`1:PURPOSE >> Building a Successful Community`

Building a Successful Community

What is a successful community? Is it a big, bustling city filled with citizens of all ages and backgrounds doing all sorts of interesting things? A collection of rabid fans gazing at the object of their admiration? A gathering of true believers holding hands and lifting their voices in song? A group of women seated in a circle, speaking in hushed, sympathetic tones? Subscribers to an email list, sitting alone staring at words on a computer screen?

Any of these communities could be called successful or not, depending on how the people who create, manage, and participate in that group define success. A book club, support group, or mailing list might only have a dozen members, yet be considered a great success by everyone involved because it does everything they need and expect it to. A large church or Web portal, on the other hand, might attract thousands of members and develop a robust social scene but be forced to shut down for not meeting the financial goals of the sponsors.

To attract members and keep them coming back, your community must serve a clear purpose in their lives. And to get the support and resources to keep it running, your community must deliver a satisfactory return on the investment of those who fund and maintain it.

Define Your Purpose

Communities arise for different reasons. Some form around a vision or cause, such as Earth First, Jews for Jesus, or the anti-war movement. Others form around a charismatic figure such as Elvis, L. Ron Hubbard, or Jesus. Other communities arise organically, such as the folks who gather on Saturday nights at the local pub for a game of darts.

Regardless of how your community gets started, everyone involved will find it more satisfying if its purpose is clear. Ask yourself these questions:

What type of community am I building?
Why am I building it?
Who am I building it for?

Because successful communities must keep pace with the changing needs of their members and owners, you'll need to ask these questions periodically as your community grows and matures. For example, a group of professional women might start getting together monthly for networking and support and evolve into a national organization that focuses on career counseling and continuing education. Or a scientist might create a mailing list to help plan a conference and then see it evolve into a way for far-flung colleagues to stay in touch, gossip about each other, and discuss the latest findings in their field.

Find a Need and Fill It

Your community's purpose will evolve, but you need to start somewhere. Plant a stake in the ground and define your initial purpose as clearly as you can. To kick-start your thinking, see if you can identify an ongoing, unmet need that your members have in common and which your community is uniquely suited to address. Participating in this kind of project takes time and effort, and unless you fulfill a real need, your members won't be motivated to keep coming back. As you ponder this, you may find it useful to refer to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (at right), which can help you focus on the basics, while keeping up with the evolving needs of your members.

The founder of GeoCities, for example, chose to address the need of inexperienced Net users who wanted to create their own Web pages. Back in 1995, David Bohnett noticed that a growing number of Netizens lacked the technical skills to create a Web page, and provided the tools and infrastructure necessary to offer free home pages in a supportive environment. Geocities soon became one of the largest and fastest-growing communities on the Web. Now owned by Yahoo, GeoCities continues to focus on making page building easy and accessible to everyone.

This story illustrates an important point: people will flock to a place that delivers something they need and can't find elsewhere. This basic truth might seem obvious, but the Internet is littered with ghost towns that fell prey to over-hyped expectations, cutting-edge technologies, and an overall lack of purpose.

The Needs of Your Members

People rely on communities in all areas of their lives (see chart). As you define your community's purpose, think about which areas of your members' lives it will serve. Is it primarily about work and career, like a professional organization? Or is it for recreation and play, like a weekly card game? Does your community touch on family and civic issues, like the PTA? Are spiritual, political and social concerns part of the community's purpose?

Asking yourself these questions will help you understand the core value your community provides. And while you can't control what your members do, you can reward actions that advance your purpose. In a religious community, for example, the leader might publicly praise a member of the congregation for starting a task force to feed the homeless. By contrast, the leaders of an online investing club might post a quarterly top-10 list of the members whose portfolios rose most in value-something that would seem out-of-place on a church message board.

You can further clarify your purpose by categorizing your community according to what the members have in common. In their book Net Gain, John Hagel III and Arthur G. Armstrong defined three types of communities, and I've added a fourth:

Geographic, defined by a physical location like a city or region
Demographic, defined by age, gender, race, or nationality
Topical, defined by shared interest, like a fan club, hobby group, or professional organization
Activity-based, defined by a shared activity, like shopping, investing, playing games, or making music.

