Three Questions to Ask Yourself When Running an Online Community

Ahoy! My name is Connor and I manage a community of communities - that is, I work with over 5k admins who manage online spaces with member counts ranging from 500 to 800k. Every week they come to me with questions like "What are the best practices for running online communities?"

Here are the three questions I ask that helps clarify next steps for growing and enriching your online community.

What is the value that your community offers?

Every community provides value to its members, which is likely why the community was founded in the first place. Identifying the specific value that your community provides helps clarify what events, resources, and opportunities you may want to pursue.

Some example value that online communities offer:

• Hanging Out. These social communities draw people in to find likeminded friends. A community like this may optimize for mixer events or gaming, as folks come to these communities for casual networking.
• Professional Development. These communities unite industry professionals with amateurs. If you work in a specific industry (e.g. tech, design, boating), odds are that you experience problems that select few people understand. A community like this may offer portfolio/resume reviews, AMA panels, and skills workshops.
• Common Interest/Hobby. These communities are enthusiastic fans of a particular thing (e.g. Anime, Legos, Gardening). These folks likely want to be immersed in content regarding their favorite pastime, or they are looking for other superfans to discuss the intricacies of their hobby. A community like this may offer show-and-tell opportunities, watch-together events, and co-make sessions.

If you have a community where members are confused as to why they are there, consider dropping a survey asking "When you first joined this community, what were you expecting?" Sometimes this will reveal that the value of your server was not (for example) finding friends, but instead finding deals on consoles. If the majority of people joining your server are looking for a specific thing, you will certainly want to adapt, adjust, and double down on whatever that specific thing is.

What is the reason someone would return to your community?

"Retention" is a measure of how many people join a community and end up staying there. One rule of thumb you can use is to ask yourself "How many newcomers return to my community within a week or so?". If you have a community surrounding a popular topic (e.g. Houseplants), but none of the members contribute or talk to each other, it would be hard to convince a newcomer to return.

I find that having regular events with your community, no matter how small, shows a newcomer that the community is alive, maintained, and engaged. For example, imagine the Houseplants community hosting a monthly "Help My Plants are Dying" workshop, both experts and amateurs will return to learn, give advice, or be entertained.

In my own server, I host a weekly Crossword Hour where we collectively work on a crossword together. Attendance grows from month to month as members of my community see that this is a predictable and regular occurrence that people enjoy. Folks are more likely to engage with us when they expect us to show up at certain times.

Whether your events are weekly, monthly, or quarterly, establishing a regular, consistent, and predictable rhythm of stuff to do will give newcomers a reason to return. I like to think of events as the pulse of any online community - it shows people that the interactions are alive and well.

What are you building together?

One of my favorite online experiences was Twitch Plays Pokémon in 2014, where 80k viewers watched and played a single game of Pokemon Red together. Once complete, the event was heavily documented and became a kind of lore for the people who witnessed it. The event created an artifact of the collective experience - the thousands of people that played together contributed to the story.

This example may be "very online" and hard to understand, so I'll offer another example: one event that I host with my online communities is a "Draw Together" event. Here, we use Magma Studio to draw on a blank canvas together. It gets chaotic very quickly (imagine simultaneously working on a Photoshop file with ten other people) and the results are often a bit... avant garde. But, the creations themselves are artifacts, that convey the message "Hey, here is proof that we spent time together, and what a good time it was."

These artifacts serve as souvenirs that remind folks of the time they spent with their community. Often, community managers have a difficult time measuring the "success" of their online communities. For myself, I measure success through the creation of artifacts like certificates, paintings, and leaderboards. When considering artifacts, try to think of the easiest way to attach a memory of a great event to a tangible (ish) souvenir.

Hopefully this helps you develop some actionable strategies for increasing member count or engagement in your online community - again, these are far from all the questions you can ask yourself, but they are some of the most common that I recommend as I coach folks through community maintenance.