1:PURPOSE  >>  Articulate Your Vision

Articulate Your Vision

You know your purpose, you're clear on your goals, and you understand your audience. Now you need to articulate a vision that brings your purpose to life. This vision will be realized through words, images, features, policies, and even the social dynamics that take place within your community.

It's especially important to be clear about your vision if you're trying to attract a particular audience. The makers of L'Eggs pantyhose discovered the importance of this principle in 1995, when they launched an ambitious, expensive Web site for the purpose of fostering brand loyalty and learning more about their market. To develop closer relationships with their customers, they included a discussion area called "The L'Eggs Community." Much to their surprise, the discussions quickly became dominated by men who enjoyed wearing pantyhose and were thrilled to discover an anonymous setting where they could trade tips and not feel so alone in their somewhat unusual habit. The company that financed the Web site, however, was less than enchanted with this turn of events. The women they were trying to attract were put off, and shied away from participating in the discussions.

Since then, the L'Eggs company has learned to market more explicitly to its target demographic. But the point remains: unless you communicate your purpose clearly, people will use your Web community in ways that you never intended.
 

Craft Your Mission Statement

Your mission statement is the most direct expression of your community vision. It spells out what type of community you're building, why you're building it, and who you're building it for. Not only will developing a mission statement help you crystallize your thinking and focus your efforts, it will also make it easier for you to include other people in the project as your community grows.

The length and formality of your mission statement depends on the requirements of your project and the standards of your organization. If you're starting a mailing list for a few friends, it will probably be short and informal. If, on the other hand, you're launching a multimillion-dollar initiative for a large corporation, you'll almost certainly need to develop a more in-depth document that will undergo an extensive review process.
 

Inside and Outside

You want to create two different yet related versions of your mission statement, one for internal consumption and one for the outside world. Your internal mission statement will guide the efforts of the community-building team. Creating and running a Web community often involves people with a variety of skills, including marketing, production, programming, design, and management. A clear and concise internal mission statement keeps everyone focused and gives the team a basis for making decisions about design, technology, and policy.

Your external mission statement also articulates your vision, but in a way that's intended for public viewing. Think of it as one of the first things that a potential community member might read; it should clearly communicate what the community is all about and who the intended audience is. A visitor should come away with a strong sense of the site's purpose and whether he or she would feel at home there.

In practice, your internal and external mission statements may not be called that. Your internal mission statement could be a portion of your design spec, and your external mission statement might be distributed among several documents. For instance, on the person-to-person auction site eBay, the "About eBay" page and the "Community Values" page together form a kind of external mission statement.

eBay also provides a good example of the value of having a mission statement. The site was founded on the principles of trust, honesty, and empowering the individual, as summarized in eBay's Community Values statement (http://pages.ebay.com/help/community/values.html). As eBay grew, well-established companies began to approach them, wanting prominent placement on the site in return for payment. The decision-makers at eBay rejected these requests, because their mission was to serve individual buyers and sellers, rather than to becoming an online mall.

But then Rosie O'Donnell approached eBay about creating a program to auction items from her television show, and donate the proceeds to charity. Rosie was already an avid eBay user, and she wanted a permanent link to her charity auctions on eBay's home page. This request caused a heated debate within the company, because it violated the principle of a "level playing field" that eBay had been founded on. After much corporate soul-searching, eBay decided to partner with Rosie, and promote her program-partly for financial reasons, of course, but also because Rosie O'Donnell is an individual promoting a worthy cause, rather than a faceless corporation striving to improve their bottom line, and eBay felt thatRosie's Charity Auctions were consistent with their basic mission and values.

Tag, You're It

While you're creating your mission statement, give some thought to coming up with a tagline, a sort of quick summary of what your community is all about. A good tagline can really help you attract your intended audience. Here are taglines a variety of Web communities have used:
  • "Are You With Us" -Ultima Online   
  • "Take Your Place in History" -AncientSites   
  • "Your Personal Trading Community" -eBay   
  • "The Smart Way to Get Things Done" -Women.com   
  • "A Home For Moms in Cyberspace" -Moms Online   
  • "Home Pages and Beyond" -GeoCities   
  • "The Black Network" -NetNoir   
  • "The Web for Grownups" -Third Age   
  • "To educate, amuse and enrich" -The Motley Fool   
  • "Fast, free online gaming" -Heat.Net   
  • "Come for the games, stay for the party" -Mplayer   
  • "Real Solutions for Women " -iVillage   
  • "News for Nerds: Stuff that Matters " -Slashdot   
As you can imagine, if the L' Eggs community had used a tagline like iVillage's "Real Solutions for Women," their site would have evolved in a very different way.