If you look around the Web, you'll find communities whose basic purpose maps to each of these categories (and often encompasses several). At Talk City, a group of local and expatriate Filipinos gets together each week to speak Tagalog (their native tongue), argue about politics, and swap recipes. Over at NetNoir, black singles join Club NetNoir to find that someone special. On eBay, doll collectors meet every Monday evening to discuss doll repair with a renowned expert. In Ultima Online, fantasy game players join medieval guilds, engage in spirited battles, and run their own frontier towns.

Change Happens

You may feel sure of what you're community's about, but you need to be prepared for it to evolve over time, too. Sometimes communities change categories as they find their core audience. For example, NetNoir started out calling itself "The Soul of Cyberspace," a topical community for anyone interested in worldwide African culture. As its membership grew, the community managers discovered that most of their active members were people of African descent. NetNoir gradually evolved into "The Black Network," aimed squarely at the worldwide black community, and developed a more focused business model.

iVillage went through a similar evolution after it launched Parent Soup, a support community for parents. Not surprisingly, iVillage found that most of their members were women, and that advertisers and sponsors were used to marketing to a narrower demographic (specifically, women between the ages of 25 and 45) than to parents in general. So iVillage renamed itself "The Woman's Network," and developed topical "channels" aimed at women that include parenting, health, relationships, and money.

No matter how you categorize your overall community, one thing that's certain to happen as it grows is that subcommunities will emerge that fall into different categories. The larger and more general your community, the more likely it is that such subgroups will arise. At iVillage, for example, the topical channels function as subcommunities-and smaller subcommunities crop up within each channel. Some are organized around shared activities, such as book clubs or investing groups; others are based on stages of life, such as pregnancy groups, play groups, and retirement planning; still others are based on shared goals such as losing weight, quitting smoking, or creating a family.

Similarly, some of the 41 Geocities "neighborhoods" (the basic metaphor by which the Geocities community is organized-see www.geocities.com/neighborhoods) are based on a topic or activity like cars, games, politics, or investing; others on a geographical location like Tokyo or Paris; and still others on a demographic group such as kids or women.

Clarify Your Goals

Now that you have a good idea of why you're building a community, and what kind of community it should be, it's time to focus on what specific benefits you and your members will get out of it. A successful community must attract and keep enough members to make it worthwhile. It must also deliver a satisfactory return on investment to whoever is funding and/or maintaining it. If either one of these standards is not met, the community will eventually fail. As a community builder, therefore, you have to pay attention to both the needs of the members and the goals of the owners.

The phrase "return on investment" can obviously mean a financial investment and return, but the principle also applies to a mailing list being run out of a private passion. In general, the form of the investment indicates the kind of return expected. For example, someone running a not-for-profit Web message board is investing time and good will and wants appreciation in return. It's important to be clear about what's being invested, and what is the expected return.

Needs and Goals: A Three-Step Planning Exercise

The following exercise will help you identify the standards of success for your community and come up with a list of goals that will help you focus your efforts, coordinate your team, and prioritize your features. You can use the exercise before launching a new community, when preparing to make changes to an existing community, or simply to update your thinking and refine your goals.

STEP 1: MEMBERS' NEEDS

Understand your members. Set aside all thoughts of business models, technology, and brand identity, and think about your (current and potential) members. Who are they? Are they homogeneous or varied? Are there distinct subgroups? What are their interests, habits, and affiliations? What other communities do they belong to? Don't worry if you can't answer these questions completely; you can collect more information later (see "Understanding Your Audience") and refine your thinking. What's important at this stage is to start seeing your community through the eyes of your members.
Make a list of their needs. Next, consider members' needs and desires. Why are they coming to your community? Are they searching for something specific? What can your community do for them? This is a brainstorming phase, so don't censor your thoughts; the purpose is to write down everything you can think of that your members might look for and possibly find in your community.
Prioritize your list. Now it's time to sort your list. Which of the items on your list are most central in your members' lives? Which would they value most highly? During this process, consider what you can actually deliver to your members: do you have access to unique resources? Can you provide them with something that's not offered elsewhere? Try to select the top five or six needs that your community can meet.

