Community is for the Little Guys (and Gals)

When I launched my first online community I worked at a non-profit with a staff of five.

Why did I start an online community?

Because I was just one person and we definitely weren't going to hire anyone else. I had access to very limited resources as I ran my professional development program for teachers across the D.C. region and launching an online community was the only way I could manage my program at scale.

Now I specialize in helping small organizations make decisions about how to engage their networks online. One of the most common concerns I hear from teams who understand the value of community is: how much time is it going to take?

My answer: launching and managing an online community isn't about MORE work, it's about DIFFERENT work.

Ask yourself these questions:

• What's the biggest challenge you're facing in your role?
• How are you getting that "job" done now?
• What tools are you using?
• How long is the work taking?
• How much effort does the job require?

Then, as you design your community strategy, plan to take these manual, tedious, time-consuming steps off of your plate by transitioning them to the community.

• Instead of spending hours a week responding to individual requests for help from your network in private emails, now you can ask those members to post to each other and scale your support processes.
• Instead of asking the same people to share their stories in marketing content over and over and spending hours trying to create original content, you can identify new voices and generate even more engaging content by asking users to create content that directly reaches your network every day.

An online community is the ultimate operational efficiency tool for small organizations. With your time back, now you can add in the "new" work of managing your community (ex: moderation, nurturing relationships, posting engaging content), all while building a scalable, replicable engagement experience for your network for many years to come.

How are you supercharging your small team with a community?