If your community is evolving in ways that you hadn't foreseen, you may want to change your tagline to reflect your changing focus. For example, iVillage used to be "Your home on the Web...for the stuff that really matters," and AncientSites's old tagline was "Where History Comes Alive." But you'll want to think very carefully before changing your tagline, because it reflects your community values (which should remain relatively stable throughout the life of your community). If your tagline is working, stick with it, especially if you're running a highly targeted community. For example, Slashdot, aimed at Open Source enthusiasts, has had the same tagline for years.

Develop Your Backstory

The term backstory comes from Hollywood; it refers to the part of a movie's story that happened before the first frame. In Star Wars, the backstory scrolls up the screen at the beginning ("Long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away...") and sets the scene for the rest of the movie.

A strong, mythic backstory can help a culture thrive. For example, the story of the Founding Fathers is the creation myth of the USA; it perfectly captures the values of free speech and freedom from tyranny that are so highly valued in American culture. Telling your creation myth can be a great community-building technique, as long as the characters, conflicts, and motivations in the story express your community's purpose and values accurately.

Given the community-building power of a good backstory, make sure there's something to tell. Introduce the community founder(s), communicate their motivation and struggles, and impart a sense of the community's core values. If you read the Moms Online backstory, you learn about the struggles of a new mom and the difficulties of a small company, running on a shoestring budget and held aloft by the efforts of passionate volunteers.

Telling Tales

A backstory gets spread through both written and oral traditions. Written tradition-that is, composed texts-are great for consistency and wide propagation. For example, the Moms Online backstory offers newcomers an easy and engaging starting point for learning about the community. If someone wants to tell the story to friends or link to it from another site, it's easy to do.

Oral tradition complements the written tradition and actively builds social bonds within a community. When an old-timer tells a story to a newcomer, their roles are reinforced, and the newcomer is indoctrinated into the shared knowledge of the culture. Those who were once newcomers will eventually begin to tell this story to the next wave of newcomers, and in this way help your community develop a shared sense of history, depth and soul.

The presence of symbols is a good way to create an opportunity for storytelling. When I first logged on and explored Britannia (the mythical world of Ultima Online), I ran across a structure marked by several large, mysterious symbols. I could have gone back to the Web site, clicked over to the Player's Guide, and searched for the backstory; but happily, a passerby volunteered to tell me the Ultima story. In a simple Web-based community interface, symbols that relate to the community backstory could be incorporated into the background art of the site.
 

Communicate your Brand Personality

Visitors will form an initial impression of your community within the first few clicks, and you want this impression to be accurate, compelling, and memorable. Part of the way you make sure of that is with words-your tagline, your mission statement, and your backstory. But purpose is also communicated through your "brand personality," which includes how your community looks, how it's laid out, what activities, tools and content are featured, and how it's staffed and managed.

Your mission statement can serve as a useful jumping-off point for developing your brand personality. Don't be afraid to create a vivid visual statement: the stronger your message, the more clearly your purpose will come across and the more likely it is that you'll attract your intended audience. For example, Parent Soup has a distinctive look that immediately tells parents that this is a comfortable place to come for advice, support, and conversation.

Unlike print or television, the brand personality of a Web community is dynamic and interactive. Defining the look of the site is the first step, but the content generated by members and the hosting style of the community leaders will also contribute to your community's brand personality. We'll be addressing these issues extensively in later chapters-for now, just remember that developing a brand personality for a Web community involves personal interactions as well as static images and content.
 

Give Them Somewhere to Go

Now that you've made sure that you and your visitors know what your site is about, the next step is to give the visitors somewhere comfortable to hang out. The next chapter explains how you can create such places in your community.