lagging indicator of success. That means you typically can’t work on improving revenue directly. Instead, you can only influence it indirectly by getting more leads and increasing your audience.
Community Building Tactics
Review these community-building techniques with your team. For even better results, get an outside perspective on your community, like a friend who has never used your website.
1) Make Your Online Community Easy To Find On Your Website
Modern websites are complex with many moving parts. When building an online community, ensure your site architecture makes it easy to find. For example, there should be an easy-to-read navigation to the community from the homepage. In addition, you may also want to set up specific calls to action for community events like product launches, events with influencer guests, and live chat experiences.
2) Set Up Your Online Community To Welcome New People
Almost everybody has had the experience of walking into a party and struggling to make a connection. In the online context, that sense of awkwardness translates into lost engagement opportunities. The solution is to make a deliberate effort to welcome new people. The art of being welcomed in an online community has several dimensions.
Post Community Welcome Message
Post a welcome message for new people interested in joining your community. This message should give a few tips on how to get started. For example, you may have a discussion board area where new people can introduce themselves. If so, direct them to post! Also, provide clear directions on how to join the community (e.g., click here to set up your community account).
To keep this welcome message relevant and useful, set a reminder to review it monthly or quarterly and update it as needed.
Set Expectations With Community Rules
Many of the most successful and enduring online communities have community rules. Posting these rules is an essential way of making people feel safe online. Beyond preventing unwanted behaviors, community rules can signal your expectations. For example, encourage community members to post reviews or ask questions about products.
Publish Community Badges
Awarding community badges like Community Builder (e.g., engaged with 5 or more other people), Conversation Starter (e.g., starting multiple discussion threads), and Welcome (i.e., a badge to hand out to brand new users) is a proven tactic to reward ongoing
participation in your community. Community badges may be symbolic, like an icon next to a person’s name. Or you may give special recognition and privileges to your top community members (e.g., invite them to be guests in your virtual event).
Community badges are common in enterprise settings (e.g., Microsoft MVP) and more casual settings (e.g., on Discord servers for gamers and other enthusiasts).
3) Offer Premium Content Exclusively For Community Members
Posting high-quality, helpful, and entertaining content is essential to creating an engaging community. The twist here is to reserve some of your best content for registered community members. Use the following tips to position premium content for your community.
Provide Early Access To Premium Content
Reward your community members with advanced access to your content, like seeing a new video or podcast episode a day or two before everyone else. In addition to engaging your community, you will also have the opportunity to get feedback on the content before it is widely circulated.
Community Exclusive Online Events
Exclusivity is a powerful way to sell people the value of your community. Exclusive content might include “fireside chats” where a dozen community members come together with a special guest.
Question And Answer Sessions With Leaders and Employees
Active community members are likely to be among your most passionate customers. Encourage this passion further by giving them access to your leadership. For example, a clothing company might offer a Q&A session about how the company implements sustainable clothing practices.
As your community thrives and grows, informally keeping the community focused may no longer work. Bringing on a community manager or moderators can make a big difference.
4) Appoint A Community Manager
Introducing a community manager is an advanced tactic that makes sense in certain situations. Typically, an online community manager is most valuable when your community has started to achieve significant scale. You’ll know you need a community manager if you start seeing problems like falling engagement or complaints about inappropriate behavior.
The specific duties of an online community manager depend on your goals. The most common job responsibilities include the following:
Moderation. A community manager will review potentially inappropriate content for deletion. In some cases, the community manager may also have to determine if a specific user should be suspended or banned for inappropriate behavior or violating community rules.
Directing Users For Help. When your community members post asking for help or have detailed product questions, the community manager can step in and direct the person on how to access support.
Oversee Your Social Media Communities. Your goal may be to grow your audience on your website. However, your customers may prefer Facebook or other platforms. Therefore, the community manager reviews these other platforms and responds to community members as needed.
Report On Community Trends. Regularly provide written and oral reports to others in the company about current trends. In this way, the community manager helps the rest of the company understand what’s working well with the community.
What if your organization doesn’t have the budget to hire a full-time community manager? There are other options. In the previous section, you learned about community badges to recognize your top community participants. You can take that process a step further by asking your top community members to take on the role of a volunteer moderator.
Community Building Tools
Building an online community also takes the right mix of technologies. It is best to focus your community-building efforts on your website. When users are on your website, it’s easier to track their actions and gather data.
5) Use Live Chat To Build Audience Engagement.
Using Arena live chat is a powerful way to transform your website into an interactive experience. Arena has content moderation features that make it easier to keep discussions focused and enforce your standards. And the best part? It can be embedded into your existing digital properties so your community remains a part of your core brand experience, always. Learn more about Arena Live Chat.
Arena also helps brands and organizations run engaging, brand-safe community experiences with a few key capabilities.
Growing Engagement
Creating an engaging experience starts with good ideas and excellent content. However, online attention spans tend to be short. One way to keep your audience members engaged is to give them easy ways to engage. Arena has polls and Q&A features so you can ask quick questions and gather feedback at every event.
Maintaining A Brand Safe Experience
Inviting dozens, hundreds, or thousands of community members to an online event is exciting! There’s also a greater chance of some community members forgetting your ground rules. Arena’s AI content moderation is equipped to detect and block the most common profanity. Also, you can use manual moderation (e.g., review and approve each post or question) for an added level of brand safety in your most important events.
