How to Build Momentum in Your Community – Part III
Measuring Your Community’s Maturity
“Membership growth in my online community seems to have hit a plateau. Should I be worried?”
That depends. You’ll want to make a careful assessment of where you are in the life cycle of your community in order to continue making decisions that keep your membership happy and engaged.
Since the groundbreaking research, A Life-Cycle Perspective on Online Community Success, published in 2009 by Alicia Iriberri and Gondy Leroy of Claremont Graduate University, the world has embraced the biological analogy for online communities. As we’ve seen in Part I and Part II of this series, online communities have a predictable pattern of growth and development. According to the experts, knowing how to recognize where you are in this life-cycle sets successful community managers apart.
If the growth in your membership has begun to level out, you’ll want to understand whether it’s a sign you’re doing something wrong or whether you’ve simply reached maturity. The key takeaway: maturity is not defined by the number of members you have, but rather by their level of engagement, type of growth, and the shared sense of community.
When over 90% of your members are actively engaged, generating content, participating in networking and events, and mentioning the community on social and other media, it’s a good bet you have reached the maturity benchmark. At this point you can expect growth to level off as new members come solely through word-of-mouth referral.
The real telltale of a mature community is difficult to measure but easy to spot. A mature community is one that has a well-defined culture. And you don’t have to be a Reddit, Flickr, or CouchSurfing to have a clearly recognizable culture. These huge communities, each with over a million members, began with a simple idea that linked individuals with similar interests. They started out small, with a few passionate folks and a little seed money to improve their platforms as they grew. As mature communities they are now household names whose reputations fuel their membership. Likewise, a small community might reach maturity when it is regularly touted in town hall and PTA meetings. Maturity is less a matter of scale and more a matter of reputation.
Regardless of the size of your membership, as owner or manager of a fully engaged and self-supporting virtual community, you should no longer be participating in the kinds of micro activities you once were. Now is the time to focus on the big picture and rely on staff or volunteers to do day-to-day management tasks such as handling spam and responding to member queries. Your macro-level tasks will include optimizing your interface and user experience and promoting your community to wider audiences across broader media. As the manager of a mature online community you can think of yourself as editor-in-chief for your community’s content. You will be focused on guiding your community’s direction, defining member, staff and volunteer roles, and overseeing processes. You will be busy harvesting the fruits of maturity. How sweet!