STEP 2: OWNERS' GOALS

Understand your owners. Now, turn your attention to the people who will be funding and/or running your community (which, of course, might be you). Who are they? Are they developing this community as a business venture? A labor of love? A PR stunt? A research experiment? Understanding the motivations of your funding source will help you get the support and resources you need to succeed.
Make a list of their goals. Next, think about what your community's owners are hoping to get out it. What kinds of results will they be expecting, and how soon? How will success be measured? If you don't know the answers to these questions, ask people. Bear in mind that you may not get complete answers, and the motivation and measurements of success may very well change over time.
Prioritize your list. As before, it's now time to sort through your list, select the top five or six goals, and prioritize them from the owners' point of view. Which are most highly valued? Which are fundamental to success? Do some goals depend on other? Are some critical for the continued support of the community? Be prepared to update this list periodically, as your community goals come into sharper focus. What's most important at this stage is to raise these issues with whoever is funding the community.

STEP 3: CREATE A "MASTER LIST" OF YOUR COMMUNITY GOALS

Compare and consolidate the two lists. Now that you've identified what's most important to both your members and owners, it's time to combine them into a master list of community goals. Do any issues appear on both lists? If so, consolidate them into a single goal. Are there contradictions? If so, take it as a signal to reconsider your plan and make some adjustments in either your audience profile or your business model.
Create and distribute the master list. Finally, distribute the list of community goals to everyone on the team and ask for feedback. You'll continue to refine this list as you learn more about who your members are and what value your community provides to them. You'll also want to adjust this list whenever your business model or community ownership changes (a common occurrence in the Web community biz).

Case Study: The Planning Exercise in Action

Let's go behind the scenes at a successful online gaming company, Origin Systems, and see how they used this exercise to kick-start a major redesign effort.

Origin's Web site, www.owo.com, had been designed to support their popular multiplayer fantasy game, Ultima Online. While that site had been appropriate for marketing and launching the game, Origin felt that a more community-focused site would better serve their players. So they put together a community design team (which consisted of myself as an outside consultant, and several in-house staff members), to see what it would take to set up such a community.

Step 1: Their Members' Needs

Because the community's purpose was to both support and promote an existing product, it had to offer something to both current and potential subscribers. Some, but not all, of the latter group might already have played UO.

From both email and surveys, Origin knew that better customer support was high on players' wish lists, along with a desire to have more contact with the UO design team. Less was known about potential subscribers, but it was clear that they would need information about the game, and to be shown why it was worth a subscription fee.

Using Maslow's Pyramid for inspiration, the community design team decided that providing game-specific support and information to the existing players was the most basic community need they had to meet. A player who can't access the game because the servers are down, or who logs in to find that his settings have been corrupted, won't care about anything else until that issue is resolved.

Step 2: Their Owner's Goals

As Community Manager, Carly Staehlin was responsible for running the Origin Web community. Since she had to justify her budget and staffing needs to the Origin executives, it was crucial that she understand their goals for the project.

Carly met with the executives and asked them to describe their vision for the UO Web community, paying particular attention to timelines and performance expectations. She also met with the "UO Live" team, who would be maintaining the multiplayer game, and with representatives from Origin customer support and public relations. From these meetings, she compiled a list of goals, including some of her own based on her past experience with Web communities.

Carly also met with David Koslowski, the head of Origin's in-house Web development team, to find out what kinds of tools were available for building the community, and for measuring success. Armed with this information, Carly and her team created a prioritized list of the top five goals for the Web community. They gave this list to the Origin executives, and revised it based on their feedback.

Step 3: Their Community Goals

Finally, the community design team sat down and compared the two lists. They noticed that both members and owners wanted to hear stories about what was happening inside the game. They noticed that the owners wanted to develop a large community, while the members wanted "small community" features such as personal attention from customer support and direct contact with the UO design team.

With input from the team, Carly made a master list of community goals and distributed it to everyone they'd interviewed. As expected, every department wanted its issues to have top priority, but generally, everybody was happy to see their needs addressed as part of the community plan. Carly and David now had a document that would help them choose which features and programs to implement in the Origin Web community.

Understand Your Audience

Knowing who you want to reach is not the same as understanding your audience. To create a community that engages your intended audience, you need to understand what makes them tick. That's something professional market researchers do, employing a variety of tools to get inside people's heads.

Among the most common and useful market research tools are surveys and focus groups. I strongly recommend working with a professional firm, if your budget allows. However, don't let a tight budget stop you from doing research yourself. A little testing is better than none, and going through the process of conducting surveys, interviews and focus groups can really help you hone your efforts.