6) Use A Live Blog To Provide Updates On Breaking News
Breaking news stories offer an exciting way to build community engagement. Journalists and news organizations have used live blog technology for years to cover breaking stories. Whether you’re covering an election, tournament, criminal trial, or conference, a live blog is a speedy way to provide live updates. Learn more about Arena Live Blog.
7) Post Video Content To Lift Community Engagement
Including video in your online community is wise because Generation Z and Millennials love consuming video content. Post video shorts on social media to promote the premium content experiences on your website. Once you have users on your website, package your video experiences as events to drive engagement further.
E-commerce companies, where customers can buy through your website, have an even more significant opportunity: live shopping. Crafting a live shopping experience takes planning, so check out our guide on the best way to make live shopping successful.
How To Take Back Control of Your Community From Social Media
For years, social media has been a powerful force in building online communities. People have forged connections with new friends and developed relationships that couldn’t have happened otherwise. At the same time, social media in the 2020s faces major problems for brands seeking growth.
Over the past few years, social media platforms have faced a growing list of challenges. TikTok has faced potential government bans. Recent changes at Twitter have caused many brands to pause advertising. Facebook and Instagram have struggled with multiple scandals that have undermined their reputation. For brands dependent on social platforms, these problems all represent headwinds to growth.
The good news is that you don’t have to sit back and hope that the big social media platforms improve. You can engage your community directly on your website. Arena Community offers many of the most popular social media features like chat and social reactions.
An online community is an important way to drive leads, engagement, and sales. While powerful, it can be challenging to design a thriving community without examples. To help you broaden your horizons and see all the possibilities around, we’ve reviewed a combined B2C and B2B online communities. These communities have been active for years and show sustained engagement.
Thriving Online Communities: 3 B2C Examples
A growing number of consumer-focused brands have created thriving communities. These efforts usually involve a combination of community building on social media and the brand’s website. There are lessons to model in each case, even if you don’t have the same product. For example, a cosmetics brand might share the audience profile as your clothing brand. Let’s examine how three different consumer companies have created digital communities hubs.
Founded in 2014, Glow Recipe is a skincare beauty brand. The business started by importing Korean beauty products into the United States. After a few years, the business launched its own products. By 2021, CNBC reports that the company has an “estimated $100 million in sales.”
The Glow Recipe approach to forming a digital community involves content and a rewards program.
Glow Recipe’s Content
The skincare company has a significant amount of video content and blog content to attract customers. With over 85,000 subscribers, the Glow Recipe YouTube channel includes tutorials, product videos, and media appearances. The brand’s blog is notable for its themed interview series “Boss Babes,” featuring successful women entrepreneurs and creative professionals.
Loyalty Program
The company’s content helps to attract customers, but what about inspiring repeat business? That’s where the company’s loyalty program, “Glow Rewards,” comes in. For each dollar spent with the brand, customers earn points that can be redeemed for products.
In addition, Glow Recipe’s founders had a fresh idea to bring Korean skincare products to the US market. The Glow Recipe approach is largely focused on the online world exclusively. Let’s see how Lululemon integrates digital and offline experiences to build its community.
Based in Canada, Lululemon is best known for its yoga apparel and related products. The premium brand has attracted a significant following. The company’s focus on community building is a key driver for its success.
Events
Many stores sell athletic and leisure apparel, but few have created event experiences like Lululemon. The company’s Flatiron store in New York alone has hosted over 30 events, including fitness instruction (e.g., kettlebell basics) and offline and virtual community events with guests (e.g., the mindful creative series and book release events).
Customer Stories
Lululemon has a significant selection of inspiring customer stories called the Sweat Collection. This content includes interviews and instructional content on desk stretches and yoga routines from coaches, personal trainers, athletes and other fitness professionals. The company’s stories are brilliantly illustrated with high-quality photos and videos.
Premium Content
Ever thought about starting your own streaming service? Take inspiration from Lululemon Studio. The service includes more than 10,000 workouts. In addition, Lululemon Studio app users get a discount at Studio Partners’ locations. The paid version of the plan is currently priced at $39 per month with a twelve-month commitment
Lululemon’s success with community building shows that brands can build events, group experiences, and more around physical products.
Sony’s Playstation has transformed into a thriving digital community. According to Statista, there are over 100 million monthly active users on the Playstation network as of September 2022, up from 50 million in 2014.
Designing A Shared Experience Into The Product
A key reason for Sony’s success is the shared gaming experience. By building a networked experience, players can find other people to play with worldwide. Social features and experiences are quickly becoming an everyday experience.
The Rise and Fall of The PS4 Community
While successful in many respects, Playstation offers a cautionary tale. In 2021, Sony announced it was shutting down the Playstation 4 communities. Accessible via the Playstation and a mobile app, this community feature gave players an interactive message board. ArsTechnica points out that unmoderated communities became a problem. At the same time, it’s clear that many Playstation enthusiasts are disappointed by the company’s decision.
Learn from Sony’s experience as you build brand communities. Moderation and oversight are important to maintaining the quality of community experiences. The continuing rise of online hate speech and other inappropriate content means that brand communities must remain vigilant.
Successful Online Communities: 3 B2B Examples
Building a community around a B2B audience is often considered more difficult than building a consumer community. It’s typically easy to find consumers who fit a broad profile, like men under 30 who love fitness. With B2B audiences, it can be more difficult to tap into.
Salesforce has grown into one of the most successful business software companies. The business started by tightly focused on software for sales teams. The company has recently developed products for marketing, field service, and other teams. Throughout that growth, the Salesforce focus on community has been a constant.
