Without a vision and goals for your community, aimless execution will take over. For your community to grow and thrive, consistent activity needs to pull towards a clear objective.
Having defined your ideal community members in exercise 2, it is now important to create your community’s value proposition. This will help you communicate the community’s purpose to internal stakeholders and to early members. A community without purpose, isn’t really a community at all. It is impossible to switch from audience-based one-to-many communication to community-based many-to-many communication if there isn’t a clear reason for members to contribute.
Exercise 3 - Value proposition
→ Create an editable copy of the worksheets
Member value proposition
The first step is to define your member value proposition. This is a simple statement that clearly communicates the benefit your community provides members.
Having completed exercise 2, you should be able summarize who your community is for. Before defining what your community will helps members to do and how, it’s useful to think how your purpose aligns with the 2 different types of community:
Community of product
This type of community is wholly centred around your product or service. Community members will be users of your product or service (whether that’s in a freemium way, or full paying) and share best-practices, catch up on news and ask and answer product-related questions.
Community of practice
A community of practice is a space where users come together to improve a knowledge-set or skill. Usually this will be in the category your product or service operates in. The community doesn’t orientate around your product offering but there will be heavy crossover. These communities provide huge value to their users, becoming an organic opportunity for shared learning.
Your community could be both a community of product and practice, but it’s important to make this distinction to communicate what your community helps members to do and how.
Business value proposition
To help your company become community-led, it's important key stakeholders understand the outcomes your community is designed to deliver. The priority Business outcomes and Key actions outlined in exercise 2 should give you a clear idea of how to describe your overarching community goals to the rest of your business.
When you’re happy with member and business value proposition statements, you can start to add more detail.
Business objectives of the community
Measurement is key when it comes to community-led growth. Understanding what's working and what’s not will ultimately determine the value your community generates for members. Businesses have historically found community growth and engagement hard to measure because community experiences have been managed on multiple legacy tools with limited data insights. Monitoring a largely qualitative interaction in a quantitative way is not always simple, but defining your top priority outcomes can help you then identify indicators of progress.
Measuring community success is vital to inform what programs, events and messaging is working with your members. It also helps pinpoint which stages of the Community-Led Growth flywheel need the most focus. For example, there is little point focussing on advocacy programs if you have a big customer retention issue.
Key features
With business objectives defined, creating corresponding key community features will demonstrate how your community will create value to the rest of your company. One of the barriers community managers face to securing more investment into their community initiatives is demonstrating impact to senior management.
Documenting the business objectives of the community and starting to ideate your community’s key features are the first step to bringing others on board with your community. Giving your community a name and deciding how you will manage access are also important decisions to make before sharing your exercise 1-3 worksheets with internal stakeholders.
What’s next?
Getting started is one of the hardest parts of building a customer community. In just 3 simple exercises, you’ve given your community a shape, a purpose and a direction. Now it's time for the fun part, designing your ideal community experience.
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@Jack Bartrop what happens if the vision changes after launch?
I recommend returning to these worksheets on a monthly basis. As you learn and grow, it's important that the worksheets are updated to make sure everyone involved is aligned and you're clear on what success looks like. Any proposed big changes should be assessed against your existing member and business value propositions.
Good point @Jack Bartrop, that a switch from audience-based one-to-many communication to community-based many-to-many communication will not be successful if there isn't a clear reason for members to contribute. Completing the "needs" column per member group in exercise 2 (module 3) helped me define these reasons for our WildHub community.
@Sukhpreet Habermacher and @Marc Schindelholz : This value proposition template, as well as the other templates, may also be useful in working towards the launch of your DermaU community.