Discovering Your Community Strategy

The discovery phase is a crucial starting point for any project, especially in building a community. The work you do in this phase will lay the foundations for effective planning, decision-making, and risk management; ultimately, your discovery phase will increase the likelihood of achieving a thriving community.

In your discovery phase, you will:

Gain an understanding of requirements: Understanding the full project requirements, objectives, and constraints before beginning will set your project up for success and minimise the amount of scope creep that will occur.

Align stakeholders: A good discovery phase involves everyone involved. This is essential to secure buy-in and support for the project and ensure a shared understanding of the goals.

Identify risks and challenges: The earlier you can identify project risks, challenges, and potential obstacles, the more proactive you can be in addressing those challenges and ensuring your project isn’t derailed.

Explore opportunities: Collaborating across stakeholder groups can lead to new ideas, potential innovations, and unconsidered opportunities. With the right creative approach, a discovery phase will uncover new possibilities.

Inform Decision-making:? The insights drawn from a discovery phase will guide you throughout your project life-cycle. From selecting the right technologies to making strategic trade-offs, the data and insights you gather are essential to the success of your project.

Set Realistic Expectations: Often, stakeholders have unrealistic expectations of timelines, budgets, and initial outcomes. By conducting thorough research during your discovery phase, you can provide a comprehensive guide to timelines, budgets, and outcomes. This will ensure that your project remains on track.

Create a culture of collaboration and communication: Discovery phases have the additional benefit of helping to shape a culture of innovation. Actively discussing ideas and plans across multiple stakeholders builds a consensus and fosters creativity.?

A discovery phase is crucial, so before you begin one, you should first ask an important question: Do we have the internal knowledge and capacity to guide the discovery and gain a deep understanding of the future project?

Create the right questions.

4-Roads approach to all our discovery phases is built upon our ethos of empowering clients and their customers. An approach we call Intelligent Self Service that helps businesses create a seamless customer experience built upon technology.

For your discoveries, we recommend you break down your community project into three questions to be answered:

What is it? - Build a picture of what the solution is going to be.

Who is it for? - Until you know who your users are, you won’t be able to design a site that meets their needs.

Why is it important? - This question will help demonstrate where your community will show its value. This question will help you focus on critical priorities and convince stakeholders to invest in the project.

Activities to help guide your discovery phase

There is a lot of information to gather in your discovery phase, and answering the what, who, and why will require research, audience analysis, interviews with stakeholders, and an assessment of your current platform and future requirements.

The best way to begin is to create a workshop. In this workshop, you can begin to understand what your community looks like based on your goal. Start thinking about the roles you will need to create a thriving community internally and built out through your customers.

From here, you can perform a full platform review. Doing this will help you understand what platforms are available to you. Are there custom tools that you need to incorporate? You will also start to understand the costs of building your community platform.

The third step is to create initial concepts. This doesn’t have to be a full MVP, but creating initial visuals can help highlight essential gaps you may have forgotten and give you an opportunity to gain feedback from your group of stakeholders.

Finally, put together a strategy report and review it with your stakeholders. This report should include your recommendations for building the platform and detail the aims and objectives you discovered in the workshop. This activity will allow you to finalise a budget, highlighting development costs and subscriptions with tech providers.?

Building a community typically only happens once for a business; it is a long-term commitment to your customers. However, if you start off wrong, it can be really challenging to regain the trust and buy-in from your customers to continue to engage. Make sure you get your discovery right, and your community project will fall into place.