Salesforce Events
The Salesforce annual conference, known as Dreamforce, has become one of the largest technology conferences in the world. In 2022, the event attracted over 40,000 attendees to San Francisco. To extend the conference experience, Salesforce has made recordings of many sessions available online via Salesforce+.
The company doesn’t put all of its event eggs in the Dreamforce basket either. The business has also run a series of regional events through its Trailhead program, with gatherings planned in Phoenix, Austin, Portland, Minneapolis, and beyond in 2023. This regional approach is a smart way to reach more people unable or unwilling to travel to the Dreamforce event.
Salesforce Ecosystem of Partners and Certifications
Salesforce software is complex, with many different settings and customization options. This is a common challenge facing many business software companies. Salesforce solved this issue by leveraging its community in two ways. Rather than building up an extensive professional services division, the business has focused on developing a network of consultants. To demonstrate their expertise to clients, consultants also have the option to earn Salesforce certifications.
As of late 2022, Salesforce offers certifications for several career roles, including administrators, developers, architects, marketers, and consultants. These programs have become so popular that an industry of authors, trainers, and other experts has emerged to help people earn their certifications.
Salesforce Content Marketing
Salesforce is no stranger to content marketing either. The company currently has podcasts dedicated to marketing trends, trends in the professional world, and IT. Further, the Salesforce YouTube channel has more than 240,000 YouTube subscribers. The company’s videos include interviews, how-to content, and company news.
The Salesforce approach to content includes significant training resources for its users. The company’s Trailhead website offers in-demand videos, networking opportunities, and social media-style experiences.
The Salesforce approach to creating a highly engaged community has paid dividends. In 2022, it is estimated that nearly 100,000 people have earned Salesforce certifications. Whether you look at the company’s events or digital experiences, Salesforce has achieved tremendous engagement with its online community platforms.
Where should you go if you have a passion for analytics and engineering? The DBT Community has used several strategies to build community engagement for their technical users.
DBT Website
The centerpiece of the DBT community, which is organized around several themes: help, show and tell, and in-depth discussions. The B2B community provides immediate value by allowing users to post code and questions.
Slack
In addition to the discussion board on the DBT website, the company also offers community Slack. To keep discussions focused, the Slack has multiple channels like #leading-data-teams, #jobs (to post job postings or job hunt for people knowledgeable in dbt), and #analytics-craft.
Open Source Participation
The technology business also participates in the open source movement. The DBT-labs GitHub page has plugins, scripts, and other documentation. Choosing to offer open-source participation may not fit with every company’s goals. However, it’s wise to look for opportunities to collaborate with technical users to make your product more valuable.
3) Stripe and Indie Hackers
Stripe, a major payment software provider, has taken a different path to online community building. In 2017, Indie Hackers was acquired by Stripe. The Indie Hackers brand includes a very active discussion forum, interview-style podcasts, and rich data. Cortland Allen, the founder of Indie Hackers, explained his decision to sell the company by discussing the burden of running the business:
“However, filling ad inventory every month has come at a cost. It was starting to occupy a large chunk of my time, and I found myself spending less and less time producing great content for the interviews, the podcast, and the forum — the very reasons I created the site in the first place.” – Acquired by Stripe.
The Stripe approach to buying an online community is significant in two ways. First, it shows that organizations don’t always have to create digital communities from scratch. Second, it shows the power of thinking more broadly about your customer base and community. Indie Hackers isn’t focused on payments – the core business of Stripe. That said, Stripe realized that online entrepreneurs need to get paid and can use Stripe to meet that goal.
Create Your Online Community Today
Whether you are selling to consumers or large businesses, an online community is a powerful strategy to generate leads, increase sales and sustain growth. These examples show different ways of using content, events, and other tactics to foster community growth. It’s also important to have the right technology for your online community. Learn more about building your digital community with Arena.
Using a community flywheel for growth is a powerful way to convert more customers and keep your customers longer. The community mindset has the potential to supercharge growth. It takes significant effort, but don’t let that discourage you. You’ll gain a lot of benefits from fostering and growing your online community hub.
What Are The Key Elements to Building a Community Flywheel?
There are five elements to a thriving community flywheel, according to management consulting firm McKinsey & Company.
Understand Your Market
The foundation of a successful community is understanding what your customers value and the communities they currently participate in.
Identify Your Hero Products
Community-building efforts have the best chance to succeed when focused on one or a few products. For companies with a more extensive product portfolio, focus on the products that have won the most traction in terms of loyalty, reviews and engagement.
Tell Interesting Stories About Your Hero Products
The next part of building a community flywheel focuses on social proof. Specifically, reach out to your customers to ask them for feedback. Shining a spotlight on your happiest customers sets the tone for your community.
Fuel The Community With Content
Great products aren’t enough to build thriving digital community hubs. You also need to offer engaging content that answers questions, solves problems, and entertains your audience. This part of the flywheel can also leverage user-generated content (UGC).
Make Buying Easy
The final piece of a successful company is making buying easy. For consumer brands, draw inspiration from Amazon’s one-click ordering. For complex B2B sales, look for sales to simplify the buying process. For example, offering a free trial of your software is powerful because it lets users experience how the product directly.
Community-Led Growth Success Stories
Seeing the value in community-powered growth is easier when you can see tangible results. Several brands have leveraged communities for growth.
