Organizations are struggling to keep up with the ever-changing pace of the internet, and community platforms are no different. To build a value-driven community, you need to be aware of the challenges you may face and how to overcome them.
Here are five common community challenges and some tips on how to overcome them:
1. Getting Buy-in From Your Organization
Getting your organization on board with building a community can be challenging. After all, it takes time and resources to develop and maintain an impactful community.
To get buy-in from the powers that be, you need to answer two questions clearly:
1. What are the benefits of building a community?
2. How will it help your organization achieve its goals?
Extra Resources
- [Article] How to Ensure Your Community Supports Your Organization's Business Strategy
- [Webinar Replay] How to Recession-Proof Your Organization's Online Community
2. Choosing the Right Platform
There are a lot of different community platform options out there. Trying to figure out which is suitable for your organization can be overwhelming.
When choosing a platform, you must consider your organization's and community's goals and the features that will help you achieve these goals.
For example, do you need comprehensive event management, broadcast email capabilities, data integration capabilities, etc?
Map out your requirements to guide your platform research.
Assess how easy the different platforms are to use. An intuitive, user-friendly experience is vital to adoption.
Extra Resources
- [Article] 7 Key Questions to Ask Any Community Management Platform Vendor
- [Article] How to Build a Case for an Online Community Platform
- [Article] 8 Tips to Help You Successfully Transition Your Facebook Community to a Private Community Platform
3. Gathering Members Intentionally
It takes more than setting up a community platform to get people to join.
You need to be intentional about gathering members.
You can do this by promoting your community to your target audience, contacting influencers, and incentivizing people to join.
Extra Resources
- [Article] 3 Ways to Promote Your Online Community
- [Article] How to Create the Best Member Experience
4. Making Sense of Data
Once you have a community up and running, you need to start making sense of the data.
What are people talking about?
What are the most popular topics?
What are the pain points?
Data can be overwhelming, but it is essential to use it to improve your community.
Extra Resources
5. Team Constraints
Building and maintaining a community takes a lot of work.
You need to have a dedicated team to be successful. This team should be responsible for moderation, content creation, customer support, and data analysis tasks. If you don't have the internal resources to build a team, you may need to outsource some of the work.
Extra Resources
- [Article] Community Managers: What They Do and Why You Need One
- [Webinar Highlight] What Makes a Great Community Manager?
- [Guide] Grow Engagement Through a Community Group Strategy
- [Webinar Replay] Community Ambassadors: What They Do and Why You Need Them
Hivebrite is an all-in-one community management platform. We empower organizations of all sizes and sectors to launch, manage and grow fully branded private communities. Schedule a demo today!
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