Simplifying Online Community Management
As digital natives have matured and entered midlife, we have brought every facet of our lives onto the Web. Like it or not, communities of every affiliation have had to adapt to living the virtual life.
I know an online community manager for a local chapter of an international church; we'll call her "Kathie." Like many of her counterparts in the not-for-profit world, Kathie volunteers her time, squeezing online event promotions and other postings into her busy work and family life. An evangelist in both senses of the word, Kathie’s online strategies for reaching out to prospective acolytes has greatly increased her church’s enrollment of members. While her congregation is small, it has grown rapidly since embracing the online community model. The problem is that as the virtual buzz increases and Sunday attendance grows, Kathie’s online community management tasks also increase exponentially.
In a typical week, an online manager for a live community of 250 members, such as Kathie’s group, faces a daunting list of tasks. On Monday morning she reviews sign-in sheets from the weekend and enters new email subscribers into her community roster. She then sends out virtual “welcomes” and follows up with the new folks she has met at church. On Tuesday she updates her group’s two MeetUp pages, adds photos from their many live events, and fields RSVPs. On Wednesday she updates calendars... let’s see, there’s Google and WordPress, and the many Facebook event posts. By Thursdays the email questions start piling up and she hasn’t even had a chance to work on the weekly newsletter, check voice mail and email, post to her group’s Facebook page and group, or distribute last month’s meeting minutes to board members.
Kathie needs help. She needs a community forum.
Community forums have the potential for greatly simplifying online community management. A harried volunteer such as Kathie could benefit from having one dashboard, a place to organize all her organization’s important communication. Besides being a place for established and prospective members to virtually hang out and get to know one another, one powerful online community platform can become the communication hub for an entire congregation, club or civic organization, including:
- Tool for handling email subscriptions and membership
- Discussion forum for continuing the conversation between meetings
- Clearinghouse for committee initiatives and reports
- Repository for organizational documents and meeting minutes
- Help desk for members' and prospects' questions
- Event management aid
- Community wide announcements
- Social platform for sharing photo and video
- Feedback forum for speeches, sermons, and classes
- Archive for important group documents, writings and knowledge-based articles
- Self-managing membership roster
- Hub for links to other online resources
- Virtual clubhouse or church, especially when the physical structure is new or in a growth cycle
- Searchable data-base
- Historical time-line for maintaining the group's identity and culture
And add to this list as many other potential uses as there are unique communities.
Online social networks are here to stay. How we simplify the process will make the difference, particularly for volunteer and part-time community managers. Online community forums can be an efficient and affordable step in the right direction for non-profits of all denominations and sizes.