Gymshark: Community Growth In Fitness
Founded in 2012, this British fitness company offers workout clothing for athletes and gym enthusiasts. While clothing sales lie at the heart of the business model, the business has also launched a fitness training app. Gymshark has a natural advantage in building a community. Many of its customers regularly pursue fitness goals like weight loss, increased strength, and athletic performance. The company also has a significant and highly active community social media following on Instagram and Facebook.
Gymshark also demonstrates practical ways to work with influencers to create content around your brand. The company started with a simple outreach campaign to Chris Lavado and Lex Fitness, fitness influencers on YouTube. With this approach, the company effectively inserted itself into existing fitness communities.
Notion: Productivity Community Drives Growth
Notion is a digital organizing tool where individuals and teams can track projects, goals and stay organized. Notion’s success at online community building is remarkable because they are entering a crowded space of productivity and organization tools. The sheer variety of the community’s engagement options is a crucial reason for its success.
The Notion approach to the community includes both official and unofficial community options. Die-hard enthusiasts can become Notion-certified consultants – there are dozens as of November 2022. In addition, the company has an ambassador program and campus program where enthusiasts can gather together.
The informal community options are even more significant. For example, the company lists digital and in-person events and gatherings in Sydney, the University of Tampa, Brazil, and Portland, OR. Further, Notion has both “interest-based groups” on topics like Notion for Students, Marketing & Notion, and language-based groups (e.g., Notion in French, Notion in Spanish, etc.).
These online community growth stories illustrate how you can bring your customers into your growth journey.
Ways To Ignite Your Community Flywheel
1) Invest In Case Studies and Customer Stories
Producing high-quality customer stories is a foundational element in fostering community-led growth. These marketing assets are powerful because they bring together your product and the value customers experience using it. Use the following tactics to gather customer stories.
Ask Sales For Happy Customers
Customer studies are most compelling when they focus on people who are delighted with your product. Asking the sales team to build a list of delighted customers is a great way to start the outreach process. Sales and marketing should work closely together to create a list of 10 customers to interview for social proof.
Review Product Analytics For Engaged Customers
For digital companies, there’s another way to find your best customers. Look at your analytics platforms to find your most engaged users. For instance, a news publisher might start by creating a list of all their paying subscribers and then refine that list by looking at people who log in to the website multiple times in the past 30 days.
Give Your Customers Options To Contribute Their Stories
The first two tips will help you create an interview outreach list. Since you are asking customers for their time and attention, it’s essential to be flexible. If possible, aim for a live interview over video so that you can ask clarifying questions and dig deeper into the answers. If the customer isn’t interested in a video call, consider using an email interview or survey instead.
Once you have your case study ready, contact the customer to get their approval before you publish it.
In addition, pay attention to the online chat events you host with Arena Live Chat. If you notice particularly positive and engaged customers in chat, send them a private message to ask if they would be interested in a case study interview.
2) Build Your Content Foundation
Engaging content is critically important to building your audience. There’s no single definition of engaging content, so let’s look at a few approaches to it.
Instructional Content
Content that teaches a person how to solve a problem or use a technology or skill is incredibly popular. It’s easy to assume that people know how to use your product effectively. In the consumer market, beauty brands like Credo Beauty and Estee Lauder on YouTube have created instructional videos and posts. In the enterprise market, Microsoft and Cisco have created significant libraries of technical content designed to help their audience.
Reach out to sales and customer support colleagues for instructional content ideas. Any question that your organization receives multiple times may be a good fit for instructional content.
Satisfy Search Intent
Finding underserved search queries is an important search engine optimization skill. Finding these searches and creating content that satisfies those interests is worth the effort. Start by using your SEO software to identify questions or comparison search-based queries.
Entertainment
Entertaining content isn’t a fit for every brand. If you can find a way to leverage humor in short TikTok videos or other formats, it will help you to gain an engaged audience. Creating successful humor that aligns with your brand is an art. In many cases, it’s best to use comedy and entertainment to spice up other forms of content.
Unique or Exclusive Content
Creating genuinely unique content takes substantial effort. For example, look at Buffer’s State of Remote Work survey. This resource takes months of planning, research, and creation. Over time, Buffer has earned a substantial amount of backlinks and attention. Ask your team what unique data you have and create content around that.
You can also create unique content by curating the best content online. For example, you can use Arena Live Blog to pull in the best social media content around a breaking news story.
3) Borrow Audiences With Influencer Strategies
There are few real shortcuts to building an engaged audience. One of the few proven options is to borrow an audience from somebody else. One of the best options is to reach out to social media influencers for promotion. For example, you can send your product directly to an influencer and ask them to review it.
4) Use Niche Strategies
Some niche community-building strategies work well in certain circumstances.
For example, many B2B brands create certification programs and training courses to help power users show off their expertise. For inspiration, look at companies like Salesforce, Cisco, and Microsoft, which have long offered certifications. Creating a meaningful certification program usually means creating a challenging exam, training content, and ways for credential holders to promote their achievement.
Does your company have an interest in younger people? Creating a college ambassador program might be a great way to focus community. This might start with offering a discounted price to students. You might also create free resources for students as well. Apple has long had a highly successful ambassador program for education. Offering a tangible benefit like a summer job, discount, or something else is an excellent way to spark this type of community.
Make Your Website The Heart of Your Digital Community
Building communities around the web and offline is all worthwhile. However, it’s difficult to deeply understand social media followers because you don’t have any first-party data about them. As you attract more and more people to your website, ensure it is interactive and engaging. Learn more about how Arena can help you build social communities under your control.