Take a Survey

A survey that's professionally created and run can give you reliable information about the opinions and makeup of your target audience. Depending on the type of product or services you intend to offer, you might ask potential members about some or all of the following:

demographics, such as their age, race, income, and education
professional interests, such as their livelihood, the professional groups they belong to, and the conferences they attend
personal interests, such as the books, magazines, and TV shows they enjoy and the hobbies they pursue
computer usage, such as the type of computer equipment and software applications they use, and the Web sites they frequent

The key issues when conducting surveys are sampling (who is invited to take the survey), self-selection bias (of those invited, who actually responds), question construction (what form the questions take and what order they are presented in), and length (how much time the survey takes to complete). The results you get from running your own survey might not be as statistically valid as those from a professional one, but you'll certainly get some useful information and ideas. Here are a few survey guidelines to get you started (see the companion Web site for further resources):

Keep it short. Respondents will be more likely to complete your survey and give you accurate answers if they're not exhausted by the process. This is especially true for online surveys, given Web surfers' notoriously short attention spans.
Provide incentives. Your goal is to get a broad range of people to respond to your survey. Offer something like a discount coupon, a gift or payment, or even a chance to win a prize for participating. Otherwise, you're likely to get answers from avid devotees and people with a bone to pick, but you won't hear from the "silent majority."
Ask simple questions first. Surveys usually start with simple, multiple-choice questions to get the ball rolling. Save the longer, more open-ended questions for the end.

Surveys can take place on the telephone, in a mall, through email, or via interactive forms-based Web pages. In general, email and forms-based surveys are most appropriate for Web communities, because you know you're reaching people who are already online. If you were trying to bring new people online and into your community, however, phone and mall surveys would work better.

So how do you choose the target audience for your survey? It depends on your goals and the state of your community. If you're looking for a better understanding of an existing community, you'll want to survey your current members. You can do this either by sending out an email survey or by enticing visitors to your site to fill out a form.

If you're trying to expand your membership or haven't yet launched your community, then you'll have to find nonmembers, which can require some ingenuity. First, you'll need to specify a profile for the survey participants-their age, gender, interests, experience, and so on. Next, you'll need to locate people who fit this profile. Professional market research firms often have access to special resources, such as targeted mailing lists. However, there are many ways to locate survey participants, both on and off the Web. For instance, if your profile specifies teenagers, you might look for survey participants at local schools, in hobby shops, at the mall, or in AOL chat rooms. You could also place an ad in the school newspaper, on the library bulletin board, on the message boards of an existing teen community, on anywhere else that teenagers hang out.

Focus Groups

A focus group is a sort of group interview that generally involves some combination of specific questions, free-form discussion, and reactions to visual material. These group interviews usually involve six to ten people who are led through a discussion by one or two moderators that are trained to keep things moving and stay neutral about the issues being discussed. Often, the client-in this case, you or others responsible for your community-can observe the session and communicate with the moderators without being seen by the participants.

Focus groups are often used at key stages of a project as a "reality check" for visual and conceptual decisions. For example, if you're planning to run a subscription-based Web community, you might run a focus group to see how much people are willing to pay for your service. Or if you're considering several different visual designs for your site, you might show sketches to a focus group and get their reactions before finalizing your approach.

Online chat rooms are an increasingly popular way to run a focus group. Some research firms have created customized tools that allow them to control the proceedings. However, you can use any chat software to conduct an online focus group, as long as the software offers private spaces, moderator capabilities, and a private messaging backchannel (see Chapter 2 for more about chat software). The issues with selecting participants for an online focus group are similar to those of surveys-you'll either want to use your current members, find nonmembers who fit a particular profile, or both.

Online focus groups have many advantages for a Web community. The cost tends to be lower than for an offline group, especially if a professional firm is running it. It's easier to get a wide geographic reach. You can show a variety of Web images and change your visual materials with ease. And the anonymity of being online tends to bring out more revealing answers.

If you decide to run your own online focus groups, try to choose a moderator who's not emotionally invested in your community, to help keep the results unbiased. Also, make sure to prepare all your questions and materials ahead of time. But if the conversation becomes lively, don't feel that you have to stick too closely to your script; you can get a lot of valuable information out of a freeform conversation.

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