Successful Community Strategies Focus on Motivations before Outcomes

Originally posted on Medium.

Businesses all have an outcome in mind.

They (hopefully) know what they want to build, how they want to build it, and then they execute. That’s how most businesses work.

When a company starts building a community, they take a similar approach. They think about the outcomes: where the community will live, what the members will do, the kind of content the community will feature and the value that the community will bring to the business.

You envision this future community paradise where everyone is happy, contributing and everything is grand.

The problem is they forget about a critical component of communities: Motivation.

It’s the most common community building mistake I see companies make:

They focus on the value they want the community to offer without ensuring members will be motivated to contribute that value.

It’s great that you want to build a juggling community where any novice juggler will be able to get advice from the world’s greatest pro jugglers… but do pro jugglers want to help novice jugglers? What is their motivation?

A founder recently came to me with this challenge. They built a community where designers could give each other feedback on their designs. They built the platform and invited a lot of designers to sign up. The value they wanted the community to create was a place where designers could get feedback on their work from each other. It’s a great vision and a lot of designers actually started posting their work to get feedback. But the people expected to create the value, the designers giving feedback, just weren’t motivated to participate. As a result, the community didn’t create value for its members and it struggled to drive engagement.

It’s great to have a clear goal for your community and it’s really important to know what your desired business outcomes are from the community. But if you ignore why it will also be valuable to the people who are contributing, responding and consuming, you might end up with a ghost town.

Motivations can show up in a lot of forms. Ideally, you’ll identify intrinsic motivation, which means members are contributing that value because it satisfies a core human need. Examples of this could be reputation, sense of purpose, belonging, identity, or an existing need to help others.

If you can identify an action that people are already trying to take, you have a golden opportunity to build a community.

Product Hunt was a great example of that. Ryan Hoover knew a lot of people who loved to talk about products, but were using tools like Twitter and Facebook to talk about them. The original “community platform” was a simple linkydink, but the platform didn’t really matter. By creating a dedicated channel for a motivation that he knew already existed, he seized an opportunity to build a thriving community that now reaches millions of product lovers.

You can also motivate people with extrinsic rewards but proceed with caution. If you provide extrinsic rewards (money, points, badges) that aren’t tied to intrinsic motivations, they’ll either flat out won’t work or as soon as they’re removed, the actions they’re rewarding will stop. Ideally, all rewards should aim to reinforce existing intrinsic motivations.

In summary…

When you build a new community, make sure your members are motivated to create the value that you envision the community providing.

If you don’t know what that motivation is yet, stop reading this article and start talking to your future members.

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P.S. This is the challenge that my friend Loic Le Meur came to me with last week. He wrote about his experience here and inspired me to put this into an article.

Photo by Ivan Slade https://unsplash.com/photos/RdyMe8KQAV0