The online world has a problem: harmful content and interactions are growing. At its worst, harmful content and communications are used to incite physical violence, but receiving negative comments online can also be extremely damaging to one’s mental health, sense of self-worth, and overall safety.
That is why, when brands build online communities of their own, guaranteeing your online community safety should be a top priority.
The High Cost Of Harmful Online Content
Harmful online content has countless other impacts. As mentioned above, mental health can suffer when people are exposed to negative content and, in the majority of the cases, this harmful content is targeted at women and minorities. For example, platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube all struggle with harmful content despite their significant efforts to counter these trends. Let’s look at a few statistics that illustrate the depth of this challenge.
Social Media Platforms Spend Billions On Content Moderation
In 2021, CNBC reported that Facebook alone is spending billions of dollars on content moderation efforts. Those costs will likely increase because moderators complain about mental health problems and inadequate pay.
The $78 Billion Impact of Fake News
A 2019 report from CHEQ estimated the financial cost of fake news at $78 billion. The report defines fake news as “The deliberate creation and sharing of false and/or manipulated information that is intended to deceive and mislead audiences, either for the purposes of causing harm or for political, personal or financial gain.” Such efforts are hurting democratic governance, eroding trust, and making it more difficult to create positive online communities.
Increasing Government Attention
In the early days, the growth of the Internet was supported by minimal regulation. The impact of harmful online content and increasing concerns about privacy protection are already changing the online landscape. Marketers have already had to adapt their practices in light of Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California’s California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).
New proposals from the British and Canadian governments further demand regulation of harmful online content. So far, these efforts to target and reduce harmful online content are targeted at a small number of large technology companies. Eventually, those expectations may apply to other businesses like yours.
It’s clear that harmful content is a significant problem. While the problem may be at its worst on large, publicly available social media sites, it is still a concern for other businesses. For example, your company may offer virtual events and virtual conferences to engage your audience, and such events are typically intended to be many people. Therefore, you risk harmful or damaging content undermining your online community safety efforts.
That’s the bad news…. The good news is that the situation is far from hopeless. There are specific steps you can take to engage your audience without risking your online community’s safety.
The Two Main Types of Online Communities
Creating a thriving online community means taking risks. Some of those risks – like new content ideas not connecting with your audience – are worth taking. Other risks, such as your event derailed by harmful content, are different.
Fostering a positively engaged audience takes a variety of strategies. The methods you choose will depend on how you run your online community. For simplicity, let’s consider two examples: a public and a closed community. It is nice to note that an organization may have both kinds of communities for different purposes (i.e., a public community for lead generation vs. a closed community for customers).
A public online community is a situation where you throw the doors wide open and anybody can enter your event/community. For example, a media brand offering a live chat experience during an election or a championship sporting event might prefer a public event to maximize attendance numbers and potential advertising revenue. The fully open nature of this type of community means a heightened risk of inappropriate content.
A closed online community is limited in some fashion. This limitation can take a variety of forms. For example, you might charge an admission fee to join your event. Alternatively, your community might be invitation-based (i.e., only your top 100 customers are invited to an exclusive ‘customer council’ community). In contrast to a publicly accessible community, a closed online community will usually have far fewer attendees. The advantages of a closed community include a lower likelihood of disruptive people (i.e., “trolls”) and more common ground between participants.
Growing a Thriving Online Community: Essential Tools for Online Community Safety
Fostering a thriving and safe online community requires multiple strategies. Here are some effective and straightforward strategies to help you achieve it.
Leverage Technology To Filter Inappropriate Content
To eliminate the need for manually blocking and excluding harmful comments and messages, consider using a profanity filter. Basically, you’ll create a directory of forbidden words and expressions, that will be automatically blocked whenever they pop up in your community.
Arena offers a profanity filter that makes it easy to prevent the most common forms of inappropriate communication. Using this capability makes it much easier to create an environment safe for your audience. We’ll explore this capability in further detail below.
Establish Simple Community Guidelines
Aside from straightforward situations like using profanity, there is some disagreement about what counts as appropriate vs. inappropriate in the online world. For example, some communities love to debate and be passionate about sharing their opinions – which can be either wonderful or hurtful! Another approach is to create and use simple rules and ask all community participants to follow them.
For example, your online community might take inspiration from Reddit communities that often use rules such as: don’t be a jerk, promote self-promotion, keep discussions on topic, and moderators reserve the right to intervene.
Add Barriers To Entry For Your Community
Adding barriers to entry, such as requiring a user to register for an account or pay an admission fee, are an effective way to discourage disruptive behavior. Alternatively, your barrier to entry might be based on limited awareness – like only inviting people on your email list to join the event.
Optional: Role Play With Your Event Staff
For organizations planning to host events with a large number of attendees or a large number of events, additional training through role play is helpful. In this case, ask two to three employees to serve as event staff and ask 5-10 employees to take the role of participants. Secretly ask a few of the employee-participant to act disruptive and notice how this situation is handled.
Training your employees and encouraging positive behavior in your audience are some of the most powerful ways to maintain a safe community. Unfortunately, these strategies take time to develop. They are worth developing, but it is also vital to offer your community a certain baseline level of safety. That’s where Arena’s content moderation capabilities make a big difference.
Five Ways To Build A Safe Online Community with Arena
By using Arena Live Chat, you have several options to build a safe community. Each organization will use these options differ depending on its values and community needs. For the best results, invite your moderation team to become familiar with these tools.
