The Business of Belonging: How to Make Community your Competitive Advantage

The community life cycle goes through the seed phase (beginnings of the community where you design and craft the experience), growth phase (community starts to organically grow and engage), maturity (the community becomes well-established), and pollination (the community breaks down into subcommunities).

Your community is not your software platform. Your community is your people.

Community programs should focus on creating value and belonging for members, while also creating value and results for the business. A good way to structure and measure your community strategy involves three levels: business, community, and tactical. Each of these will have distinct goals and measures for tracking success.

Measure your community health with surveys that ask questions about identity, feeling welcome, onboarding, and achieving goals.

Create a compelling onboarding experience by knowing and translating your vision to new members, making them feel welcome, and being clear about what you want them to know.

Activate community engagement by doing things that don’t scale, giving members a say in what happens, being funny, sparking debates, being authentic, and keeping your energy high and positive. Lead by example.

When you build a community, you create a social identity. The Social Identity Cycle consists of three stages: identification (person identifies with the community), participation (member takes action to participate in community), and validation (member rewarded for action). Remember to invest in diversity, equity, and inclusion from day one.

There are four factors that contribute to a sense of community: membership, influence, integration/fulfillment of needs, and shared emotional connection.

Like a person, a community will have a personality, and the right people will feel drawn to that personality.