1) Use The Profanity Filter
Reducing profanity is a key quick win to creating a safer online community. There is a built-in profanity list of commonly banned words. You can review, edit and update this list based on your needs. Once the filter detects a banned word, you can choose whether to replace the word with a series of asterisks (***) or block the user. Blocking users who use profanity may be wise in situations where the live chat includes children or controversial topics.
2) Review Reported Users
Arena Live Chat lets chat users report another user for inappropriate activities (e.g. inappropriate direct messages etc). During the live chat, review the reported users every few minutes and do a quick investigation. If the infraction is minor, you may decide to send a warning message to the user and delete their message. For more serious violations, see the next option.
3) Ban User and Delete Message
In some environments – especially public live chats with a large number of users – you may encounter highly inappropriate content (e.g. sexist, racist, or other violations of your policies). If these violations are ignored, it can embolden disruptive users. That’s why it is helpful to use the “Ban user and delete message” capability. Arena saves banned users in the organization’s dashboard so there’s less chance of suffering disruption in the future.
4) Delete Message
This moderation feature is a good choice for borderline inappropriate content. For example, you might choose to delete a message (rather than banning the user) if some users engage in self-promotion assuming your guidelines discourage that activity. Likewise, the delete message capability might also be useful when you see a rise in off-topic discussions.
What if you end up deleting a significant number of messages? Large live chat sessions that are fully open to the public tend to face this risk. Reinforcing your code of conduct expectations for the event can help. If problems persist, you may wish to consider using the pre-moderation feature to further control the flow of discussion.
5) Use The Pre-Moderation Feature To Maximize Brand Safety
Traditionally, a live chat experience emphasizes live interaction between users. Usually, it is best to encourage a free flow of conversation. Yet there are some situations where it’s appropriate to intervene more heavily by using pre-moderation. In essence, pre-moderation means that each message has to be manually approved by moderators before it shows up in the live chat window.
There are pros and cons to using pre-moderation in your live chat. The advantages are there you can filter out almost all inappropriate chat content. There are downsides though – moderator review of each message slows down the pace of the conversation significantly. As a result, your audience may become disengaged if they are kept waiting too long. The second disadvantage is that pre-moderation requires more effort from your team.
Conclusion
Maintaining a safer online community requires ongoing effort and the right tools. With Arena’s advanced moderation and engagement features, you can create a secure and welcoming environment for all users. Find out more about Arena’s social communities solution.
Your growing engagement on Arena is easier when you build communities. Without communities, your marketing and content are more likely to fall flat. You can generate leads and maintain high engagement. Without your community, your users and customers may drift to social media platforms. Read on and learn how to break free from social media and build your own community with Arena.
Escape The Social Media Walled Garden With Arena
When you have a large and thriving community of users, subscribers, or customers, staying organized can get more complicated, especially when you implement marketing segmentation. For example, you probably want to offer a different community experience to your paying customers vs. potential customers. Creating multiple communities in your Arena account is one of the best ways to support your segmentation objectives.
There’s another reason to set up your social community with Arena. You need detailed customer data to fuel your marketing segmentation. You lose insights if your users leave your website to interact with each other on social media. Traditional social media platforms are also full of distractions – like notifications and ads. As a result, your audience may lose interest in your content. When you lose engagement, gaining conversions, sales, and advertising revenue become far more challenging.
Can You Make The World A Better Place With Arena?
Beyond supporting your marketing efforts, there are other reasons why establishing your community with Arena is worthwhile. A growing body of research shows that traditional social media platforms are harmful to users. For example, the Guardian reported that Instagram was harmful to mental health. Similar criticisms have pointed at other popular services like TikTok and Facebook. Fortunately, there are ways to connect online while minimizing these harmful effects.
The solution starts with building your online community. Your community is likely to be much smaller than TikTok, Instagram, or Facebook, and that is a critical advantage. Maintaining standards becomes very difficult and expensive when an online platform has hundreds of millions of users. On the other hand, cultivating a digital community with a few hundred or thousands of participants who share common goals is a different matter entirely. For example, you can use Arena to engage your top 500 customers in an exclusive community. That means setting community standards and fostering positive engagement is far easier. When your organization becomes known for offering a positive, well-managed community, it will become far easier to grow an engaged audience.
Unified Communities vs. Separate Communities: Which Is Right For You?
Your first decision is to decide what kind of community experience you want to offer through Arena. You have two options: Separate vs. Unified. Let’s take a look at how these different options work.
Unified Communities
Using unified communities is a good choice if your organization focuses on a single target market or segment. In addition, unified communities are well suited to smaller organizations. If you have a single person tasked with engaging your community, focus on unified communities.
Separate Communities
In contrast, separate communities are a better fit for larger companies. For example, a publisher or media company might have multiple segments of subscribers – people interested in sports, those interested in business news, and those concerned with politics. When you have multiple segments with little in common, there’s value in creating separate communities.
Now that you know the difference between these ways of using communities, it’s time to set up your community in Arena.
Creating Communities Step By Step
The following over-the-shoulder guide explains exactly how to create your community in Arena.
1) Open your Arena Account
Adding more communities to your Arena account is simple.
Log into your account and click on your logo in the top left corner of the page.
When the menu appears, click the “Sites & Organizations Settings” button.
Click the Add New Button
2) Add New Organization
Your next step is to create a new organization. For example, let’s say you will run a virtual conference later this year. You might want to create a new organization to keep that event organized.
If you have been following along from Step 1, you will see the “Sites and Organizations” screen (shown below). Click the purple “New Organization” button on the right-hand side of the page.
3) Add A Site
Within your organization in Arena, you can set up multiple sites. To explain why this is valuable, let’s continue with the example of running a conference. Let’s say you have a company conference, and several people will attend the event, such as VIP customers, the sales team, and partners. Each of these groups has its own needs, so creating a separate site for each group can be valuable.
Of course, you can also simply create a single site if that is a better fit for you. Adding additional sites to your account may require additional fees. Reach out to your Arena rep if you have any questions.
To create a new site, fill in the required information:
Website Name
URL
Organization
Subscription Plan
Connect Social Media Site (optional but recommended)
4) Customize Your New Site
By default, your new site will have placeholder information. We recommend updating your site with a custom profile photo to inspire trust in your audience. You can use your logo or the photo of a well-known person in your organization if you prefer.
Updating your site’s profile photo is simple:
Click on “Site Settings”
Click on the circle above “Website Name”
Choose the photo you want to use and then click Update.
See the following screenshot:
At this point, your community and site are set up. In other words, your blank canvas is in position. It’s now time to plan your engagement strategy. For example, you might decide to plan a virtual conference. In that case, see our guide to grow engagement with virtual communities.
How To End Your Dependence on Social Media
Imagine if you could create your version of Facebook or Instagram but focused on your community’s needs. That’s possible with Arena. Learn more about how you can create a social community for your users.
Building a virtual community is a powerful way to have a positive impact. Online communities have tremendous flexibility in terms of time and participation. Yet many organizations miss opportunities to enrich their live events with an online community platform.
What Is A Virtual Community?
There are various ways to define a virtual community. Some researchers focus on questions of social identity, but our definition is more straightforward: a virtual community is a group of people who communicate digitally around a shared interest.
For example, there is a thriving virtual community in many parts of the technology industry. If you want to ask questions and get advice about Microsoft, Salesforce, and other platforms, there is an online community for those interests. Many virtual communities are also dedicated to sports, movies, TV shows and hobbies.
For publishers and companies, starting or growing a virtual community or even a series of online communities has significant attractions.
The Pros and Cons of A Virtual Community
Starting and growing a virtual community has multiple benefits for your community members and the event organizer. Here are some of the essential benefits to keep in mind.
Pros of Having a Virtual Community
Establishing a virtual community for your audience offers significant benefits, including making it easy to find warm leads.
Get More Leads
Thriving online communities related to your company are a ready source of potential leads. With the right approach, your community may act as a sounding board for new product ideas and as early adopters. While that is an exciting benefit, your virtual community has to offer your community members appealing benefits, or you will lose people over time.
Increase Engagement
For some organizations, like online media companies, growing audience engagement is their top goal. For publishers seeking to maintain or grow their paid subscriber base, offering a virtual community goes a long way toward achieving those goals. Online community growth becomes more manageable when your audience responds to new posts, announcements, and more. A more engaged audience is more likely to purchase and engage with advertising.
Differentiate Your Brand
You’ve probably spent considerable time and effort creating a distinct and memorable brand. Yet few people outside the company likely understand your brand promise as profoundly as you might hope. Most potential customers are thinking about their families, needs, and problems – your brand probably doesn’t come to mind too often.
That’s where offering a compelling virtual community makes a positive impact. When people associate your brand with a community of friends who share their interests, your brand will become more appealing. Over time, a strong community can translate into significant brand loyalty and a greater willingness to accept premium prices.
Improve Mental Health
Seeing mental health on this list might surprise you because it may not be one of your goals. However, giving people access to a solid online community where they can connect with others who share their interests matters. Developing a positive and inclusive virtual community may help people reduce anxiety and the impact of other problems like loneliness.
That said, a thriving online community hub is not the same thing as treatment. But every bit of positive human connection your community offers can help people get through a rough time.
Cons of Having an Online Community
While there is much to be said about running a virtual community, there are some disadvantages to keep in mind.
Virtual Community Is A Long-Term Strategy
Developing a thriving virtual community will yield results, but these results often take years to yield fruit. In that sense, a running virtual community tends to produce better results when running alongside other marketing strategies. That said, there is a shortcut to building a virtual community faster, which we will reveal in the next section.
A Virtual Community Requires Leadership and Content
Most thriving online communities revolve around leaders and content. For many small businesses, the founder may act as the leader, content creator, and community facilitator. In a larger organization, these roles can be shared among several people. In the long term, it is sometimes possible to recruit members of your community as well.
In the beginning, expect to invest considerable sweat equity in your virtual community. A successful content strategy is vital to making the community attractive. Without an appealing content strategy, it will be hard to see the value of your community. When the community is small, take the time to interact with each new member who signs up.
A Virtual Community Requires The Right Technology
Setting up the technology needed to launch a digital community may feel daunting. At a minimum, a virtual community needs message board capabilities so that people can post messages and receive a community response. While useful, a message board is probably not enough to make your virtual community appealing. Instead, take inspiration from thriving online communities (e.g., the gaming community), which include video chat, live chat, and virtual events.
One Shortcut To Jump Start Your Virtual Community
Developing a thriving virtual community takes time, but there is one way to accelerate the process: events. Specifically, running a virtual or hybrid event can help ignite your community’s growth. Unlike a simple online message board, events are different.
In contrast to an always-available online group, an event is a limited and scarce experience. Since the event occurs at a specific time and place, there is a real sense of scarcity. That scarcity helps to make the event more valuable. Furthermore, a virtual event that uses a proven process, like our virtual event checklist, is well organized and tends to offer relevant content to participants.
How To Bridge The Gap Between Virtual And Real Communities
The value of connecting a virtual community and a traditional community is all about finding the best of both worlds. Let’s look at a few examples in both the corporate and educational settings that illustrate the power of these events.
Specifically, adding live chat to your online events makes a tremendous difference in bringing your community together. With live chat, you can get feedback from your peers, answer questions and build connections.
Bringing Together In Persona And Virtual Communities For Companies
The booming popularity of remote and hybrid work arrangements has delivered considerable benefits. Flexible schedules and greater work-life balance are precious. Yet the lack of real-time interaction over coffee or lunch can make it more difficult to form strong relationships. The critical technology to enable these virtual communities is implementing a live chat, because it makes it easy and simple to share comments, questions and more.
To enrich your community, start with these virtual community and virtual event ideas.
Annual Company Conference
Many companies run annual conferences to connect with their customers, recognize top performers and announce important events. Adding a virtual community to this type of corporate event helps in several ways. First, you can accommodate more participants, including those who might be unable to travel to the event in person. Second, you can extend the conference experience before and after the official conference date. For example, you might launch “teaser videos” about the conference keynote speakers in advance to spark greater excitement.
Sales Kick Off
Supporting the company sales team is a critical leadership responsibility. Success in sales requires perseverance in the face of pressure, disappointment, and stress. Offering encouragement, relevant training, and other resources in a sales kick-off event can help the sales team to thrive.
Enriching your sales kick-off event with a virtual community helps deepen the event’s value. For example, you might invite a sales expert like Jeb Blount about one of his books, “Fanatical Prospecting” or “Selling The Price Increase.” To support your team in applying the lessons of the book covered in the keynote, set up a virtual community where people can come together to share their wins, questions, and other comments weekly.
Recruitment Events
Attracting high-quality graduates and employees to work for your organization is becoming more difficult in many countries. As of July 2022, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that US unemployment has fallen to 3.5%. In other words, many workers have choices. New methods like recruitment strategies are needed for employers seeking to compete for the best talent.
Enhancing recruitment with a virtual community starts with taking a long-term view of talent. Instead of engaging students when they are a few months away from graduation, start earlier. This might take the form of establishing a virtual community for your summer internship program. Give your current and prospective employees a chance to interact with your current staff, ask questions and find out why they should consider working with you.
By the way, you don’t have to restrict yourself to cultivating graduates and younger professionals only. For inspiration, look at the virtual communities that the world’s leading consulting firms have long cultivated. PwC, a global leader in accounting and consulting, runs a US alumni program that offers on-demand learning to help alumni succeed, networking opportunities, and career opportunities for former employees.
Fostering Higher Education Using Virtual Communities
For colleges and universities, virtual communities can make an even greater impact. The following introduces a few opportunities. For a comprehensive guide to virtual event ideas in higher education, see our post: 60 Awesome University Virtual Events Ideas. Organizing a virtual event series is a powerful way to grow your virtual community.
Just make sure that you include live chat so that your students, alumni and other community members can easily participate – not everybody likes to appear on video after all.
College Orientation
Many colleges and universities have reported lower enrollment numbers over the past few years. The pandemic, high costs and the growth of alternative online learning opportunities have some questioning the value of traditional post-secondary education.
Offering a robust college orientation experience is one way that campus leaders reach out to their students. In addition to traditional orientation activities and parties, look for ways to build a virtual community that starts before students arrive on campus.
The assigned reading of new books includes memoirs, novels, essays and other works. For example, the University of Delaware assigned “While the Earth Sleeps We Travel: Stories, Poetry, and Art from Young Refugees Around the World” by Ahmed M. Badr. Meanwhile, Siena College has assigned the Pulitzer Prize winning novel “The Nickel Boys” to new students. Giving students a book to read before they arrive on campus gives them a tangible connection to campus long before they show up in person.
These reading recommendations help to give students common ground with their peers and to start their learning journey. Why not invite students to join a virtual community where they can discuss the book and raise other questions before they arrive on campus?
College Career Fair
After paying thousands of dollars in fees, many students are hungry to discover their career opportunities. Traditional career fair events offer invaluable networking opportunities. These events are not accessible to all students, especially those with significant family or work commitments. Asking a student to give up a paying shift to attend an event may not be realistic in some cases.
Offering a virtual community to support college career events makes a big difference. For instance, you can invite students to join sub-groups focused on exploring certain professions like accounting, nursing, nonprofits, or engineering. By giving students more time and space to come up with questions and seek support, students are more likely to discover various career paths.
Alumni Organization
Once students leave campus, that doesn’t mean they have left the college community. Many colleges have long-established alumni associations that organize events, networking databases, and other resources. Keeping alumni engaged with valuable insights and opportunities means your alumni are more likely to be open to making donations and volunteering. Just think about the opposite case – what if you only heard from your college alumni association when they had a donation campaign? It might feel like a one-way relationship, and such relationships tend not to last long.
What if you’re not sure what to offer your alumni? Take inspiration from the McMaster University Alumni Association. In 2020, they solicited feedback from their alumni and received dozens of suggestions, including requests for online events. Many of these suggestions could be integrated into a virtual community format. For instance, one alumnus requested computer skill training for older people curious about digital technology.
Get Started Building Your Virtual Community
Starting a virtual community is an exciting journey, but it’s not one you should take alone. Find out about Arena’s Social & Communities page for more information on how we can help you grow faster.
